Don Russell Clayton, an alumnus of Kennesaw State University, selected the Zuckerman Museum of Art to house his beloved collection of works by Athos Menaboni, one of Georgia’s most prolific artists and well-known to Atlantans for his detailed and naturalistic paintings of American birds and botanicals.
“The lives of Sara and Athos Menaboni have had a lasting impact on my own. Since that first meeting, I have never looked at a flower, admired a bird, or watched the sun rise or set through the same eyes. Their love and enjoyment of life and nature has inspired the same in me. They were lifelong learners and always shared their knowledge and varied interests with their many devoted friends; those who knew Sara and Athos will always remember them with admiration and deep affection.”
History
The Collector: A Few Recollections by Russell Clayton
Among the few people who have touched my life in a truly meaningful way, Athos and
Sara Menaboni figure largely; my close relationship with them affected me profoundly.
I became acquainted with them in a roundabout way. I was pen pals with Robert W. Woodruff, a former president and chairman of the Board of Directors of The Coca-Cola Company, for several years while I was in high school and college. One day while shopping at Rich’s, Atlanta’s oldest and at the time most popular department store, I noticed a book entitled Menaboni’s Birds, written by Sara and suddenly remembered that Athos was the artist who for many years painted the birds for Mr. Woodruff’s Christmas cards. I glanced through the book and noticed right away that it included many paintings that I recognized as having appeared in the Christmas card series. I had to have a copy for my library because of the Woodruff references, but I quickly began to develop an appreciation for Athos as an artist. As I read Sara’s account of their life together, I grew to admire this man whose paintings illustrated her words.
A few years later, my interests in both Athos Menaboni and Coca-Cola came together when I discovered a small home calendar he had illustrated for The Coca-Cola Company. I soon learned it was the only calendar ever produced featuring his art, and as fate would have it, it was for 1959, the year I was born.
After several months had passed, I was told that Sara and Athos still lived in Atlanta and thought it would be nice to have my book autographed. To my delight, they were listed in the phonebook! I gathered up my courage, made the call, and, from our brief conversation, a friendship was born. Athos told me that his wife was in the hospital with a broken leg, but when she returned home he wanted me to come for a visit rather than send the book in the mail to him for autographing as I had suggested.
I believe that the Menabonis were interested in me because I was a teacher and they had a great love for children and education. Of course, I was thrilled to be invited to the home of these local celebrities and could hardly wait to meet them. The visit was exciting and I will never forget how delicious the homemade lemonade tasted. We talked for several hours, wandering through any number of subjects: Italy, other countries they had visited, and intriguing people they had met. I also enjoyed being shown the paintings hanging on the walls of nearly every room and then stood in awe when I was allowed to enter his studio. As I drove home, I was thinking how fortunate I was to have met these two delightful and special people.
A few weeks later, Sara called to invite me back for “supper.” I was elated to hear from her and of course accepted the invitation. After that evening, we had phone conversations on a regular basis and I went to their home at least once a month until their deaths.
A highlight of my life was their visiting my home for dinner. Athos enjoyed and seemed surprised that I had a “Menaboni Room.” He was a humble and unassuming man, but seemed truly flattered that I had dedicated that space in my house to his work.
The Menabonis’ life has had a lasting impact on my own. Since that first meeting, I have never looked at a flower, admired a bird, or watched the sun rise or set through the same eyes. Their love and enjoyment of life and nature has inspired the same in me. They were lifelong learners and always shared their knowledge and varied interests with their many devoted friends; those who knew Sara and Athos will always remember them with admiration and deep affection.
The administration of Kennesaw State University and I are indebted to the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation for supporting our efforts to honor one of Georgia’s most prominent artists. I can say without hesitation that Sara and Athos would be extremely grateful and honored.
About Athos Menaboni
Athos Rodolfo Giorgio Alessandro Menaboni (1895 - 1990) was born on October 20, 1895, to Averardo and Jenny Neri Menaboni in the Italian port city of Livorno. Menaboni’s father was a successful ship supplier, and his maternal grandfather, Alessandro Neri, was a military leader with Garibaldi in Italy’s unification movement. As a result of his father’s bringing home exotic animals given to him by clients, young Athos developed the lifelong fascination with birds and other animals; these later became the subjects of his paintings. He also often rode his bicycle to nearby Pisa where he admired the city’s art and architecture. At the age of nine, he began a formal study of art with private teachers, including marine painter Ugo Manaresi, muralist Charles Doudelet, and sculptor Pietro Gori. He later attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.
