Blooming on the Amazon

Among natural scientists she ranks with the great botanical artists of the century. Among ecologists she’s revered as a pioneer conservationist. Now the Huntington brings her to L.A. with the traveling exhibition “Margaret Mee: Return to the Amazon.”

A selection of 85 spectacular examples of Mee’s work are on view. They depict dancing-fairy orchids, spiky bromeliads and other exotic flora that seem almost prehistoric. Accompanied by field sketches, diaries and artifacts from Brazil’s native peoples, the ensemble evokes Mee’s remarkable life. Finished gouaches encapsulate her artistic strength. Images are invariably handsome in composition, color is silver in luminescence. Mee’s form is remarkable in its ability to capture both the weight of pulpy leaves and the delicacy of petals. She blended vitality with concentration.

Born in 1909, Mee herself was a late bloomer. The exhibition entrance introduces her with three photographs. The earliest shows a young Victorian beauty. A set of later camera-booth shots make her look like the heroine of a World War II movie. Doing her part on the home front delayed her entering art school until she was 36. There’s a vigorous student sculpture of a female nude recalling Gauguin. The third photo shows her in the Amazon jungle wearing shirt and jeans, teetering across a flimsy bridge. She was 43 and just getting started.

When Mee made the first of her 15 explorations in the mid-1950s, the Amazon forest was protected by its remoteness. In the ‘60s the Trans-Amazon Highway opened the area to cultivation, mining and hydroelectric exploitation. In the next two decades deforestation ruined about 12% of the ecosystem. If that doesn’t sound like much, we’re reminded that the region’s natural balance is exceptionally fragile and interlocked. When one species perishes, numerous others are destroyed.

We’re reminded of the tropical bromeliads Mee recorded so lovingly. The plant’s tough strap-like leaves form a funnel. They capture water that attracts insects and small critters, forming a tiny universe able to survive without soil high among the trees. When a bromeliad variety vanishes, its dependent life forms are in big trouble.

A number of Mee’s images record species now extinct, but painting wasn’t all she did to preserve them. From the beginning she hectored bureaucrats and alerted the academic world to the slow-motion conflagration. She’s credited with having slowed the disaster.

Visitors of more generalized aesthetic interest may be a little surprised that specialists like Mee even continue to exist. In a world of such technologically sophisticated visual recording devices as high-resolution digital cameras and holograms, hands-on scientific artists seem as endangered as some of the subject matter they record.

Their survival is probably due at least in part to tradition. The smart, affectionate catalog broadcasts a quality of cozy understanding between people who are all members of the same club. They take obvious pride in linking Mee to great naturalist predecessors like the 19th century Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, who collected a staggering 12,000 plant specimens. Then there was Alfred Russel Wallace, whose independent Amazon explorations gathered materials confirming Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Common sense, however, suggests practical reasons for the persistence of artists like Mee. Low-tech art materials are simply more adaptable to the inhospitable jungle than cumbersome mechanical contraptions susceptible to dampness, fungus and bugs. These artist-botanists don’t just record, they explore. The bio diversity of the Amazon is staggering. There are about 50,000 species of plants. The naturalist has to tell them apart and classify the unknown. Mee found about 10 new varieties.

The exhibition recounts a particularly touching story about Mee’s pursuit of a rare cactus. The Amazon moonflower doesn’t blossom every year. When it does, the flowering happens at night. After a 24-year search, Mee found the illusive plant at the right time, sketching it by torchlight from a riverboat on the Rio Negro. The year was 1988. Shortly after Mee sojourned home to England after successfully dodging the perils of the Brazilian rain forest for some 36 years, she was killed in an auto accident. She was 79.

The survey was curated by Ruth Stiff and organized by London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It owns most of Mee’s 400 large-format pictures. Since the Huntington is renowned for its own art collections, gardens and scholarship, the exhibition’s appearance there is notably apt.

* “Margaret Mee: Return to the Amazon,” Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; through Aug. 23, closed Mondays and holidays. (626) 405-2141.