Andy Warhol created his 1983 Endangered Species series just 10 years after the passage of the Endangered Species Act, emphasizing the status of vulnerable animals like the orangutan, San Francisco silverspot butterfly, Pine Barrens treefrog, and the bald eagle shown here. The collection, commissioned by Ronald and Frayda Feldman, was a departure from Warhol’s typical Pop fare.
The Feldmans were art dealers who opened the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery in 1971 and frequently highlighted art that engaged with contemporary social movements. They were longtime friends of Warhol who worked closely with him and published some of the first editions of Warhol’s silkscreen prints. (Ronald Feldman was even the subject of one of Warhol’s silkscreen portraits in 1974). Warhol stopped into the couple’s gallery often and would ask whether the Feldmans had any ideas for him, according to Ronald Feldman’s 2023 obituary in The New York Times. Eventually, the Feldmans did propose something that captured Warhol’s interest, which led to Ten Jews of the 20th Century, a 1980 series of silkscreen portraits of famous Jewish people.
Several years later, the Feldmans commissioned the Endangered Species series after they discussed beach erosion with Warhol. Bald Eagle is one of 10 screenprints in this portfolio, which also includes portraits of a panda bear, tiger, black rhinoceros, zebra, and bighorn ram. Framed against a deep blue gradient like a clear afternoon sky, the bald eagle faces left with an intense stare, as though tracking its prey. Warhol used thin lines of bright yellow and red paint to accentuate the bird’s features, much like his use of color and hand-drawn lines in his portraits of well-known celebrity subjects like Mick Jagger and John Wayne.
Throughout the 1980s, the Feldmans commissioned other projects with Warhol that included: Myths, featuring icons like Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse; Ads, with famous advertisements for Macintosh, Chanel No. 5, and the Volkswagen bug; and Moonwalk, about the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The bald eagle population has had a remarkable recovery since Warhol’s series was unveiled in 1983, to the point that the bald eagle was delisted as an endangered species in 2007. Still, seven of the 10 species in the portfolio remain endangered or protected.
