Herbert Friedmann, Acclaimed Ornithologist, Dies at 87

Herbert Friedmann, an internationally acclaimed ornithologist who guided the former Los Angeles County Museum of Art, History and Science through its transformation to the Museum of Natural History in the 1960s, is dead.

Friedmann, who was made emeritus director of the museum after his retirement as director in 1970, was 87 when he died May 14 in an Orange County hospital.

He had published more than 400 scientific papers on ornithology and was the author of 17 books on birds, as well as on art history, a favored avocation.

Friedmann, whose interest in birds began when he joined the Audubon Society as a teen-ager in Brooklyn, came to Los Angeles in 1961 from the Smithsonian Institution, where he had been curator of zoology for 31 years. Before that he taught at Cornell, Harvard, Brown and Amherst universities.

During Friedmann’s tenure, the art section of the museum in Exposition Park was relocated in the new County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard, enabling Friedmann to expand the research and collection sections into the space formerly occupied by paintings and statuary.

Exhibits as diverse as pre-Columbian, South Pacific and African ethnology and vertebrate fossils were added.

Ralph Schreiber, curator of ornithology at the Natural History Museum, said Friedmann was the first director to receive a grant for the museum from the National Science Foundation.

After his retirement, Friedmann was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation to evaluate biological research programs there.

Friedmann had a lifelong fascination with art, Schreiber said. His last work was “The Bestiary of St. Jerome: the Animal Symbolism in European Religious Art,” published in 1980.

It was hailed as a scholarly compilation of all the animal symbolism relating to the 4th-Century Italian saint who later became a favored subject for Renaissance artists.

Friedmann is survived by his wife, Karen, a daughter and a brother.