Arthur Singer’s life was a dichotomy of beauty and beast
Arthur Singer hung out with the biggest names in jazz, collected records by the thousands, designed album covers for Duke Ellington and loved to dance.
He was a part of some of the biggest covert operations of World War II, stories that were virtually unknown for 50 years, a series of spy-novel-like deceptions that one historian estimates saved the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers.
But all Singer wanted to do was paint birds. Beautiful paintings of beautiful birds.
And he did so for almost his entire life until his death in 1990, a catalog that rivals the Babe Ruth of ornithological canvases, John J. Audubon.
“In the thousands,” says his son, Alan Singer. “He painted every species of bird in the U.S., in Europe, in the West Indies.”
And on to Borneo, an island in Asia, where he found his favorites — the birds of paradise. Singer filled more than 20 books with birds. Millions of books sold, including The Golden Field Guide series, Birds of North America, one of the biggest-selling books of its kind.
His birds appeared on Franklin Mint collector plates (if you remember that china cabinet in your grandmother’s dining room that you weren’t allowed to go near). And Singer’s 1982 series of 50 official state bird and flower stamps, with Alan painting the botanical environments, is one of the best-selling commemorative stamp sheets in the history of the U.S. Postal Service.
Singer’s birds will come to roost next week in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences’ James E. Booth Hall. “Arthur Singer: The Wildlife Art of an American Master” opens Aug. 7 in the RIT University Gallery, and runs through Oct. 28. It’s accompanied by RIT Press’ publication of Arthur Singer: The Wildlife Art of an American Master, a lavishly illustrated, coffee-table book by the artists’ two sons, Alan and Paul Singer, that RIT Press people quietly hope could become its biggest-ever seller.
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“This will really be the first time we’ve been able to show a cross section of our father’s artwork, from when he was a teenager to his last years,” says Alan, a School of Art professor in the RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences.
This show of more than 100 pieces dates back to his early animal drawings, done during trips with his mother to the Bronx Zoo and the American Museum of Natural History. “Big animals are the things that attract you when you’re 10 or 11,” Alan says. “He sold his first animal drawings when he was 15.”
Singer’s life was a dichotomy of beauty and the beastly. The exhibit will also include images from his service during World War II, including color washes of a bombed-out church in France. And like many veterans, he kept the worst to himself. “He was pretty mum about this most of his life,” Alan says. “It probably left an indelible impression. He was probably horrified.”
Arthur Singer grew up in an apartment in North Manhattan, his father working in retail, his mother sewing doll clothes for the toy store FAO Schwarz. “There was a tradition of things in his house that required serious hand skills,” Alan says. Edith — “We called her Judy” — was a doting mother, “There were frequent trips to the zoo and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. It had dioramas of animals in their painted backgrounds, I think he was fascinated by that kind of thing.”
This childhood exposure to nature carried over into Singer’s adult life, as he and Edith were raising their two sons on Long Island. “Even from my first years, as a little kid, we were going to state parks, nature conservatories, anywhere outdoors, just to get out of the city,” Alan says. “Every type of state park you can think of, he took us everywhere as a family.
Like Audubon, Singer shot his subjects so that he could preserve them for eternity. Unlike Audubon, he shot them with a camera, rather than a gun. “He was an avid photographer, and that presented the raw materials for his paintings,” Alan says.
And Singer pursued his subjects into their environments. “He took his art supplies outdoors, plein air as they call it,” Alan says. The elusive nene goose? “They’re almost extinct, these birds are really, really rare. You have to go to Hawaii to find them. In fact, my father did that.”
Singer also took his family to the Caribbean to do the illustrations for Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, with text by the famed ornithologist James Bond. Not that James Bond, but close. An amateur bird watcher named Ian Fleming was living in the West Indies at the time, writing his first spy novel, and confiscated the name for his Agent 007. Like Singer, Fleming had experience in covert World War II operations, working for British naval intelligence; you have to keep an eye on these bird watchers.
Following birds into their habitat naturally brings an awareness of the environment. “The birder world in the ’30s was a small group of folks, people who became aware of ecology,” Alan says. “My father worked with the Sierra Club, the American Ornithology Union. Wildlife federations in the area frequently called upon my father to donate artworks to help them.”
Singer did not have to travel halfway around the world to see where we were heading. New York’s contribution to the state bird postage-stamp series was the bluebird. When is the last time you saw a bluebird in New York?
“When we lived on Long Island, you could walk down to the end of the block and see bluebirds,” Alan says. “The population on Long Island doubled in the time he was there, it changed the whole look of the place. Their environment has been encroached upon by development. Bluebirds live in open fields. Try to find open fields now. As people multiplied around the country, you could see we were heading to a situation where a lot of wildlife was being threatened.”
This was a subject that became “many, many discussions over the dinner table,” Alan says. “My father was maybe not a political activist, but he was certainly working to a cause.”
The activist has actually turned out to be Alan’s wife, Anna. Musician, teacher, working on behalf of anti-fracking and other environmental concerns. “My editor, also,” Alan says. And for people who like to hit the trails, Paul Singer’s work can be seen by anyone enjoying the paths along the Erie Canal where, as a graphic artist living in Brooklyn, he produced many of the informational signs.
When not pursuing birds afield, Arthur Singer retreated to his book collection. “He had magazines and books going back from the time he was a little kid,” Alan says. “Anything about nature.”
The den of the family’s home was dense with them, as well as a massive record collection, with Singer presiding over it as a pipe-smoking squire. “A lifetime’s work of collections,” Alan says. “I took care of a lot of his scrapbooks, which he kept in filing cabinets.”
