Bringing out the Animal

...All would presumably become a bit more coherent if viewed with the aid of Beard's book of the same name, reissued by Dou-bleday in revised form (paperback, $9.50) to coincide with the show's opening, though I can't be sure because the gallery refused to furnish a reviewer's copy...

...Generally speaking, the art deteriorates steadily through the 20th century, with sculpture becoming progressively cuter and painting hitting Washington Square bottom...

...The tusks being intact, one presumes it was not the victim of a poacher...

...Even the aerial views in the forbidding "obituary" room are impressive...

...Meanwhile, one of her three puppies is clambering aboard with difficulty...

...Apparently, the photographs are the original book illustrations...

...This entertaining show tells us something about the dog, too: He is the ultimate Uncle Tom...

...Would the extinction of the cheetah really trigger an ecological disaster, or barely a ripple...

...On Art BRINGING OUT THE ANIMAL by vivien raynor The International Center of Photography is currently (through January 22) occupied by The End of the Game, an exhibition of African wildlife photographs taken by Peter Beard...

...In fact, it is not merely a matter of choosing between American and African "desires" but of overhauling our underlying philosophy of nature—something Peter Beard does not attempt, much less accomplish...

...It is hard to quote him with-out imagining the sport a zealous editor would have with his prose...

...Black men urge them on, the families bring up the rear, carrying more bundles, and three dogs escort the procession...

...As is usually the case with photo-polemicists, Beard leaves one as angry at him as at the situation he describes...

...Elsewhere, Beard reports that "rhinos are being transported from forested hunting areas to National Parks such as Tsavo, where population densities and habitat destruction have converted a paradise into a desert...

...No doubt there are dogs in the crowd of animals arranged on a turquoise ground, but the emphasis is on the brilliantly variegated birds that fill the Tree of Knowledge and, along with butterflies and palm trees, the white sky...

...The calculated spontaneity of his handwriting on the prints, the chicly-torn edges of the collaged elements, the nifty curtain at the show's entrance made of the shredded photograph of an elephant—all imply artistic opportunism...

...A recent article by Boyce Rensberg-er in the New York Times Magazine depicts Kenya's environmental problems as part of an intricate mess that is the familiar legacy of colonialism: tourism, do-goodism, alleged government corruption, population growth, rising expectations, ignorance, poverty, greed, and so on...

...A page from his diary, thick with corrections and doodles, is reproduced in a poster accompanying the display, and discloses that the first version of The End of the Game was compiled by the author and some Yale friends between 1955-62, "for the same reason I had first gone to Africa—to avoid school...

...There could not be a better corollary to The End of the Game than The All-American Dog (Museum of American Folk Art, through April 2...

...Since Beard lost most of his life-work earlier this year in a fire that destroyed his house (a converted windmill near Montauk, Long Island), book and show probably represent all that is left of some 20 years of artistic and literary effort...

...Remarking on the continent's drastic alteration in the interim, Beard notes that "the perspective had turned full circle...

...In The Flood, by Clio D. Shively of Ohio, a desperate black-and-white Newfoundland-type stands baying, chained to a kennel that is being borne away by the turbulent waters...

...Still, Beard is not above indulging in the elisions of 20th-century photo-journalism...

...The exhibition also includes booths containing miscellaneous source material—old pictures of white hunters and African servants, press cuttings, diary entries, drawings of animals by African children—that alludes to Beard's major influences, Isak Din-esen and Teddy Roosevelt...

...Some fetching stuffed toys adorn the needlework section, together with numerous hooked rugs of delicate color and ingenious design...

...Dealing with a situation that requires an intellect as cool as his emotions are hot, he addresses the already-converted through his pictures, confirming their despair and, in a way, exulting in it...

...In some paintings they are subjects on their own, at times to astonishing effect...

...These large prints show survivors strolling among corpses and bones that seem to be melting into the arid ground, on their way to becoming fossils...

...A sizeable roundup of painting, sculptures, artifacts, needlework, and dolls, it celebrates the mutual dependence of man and his best friend over approximately 300 years...

...Beard's grainy black-and-whites are indeed beautiful, however, and in the parts of the show devoted to the living include excellent shots of a lion, cheetah, zebra, wart hogs, monkeys and, best of all, a profile and full-face study of a crocodile...

...In the earliest, mid-18th-century paintings, dogs nose tentatively into portraits of formally-dressed children, or lie discreetly nearby...

