By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer/Photographer

If you’ve never seen much of a certain mid-century American artist’s work, you’ve probably seen his famous cardinal. The bird, which struts its perky stuff in several of his images — and serves as the logo for “Charley Harper: Birds and Beasts,” the delightful new exhibit at Lexington’s Headley Whitney Museum — embodies the late Cincinnati-based artist’s minimalist style.

It distills the subject’s essence with a few precise strokes right out of a geometry textbook. The cardinal’s beak is a diamond shape bisected with a perfectly horizontal slash. The wings and legs are indicated by two utterly straight vertical lines, the left one extended upward to create a tail. The feathers on the wings and tail branch off from the same lines at angles that look drawn with the help of a ruler and a calculator. The body is an exactly symmetrical teardrop, the eyes and knee joints mere dots. How can it be that with so few elements — and the crucial assistance of the on-the-money, true-to-life colors — the image registers instantly as a cardinal?

That’s the genius of Harper, who died in 2007 after a long career as an artist, illustrator and conservationist whose homemade silkscreen prints were sold by mail in the Ford Times Magazine in the 1950s for $4.50 and now go for exponentially more. (His original paintings can range from $50,000 to over $200,000.) It’s also the genius of “Birds and Beasts,” which brings together more than 150 of Harper’s works — including many never exhibited before — on loan from private collections and the Charley and Edie Harper Foundation.

Christina Bell, the Headley Whitney’s executive director, curated this show based on her longstanding admiration for Harper’s pared-down aesthetic, which dovetails — pun intended — with perennially popular mid-century modern design in furniture, decor and architecture. “I probably saw his cardinal somewhere years ago, but it wasn’t the cardinal that struck me so much as his representation of the cardinal,” Bell says in an interview. “It’s hard to verbalize how it hits me — in the heart, in the gut. The simplicity of his belief in nature is just so powerful.”

That simplicity, upon close inspection during a preview tour of the show, is deceptive in its sophistication. Harper’s eye, trained at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (where he later taught for many years), was always in search of the underlying structure of things in nature. Then, like far better-known contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Alexander Calder and Ruth Duckworth, Harper expressed that structure in a manner that’s at once reductive and purifying. The realism of Audubon was anathema to him. Almost every composition involving tree branches and leaves starts with arrow-straight horizontal and perpendicular lines contrasting with precisely curving, radiating lines that could have been drafted using a protractor. In a piece called “Jonah in the Belly of the Beast,” Harper signals his understanding of the hinge of a whale’s great jaw with a thick black line in the shape of an inverted C. The tail of a pheasant is both simplified and exaggerated, becoming a hyperextended spike. “There’s some who want to count all the feathers in the wings,” Harper once told an interviewer, “and then others who never think about counting the feathers, like me.”

As simple as his individual creatures were, he often arranged them in complex, intensely considered compositions that showed the birds’ habitats and habits — mating, feeding themselves and their young, hunting and being hunted — with a deliberateness that rivaled Old Master still-life paintings. “I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures,” Harper told another interviewer. “I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of painting. In a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.”

Another wellspring of his imagination was wordplay, including rhymes, alliteration and puns, the last of which he described as “the purest form of creativity.” “Taking two words never connected and making a new creation — that equals creation at its purest,” he told Diana Tessaglia-Hymes of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “I’m constantly thinking of puns all the time. If it’s a good pun, I’ll make a picture for it. Sometimes I will wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea for a pun and write it down. Later, I may turn that pun into a painting.”

And so, he did. In “Birds and Beasts,” several of the titles purr with slyness, merriment and, on occasion, a sepulchral chill. “Red and Fed,” featuring the omnipresent cardinal atop a half-eaten cob of corn, radiates contentment and perhaps a certain smugness. “Quail Safe” shows a covey of birds escaping a hungry fox. “Dam Diligent” abstracts a beaver at his work. “Catnip” shows a bird being stalked by a housecat, while in the show’s most startling image, “Wrented,” a family of wrens builds a comfy nest inside a human skull. Perhaps birds do live rent-free in our heads; they may also survive us.

Or not. Harper was troubled early on by the endangerment and/or extinction of various bird species, as evidenced by “America’s Vanishing Birds,” a 1957 Ford Times feature with artwork and accompanying texts by the artist. It’s worth stopping a while with this display in a corner of a Headley Whitney gallery, where Harper comes down hard on human culpability in the destruction: “The fate of the Labrador Duck is obscure, but it was undoubtedly hastened by egg collectors and by wholesale slaughter for the retail market,” he wrote. “During the breeding and molting season, when he lost the power of flight, his flocks were helpless — sitting ducks for the hunting ships sent by the feather merchants.” At the fate of the Great Auk, which once prospered in the north Atlantic, Harper’s prose fairly thrums with rage. “Then the professional hunters invaded his nurseries, butchering relentlessly for oil and feathers, encrusting Funk Island with discarded carcasses. The last of the Great Auks was clubbed to death in 1844, heading the obituary column of American birds.”

This passion for avian wildlife, bordering on a kind of mysticism, runs through “Birds and Beasts,” spilling over at times into unapologetic activism. One of the few original paintings in the show, “A Day in Eden,” envisions the interdependent ecosystem — bird, rabbit, flower, ladybug — of his beloved Eden Park in Cincinnati.