Further cluttering the den were the tools of his trade. Singer worked in watercolor, tempera, acrylic, oil. The “serious hand skills” of his mother’s doll-clothing work were passed on to the tiny brushes Singer preferred. “They’re called zeros, , or double-zeros,” Alan says. “Like painting with a toothpick. He had terrific eyesight until he was 65 years old.”
Notables of the feathered world visited, including the acknowledged champion of bird-watching guides, Roger Tory Peterson. “He was a competitor, but also a friend,” Alan says. “Roger was a guest in our house many times.”
Jazz musicians were there as well. Singer frequented the jazz clubs of New York City and got to know many of the jazz players of the day, including Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, sometimes even painting their portraits.
“He would hang out with some of the greats,” Alan says. “He met Duke when he was still a teenager. Ellington came to New York City because he had a scholarship to Pratt University as an artist. My father would go to the recording sessions, the studio in Queens where Duke’s records were produced. He designed a record cover for Duke, he illustrated bandstands, he did advertisements.”
So while Singer is known almost exclusively as a bird artist, and birds are what he pursued throughout his life, as Alan points out Singer painted whatever was in front of him. So it could be jazz musicians.
Or the war.
“Arthur Singer was one of many artists who found their way into the 603rd Camouflage Engineers,” says Rich Beyer, co-author with Elizabeth Sayles of The Ghost Army, on which the 2014 PBS documentary of the same name is based. “When you’re designing camouflage, you want the eye of the artist.”
These artists, whose training was all about capturing the reality of what they saw before them, were now creating visual deception. Their work was intended to throw off German intelligence. Design camouflage patterns that obfuscated the true nature of a warship, or create the illusion of troops where there were no troops.
“If you’re creating a phony artillery battery, you need more than inflatable cannons with netting over them,” Beyer says. “You need sandbags, and artillery shells spread around them to create the sort of detritus one would expect to see if you look at it from the air.”
Ellsworth Kelly, who would go on to become an acclaimed minimalist artist, was one of them. Bill Blass, future fashion designer. Art Kane, who shot some of the most-iconic photos in music history, including “A Great Day in Harlem,” an image of 57 famous jazz musicians gathered around a porch. There was a guy who went on to make dresses for Marilyn Monroe, and a graphic designer who would create the Hamm’s beer bear. “This amazing aggregate of talent,” Beyer says. “One of the soldiers said it was sort of like an art graduate school.”
A seemingly a safe gig, out of harm’s way. Until D-Day. A week after the Allies landed on the beaches, the 603rd Camouflage Engineers, 1,100 men, were shipped to France.
“I think they were surprised to find themselves in the war zone,” Beyer says. “Having been involved in this camouflage campaign on the other side of the English Channel, it was a rude awakening. One of them, John Jarvie, said, ‘We didn’t take this seriously, it was like it was a lark. Until people started to shoot at us and were trying to kill us.’”
Their assignments were historic, and remained top secret for a half century. “They were involved in 21 different deception missions from June 1944 until March 1945,” Beyer says.
The last one was the biggest, with the Allied troops poised on the west side of the Rhine River, ready to roll into Germany. But first, the 603rd Camouflage Engineers went to work. “Twelve hundred men with inflatable tanks and trucks and sound effects and radio deception, pretending to be two divisions of 30,000 men,” Beyer says. It worked, with the real American Army crossing the river 10 miles to the north of the distraction.
But these men, these artists, needed distraction themselves, distraction from the horror that was all around them. When there was a pause in their duties, the watercolors and sketch pads came out. Singer did a watercolor of a bombed-out bridge in Trier, a destroyed church in Trevieres.
“I got paintings from a half-dozen guys inside that church. They were all there together,” Beyer says. Of Singer, he says, “He was an amazing watercolorist. His ability to paint on the fly was striking.”
His fellow artists in the 603rd noticed. Here’s what Jarvie says in The Ghost Army:
“Arthur Singer, the bird artist, if we — they put us in some place that we were going to be in for two weeks, sure as shooting, one wall of that place would have beautiful birds and animals on it, done by Arthur. He’d do the whole wall, think nothing of it. And he never penciled it in or — he just took his brushes and painted it. He was good.”
He was good, but he was still a young man. None of them knew what was ahead.
“It’s like John Jarvie said to me, it was a big war and everybody went,” Beyer says. “Most males of their age, it was what they were going to be doing.”
Andrew Lazar, the producer who did the Academy Award-nominated American Sniper, and the actor Bradley Cooper have optioned the rights to making The Ghost Army into a film. A tale of heroic artists. Fashion designers, photographers, the creators of beer mascots, a painter of birds.
Arthur Singer died at age 73 of esophageal cancer. Maybe it was those years of smoking a pipe. But the war didn’t get him.
“His art skills,” Alan says of his father, “really saved his life.”
JSPEVAK@Gannett.com
If you go
What: "Arthur Singer: The Wildlife Art of an American Master."
When: Aug. 7 through Oct. 28.
Where: Rochester Institute of Technology College of Imaging Arts and Sciences’ James E. Booth Hall, in the RIT University Gallery.
Reception: Alan and Paul Singer will talk about their father during a reception at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 8 in the RIT University Gallery. It is free and open to the public.
Related events: Talk by John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 5:30 p.m. Sept. 14; author David Wagner discusses the history of wildlife art in America, 5:30 p.m. Sept. 21; Rick Beyer, co-author of The Ghost Army, will speak and present the accompanying documentary at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 5.
The book: RIT Press’ Arthur Singer: The Wildlife Art of an American Master is $60 and is available at rit.edu/press or (585) 475-6766.