...Finally, there is the question of whether it is not disgusting to gorge oneself on the esthetics of a disaster...

...One is torn between enjoying the humor and, sometimes, the brilliance of these folk renderings and thinking about a future when only domesticated animals will be left...

...Noteworthy, too, is the landscape of grassland dotted with trees...

...A picture of Tsavo National Park, for instance, features rhinos—alive, dead and decomposing...

...In a region that was wilderness 50 years ago, "the few remaining spaces have been infiltrated, divided up, domesticated, deprived of natural systems, denuded of natural processes, systematized, similarized, artificialized, sterilized, commercialized...

...Spectators are left to guess, for instance, that the territory under inspection is exclusively Kenya, not simply Africa...

...Judging by the state of the sky, worse is to come...

...another is still battling the waves...

...An 1845 study of a black-and-white quasi-retriever presages Ma-gritte in the way the animal—which seems, by the scale, to be about 5'x6'—fills an ornate room...

...Although the artists' idiosyncracies occasionally make it difficult to identify breeds, thoroughbreds—with special emphasis on dalmatians and poodles—appear slightly to outnumber mutts...

...The magnum opus here is an applique quilt entitled The Garden of Eden (1874), by Abby F. Bell Ross...

...Installed artily by Marvin Israels, captioned haphazardly and at times semilegibly, this is a most unusual experience, a retrospective without verbal guidance—and desperately in need of it...

...How does one balance," asks the writer, "an American's desire to know that there are elephants or lions or giraffes living free in the world, against an African's desire for enough land to feed his family...

...The 19th-century division also abounds with beautiful carvings, notably a stone gravemarker with a reclining lap dog and several standing pugs and terriers...

...How many wild elephants does it take to meet our wish that there will be wild elephants to think about...

...These are the findings of a man who, following in the steps of the English explorers of the last century, has devoted himself to Africa...

...Beard's passion for nature may be sincere, but it is tinged with queru-lousness—the petulance of the dreamer thwarted by gross reality...

...An exception is a nearly life-sized German shepherd executed in laminated wood and painted black (circa 1920...

...The collection, numbering 350 prints, is not as large as it sounds, for several of the works are composites...

...The English animal specialist Sir Edwin Landseer evidently hit American artists hard during the latter part of the Victorian era...

...One is confronted, for example, by a picture of an elephant's rotting carcass draped over a rock, its forefeet in a puddle...

...Things become cozier in the beginning of the next century, when pets are shown being caressed, dandled or played with by their young owners, and are conspicuous in portraits of adults and family groups, such as that of the Brigham Youngs (circa 1847...

...As a work of art, the most striking piece in the show is William H. Brown's four-part water-color collage, Hauling the Whole Week's Picking (circa 1842...

...Measuring about 3' x 4', these are generally panoramic or aerial views on which details have been collaged...

...over it hangs, in an otherwise clear sky, a single, anvil-shaped cloud...

...no attempt is made to explain whether it died of starvation, natural causes or at the hand of a game warden pruning a herd...

...The poodles carved out of chalk are worth examining for the treatment of their heads and the inventive way their plucked coats are suggested by patterns of nodules—reminding one of the effect folk art had on the sculpture of Elie Nadelman...

...Moreover, he shows only the crime, never the criminal...

...Working dogs are featured as well: One lovely bluish-gray 19th-century landscape shows hounds chasing a fox into a river, with the unsporting assistance of men with guns...

...Evoking an Egyptian mural, it is done in soft russets, ochers and grays and shows, in profile, two wagons piled high with baskets of cotton being drawn, respectively, by mules and oxen...

...The All-American Dog reveals the inevitable sentimental obverse to the human cruelty portrayed in The End of the Game...

...the scaley underbelly of Paradise had its full chance to reveal all the folds we have always known in the back garden of our minds...

...An observer who visited him there during the '60s reported him to be living in an Arabist's dream—an elegant compound of tents furnished with Oriental rugs...

...some have crop lines and printer's instructions, together with the author's handwritten comments...

...How refreshing it would be if artists made their statements before catastrophe occurred, and to those who could prevent it...

...There is no knowing what, if any, recourse someone in Beard's position has, yet clearly, more than enough gifted cameramen have born witness to and capitalized on catastrophe...

...Then again, with the shot of a dead elephant fetus—did the photographer ordain an autopsy of the mother in order to record this tiny, perfect form that seems to have been carved out of some precious stone...