The World According the Bateman

Major retrospective of paintings at the National Museum of Wildlife Art is one of most provocative to greet the West in years.

By Todd Wilkinson

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“The art world can be so Fascist sometimes,” Falconer says. “Those who claim to be operating with an open mind will, at the same time, render judgments on who can play in the art sandbox and who cannot. They are quite intolerant toward anything that does not uphold their own worldview. That’s the problem with the attitudes of hard liners.”

Bateman has been ahead of his time, not behind it, claims Swedish-American wildlife sculptor Kent Ullberg. Ullberg, whose monuments to animals adorn public spaces on four continents, including the sculpture garden of the NMWA, has known Bateman for 30 years.

“We’ve had so many discussions late into the night about art,” he says. “I find that he is one of the most knowledgeable people about all art, including art history. Even though he paints wildlife art, he consciously attempts to create work that transcends the genre. He is really one of the only guys who are not afraid to make an artistic statement about the sad state of nature. He could have made so much more money by just keeping quiet. But he has never wavered in being absolutely rabid about his commitment to conservation.”

Ullberg has attended some of Bateman’s lectures in Oklahoma, when the auditorium was filled with people who made fortunes in the oil business, had impressive art collections and probably had been eager to buy some of Bateman’s art. Bateman, however, proceeded to talk about the destruction of Alaska’s Prince William Sound caused by the Exxon Valdez spill and the role of fossil fuels in exacerbating global warming.

“I could see frowns in the audience and heads shaking in denial but he [Bateman] gave the message straight from the heart,” Ullberg explains. “The so-called critics who say Bateman’s art panders to a dumbed-down commercial audience haven’t a bloody clue what they are talking about. You can’t compartmentalize Bateman the artist and Bateman the environmentalist. The two are the same person.”

By any definition, Ullberg says, the result is an artist who is cutting edge in elevating the profile of wildlife into public consciousness. If the high priests of fine art can assert that Hirst’s dead sharks in a fish tank have validity, with Hirst readily admitting that he often has little to do with creating his art, then how is Bateman’s art, which is understood by far greater numbers of people and confrontational, any less poignant?

Kerr says that Bateman’s background as a former illustrator and art teacher have given him a refined command of draftsmanship and a sophisticated classical understanding of paint that is largely unrecognized. He has a reputation for being notoriously unyielding about the quality of large easel paintings that he allows to leave his studio.

“Perhaps the best anecdote I am aware of concerns Chief, the magnificent bison painting given by Birgit and Bob to the museum,” Kerr says. “He had finished, or very nearly so, this major work. Then, after reflection, was dissatisfied and painted the images out in order to begin again. I just can’t imagine any other artist doing that.”

Bateman could have settled for the easy way out and let it pass; no viewer would have known otherwise. His decision to intervene was driven by the fact that he could not stand the idea of a painting, flawed in his mind, hanging next to other historically significant works when he knew the piece did not meet his expectations.

As a painter, Bateman does not usually make loud in-your-face declarations. His commentary is intended to pull the viewer in rather than cause one to brace. He is aghast by what has crept into view from his studio window over the years. He has watched former huge rafts of harlequin ducks, scoters and cormorants dwindle, ocean pollution wreak visual and biological havoc, industrial logging level dynamic terrestrial ecosystems, and overfishing cause a cascade effect on all forms of sea life.

One of the most acclaimed pieces of his career is a recent work in the Jackson exhibition that combines painting and found material – a piece that could easily be hanging today in the Museum of Modern Art.

It’s an underwater portrayal of a doomed albatross and Pacific white-sided porpoise, the victims of bycatch in a fishing boat driftnet. The phenomenon of bycatch, in which dozens of unintended species not targeted for commercial harvest, are routinely killed, outrages Bateman. A million birds, a million mammals, porpoises, sea turtles, whales and fish, whose numbers are never counted, are simply destroyed and tossed overboard. In response, Bateman’s painting features an actual piece of driftnet incorporated as an element of surface texture.

“Once Woody Allen was asked to define nature and he said it was one big restaurant,” Bateman says. “But what he didn’t say, but should have, is that our consumption of nature is not a free lunch. There are costs of the way we are mining our resources in unsustainable ways with no regard to the way we are exhausting them. We can pay now by doing things better and right or we can pay later when the costs are so high as to be unthinkable.”

Art historian David Wagner, author of the recent magnum opus book, American Wildlife Art has known Bateman for decades and curated his biggest exhibitions, including the seminal Smithsonian Institution event and the present retrospective in Jackson.

During the late 1980s, Bateman commenced what has become known as his “environmental series.” One piece featured a northern spotted owl and other images in a succession of works titled “Carmanah Contrasts” portrayed a devastated owl-less forest that had been clear-cut. “He notched up the dialogue using his success and fame and in a brash way took the aesthetic arguments beyond the mere marketplace,” Wagner says. “It was more than an ideological statement. When you look at the sophistication of the pieces that started to emerge, you realize it was actually an homage to modernism.”

Far from being involved with a prosaic visual idiom, Kerr, Ullberg, and Wagner say that Bateman has bucked convention. “When Bateman talks about being influenced
by Franz Kline and Clyfford Still, he’s not insinuating that he is an abstract expressionist because obviously he’s not,” Wagner says. “What he’s doing is acknowledging their mastery and affirming that in his own approach to conveying his subject matter representationally, their efforts had an impact on him. When he refers to Kline and the early modernists, what he finds provocative is imagery that is allegorical. On the surface, his paintings may appear to be only about wildlife, but there is something subliminal, in multiple layers of thinking going on, that speaks to our own existence at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.”

Wagner says it’s absurd to dismiss Bateman because he profited when someone else approached him and had a brilliant idea for how to sell reproductions of his work as decorative art. Old World masters all aspired to make a living and with patrons were able to achieve commercial as well as critical success. Bateman’s largest patrons are the masses.

Even Milroy is forced to concede that Bateman has been far more generous than most people in the millions of dollars’ worth of cash and art he has given away to support conservation.

Whether viewers in Jackson are left riveted by Bateman’s work or not, the fact is that millions of others are – a collective whose notion of what is important about safeguarding in the environment is linked, in part, to one man. All art is subjective; great art has impact that persists long after the artist is gone.

Bateman’s impact is not merely visual; he has fired people up around the planet and tried to protect pieces of terra firma in the process. That kind of ethic has little to do with what one takes from the world, but what a person is willing to give back.

Todd Wilkinson has written about art for nearly a quarter century. He is currently at work on a book about media mogul, bison baron and humanitarian Ted Turner.