In My Obsession, one creative person reveals their most prized collection.
Every morning, Walton Ford wakes up in his West Village townhouse and sees a menagerie on the mantel. The 64-year-old artist, who creates detailed, large-scale watercolors of exotic animals, has spent more than a decade building a collection of vintage composite animal figures. (The term “composite” describes the linoleum-like mixture used to create toys before plastic became manufacturers’ medium of choice.) Only two main companies in Germany produced this now-rare product — typically no more than 2 inches high and 2 inches long — between the early 1900s and World War II. “If you’re an artist who studies animal anatomy, you are blown away by these things,” Ford says. “It’s like you have these little zoo animals in the room.” Many of the creatures’ poses will look familiar to fans of Ford’s art; he frequently works from photographs of them. The artist, whose sketches, watercolors and studies are on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York through Oct. 20, says that being greeted by the tiny animals each day reminds him “what my purpose is.”
The collection: “Pre-World War II animal figures from Germany, mostly from the 1930s. They’re made out of composite materials — metal, sawdust, linseed oil, glue and binders.”
Number of pieces in the collection: “About 50.”
First purchase: “My wife at the time bought me a small zebra [from] an antiques store in Newport, R.I., in the ’80s. It seemed far superior to the plastic animals I’d grown up with.”
Latest purchase: “I bought one a couple of years ago: a mother baboon with a baby baboon on her back. A German antiques dealer was selling them online. Creepily enough, a big part of their website was devoted to figures of Nazis and Germans fighting. I was only interested in the zoo animals.”
Most expensive: “Probably one of the elephants. But an expensive figure is still under $100.”
Most precious: “At the natural history museum in Berlin, they have the taxidermied remains of a very famous gorilla named Bobby who lived in the Berlin Zoo. After he died [in 1935], he was mounted in this proud position. One of these companies made this little portrait of him. It isn’t just a figure of a gorilla — it’s a sculpted portrait of a beloved individual.”
Weirdest: “The elephant seal. It looks like it’s too big. But they’re called elephant seals for a reason; they’re as big as rhinoceroses.”
Most sought after: “I wish I had a sable antelope — a very large African antelope that has these tremendous sickle horns. In one of the better Ernest Hemingway stories, he goes to hunt one and wounds it. He follows the blood trail and never gets it.”
One that was damaged: “There’s a wire armature underneath each of them. One of the wild boar’s legs is simply the wire underneath. He looks rather like a pirate with [a] peg leg.”
One obtained through dubious methods: “The entire collection has a dubious origin. In the middle of the rise of Nazism, you have these [figures] that very much resemble animals at the zoo at that time. Companies had to suspend making toys during the war. The zoo was hit with a bomb. This haunted history resonates with the work I do, which is to draw out a cultural history of these conscious beings that we share the planet with.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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