Carl Rungius, the German-born painter who remains one of the most important wildlife artists to date, was a visionary.
Not long after the slaughter of millions of plains bison throughout North America had nearly rendered the species extinct, Rungius, who spent every summer in Banff from 1910 through to 1959, painted an imaginary scene in 1900 depicting two bison on a snow-covered hillside in Wyoming with just the hint of a larger herd over the rise of the hill in a place where – when he went there – only bleached bison bones remained.
Given that the title of the painting is The Last of the Buffalo, Rungius was paying homage to a lost icon of the West. But it could also be said that Rungius had, in fact, painted a future when bison would return to the Great Plains, as part of a conservation movement his work and passion helped to inspire.
And Rungius was not alone in this endeavour. He was joined by the likes of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Charles Russell, Edward Kemeys, Thomas Hill, Alexander Phimister Proctor, Charles Beil and Belmore Brown, all of who spoke straight from their hearts through their work, according to Banff resident Harvey Locke, editor of the new book Yellowstone to Yukon: The Journey of Wildlife and Art that will be released as a companion of the art exhibition of the same name that opens at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies on June 16 at 7 p.m.
Yellowstone to Yukon: The Journey of Wildlife and Art, is a book and an exhibition about conservation, both the early movement that saw the creation of the world’s first national parks – including Yellowstone, Banff and Kruger in South Africa – and the modern movement to ensure those early conservation gains are not lost, but also enhanced.
“What we needed was for the art to speak authentically to the topics inherent in the art and that happened to be a profoundly important conservation story and the relationship between people and wild nature. It wasn’t projected on the art. It was in the art. And all we’re doing is pulling that story out of the art to make it obvious,” Locke said.
This remarkable book shares that story of how art inspired conservation and how conservation continues to benefit from artists. As well, it is the story of how early work to protect land and wildlife is continuing, with the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) initiative, based in Canmore being one of the most significant examples of how the bar is being lifted, perhaps higher than the likes of Rungius may have imagined, dreamed or hoped.
“The whole idea of protecting wildlife emerged locally in the 1890s,” Locke said recently during an interview with the Outlook. “And it corresponds with the extermination of bison and the extermination of large carnivores all over the place.”
And artists like Rungius, as they often do, led the charge.
“I believe that artists see these things first,” Locke said. “That’s their contribution to society and some people call it intuitive knowledge, and that’s why you need the arts.
“These artists anticipated this conservation in scale before we figured it out scientifically.”
They still do. Robert Bateman, Robert Kuhn and Dwayne Harty, a Wyoming artist commissioned in 2005 to paint from one end of the Yellowstone to Yukon region to the other, continue to emphasize the value of wildlife and wild spaces through paintings that are no less significant than what Rungius and his counterparts produced in terms of capturing the ethos of the land and its inhabitants.
“Conservation as it was developed over one hundred years ago has given us the landscape and wildlife that we have today,” Locke wrote in the foreword of Yellowstone to Yukon: The Journey of Wildlife and Art. “While that model has served us extremely well, human pressures have increased across the landscape, and we have come to realize that parks and wilderness preserves cannot serve their purpose if they function as isolated islands in a sea of human development.”
And while the work to ensure connectivity for wildlife between protected places will likely never end, this book provides a significant message of hope.
Where Rungius painted bison where they no longer roamed, his modern contemporaries can and do as bison have returned to many of those places.
Similarly, where Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles Russell found grizzlies, so too do modern painters Harty and Kuhn (1920–2007), an American painter whose 1986 painting High and Mighty features a grizzly lying sphinx-like on a rocky outcrop, front feet hanging over the edge with its head up, seeming to survey his domain.
Good art makes it easy to appreciate for its subject or approach. Great art elicits a powerful emotional response, that unmistakable “thump” that can stop a person dead in their tracks. Magnificent art, however, changes the world.
High and Mighty, along with the other 85 pieces in this book, would fit into that latter category.
This is the work that inspired a movement to preserve key landscapes, save wildlife (and to describe animals as “wildlife” as opposed to game or vermin) and today continue to act as a reminder of why conservation work is never done.
Yellowstone to Yukon: The Journey of Wildlife and Art, published by Fulcrum Publishing, retails for $35.