Menaboni had no interest in his father’s business. Several years after World War I and his service as a sharpshooter and a pilot in Italy’s armed forces, he left home with a job on an American freighter, had some layovers (including Tunisia) along the way, and then landed in the United States in 1921, becoming an American citizen in 1939. After arriving in Norfolk, Virginia, he settled first in New York City, taking a job decorating candles. Three years later he went to Davis Islands in Tampa, Florida, to become an art director for a real estate development.
In 1927, after the land boom had ended, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and soon began working on projects with Philip Shutze, one of the city’s leading architects. During the next decade, Shutze hired him to do decorative painting at the Swan House (the home of Edward Inman) and in several other residences (the May Patterson Goodrum House, Spotswood Hall, and the Patterson-Carr House) as well as public buildings (The Temple and the Capital City Club). Menaboni also worked with other architects, including Samuel Inman Cooper and Albert Howell. Other important early commissions included restoration work on Atlanta’s Cyclorama, decorative painting of the lobby ceiling in the Rhodes-Haverty Building, and murals in the home of R. J. Reynolds on Sapelo Island (another Shutze project). During this period, he also earned money painting landscapes and seascapes.
Athos Menoboni, 1945
Athos and Sara Menaboni, 1987For the first year in Atlanta, Menaboni lived in a downtown Peachtree Street boarding house owned by an uncle of his future wife. It was here that he met Sara Regina Arnold of Rome, Georgia, whom he married in August of 1928. After honeymooning in Italy, they found a small apartment, first on Tenth and later Eleventh Street. In 1939 they bought six acres in an Atlanta suburb, and subsequently built a house in 1942. This was at 1111 Cook Road, later renamed Crest Valley Drive. They named their property Valle Ombrosa (Shady Valley) after a town southeast of Florence, Menaboni’s favorite holiday destination during his boyhood summers. Their little estate became a bird sanctuary, complete with its own aviary; it also included a greenhouse for the cultivation of Menaboni’s bonsai. The couple lived and worked there for the rest of their lives.
In 1937, between commissions, Menaboni began experimenting with paint pigments and returned to his early childhood interest in birds. When he painted a pair of cardinals for a wall in his own living room, an interior designer and close friend, Molly Whitehead Aeck, noticed the painting and insisted that she be allowed to purchase it for a client. The resulting sale marked the beginning of a shift in Athos Menaboni’s career, and, from then on, he steadily refined aspects of the art for which he is now famous: naturalistic oil paintings of birds. He developed a technique he referred to as his “undercoat method,” which used turpentine to thin the oil in order to paint in layers on paper and give the feathers translucency, detail, and depth. Admirers continue to mistake these paintings for watercolors.
In 1938, Sara Menaboni sent a portfolio of his bird paintings to New York City; almost immediately, her husband was invited to exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History and the National Audubon Society. A show at Kennedy and Company (later known as Kennedy Galleries) led, in turn, to Menaboni’s long association with Robert W. Woodruff of The Coca-Cola Company. It was in New York that some of Woodruff’s close associates noticed and purchased the painting Doves in Longleaf Pine for the Woodruffs. It reminded them of a scene at Ichauway Plantation, the Woodruffs’ beloved Baker County, Georgia, retreat. After Mrs. Woodruff discovered that the artist lived in Atlanta, she decided she would like to use the work on their 1941 Christmas card. It became a tradition, with a different Menaboni bird painting each year until 1984; Mr. Woodruff died in 1985. Emory University (in Atlanta) and the Troup County Archives (in LaGrange, Georgia) both hold a complete set of the forty-four cards, sometimes described by collectors and enthusiasts as one of the finest ever produced.
From the late 1930s on, Menaboni’s range of media broadened. During this time, he rendered countless landscapes, seascapes, botanicals, nature studies, and what might be termed surreal fantasies on a variety of materials, including silk, wood, Masonite, cork, and paper. In 1939, he created fifteen mirrors, done in reverse painting on glass (before it was silvered), for a windowless dining room at Atlanta’s Capital City Club. Then, between 1951 and 1969, he was able to return to an interest from earlier in his career when Mills B. Lane, Jr., president of The Citizens and Southern National Bank, commissioned him to paint murals in bank buildings in Atlanta and Albany, Georgia, and to create an eggshell mosaic for the branch in Decatur, Georgia. He did magazine work as well. For example, he painted sixteen covers for The Progressive Farmer and two for Sports Illustrated. His work also appeared in publications, including The World Book Encyclopedia.
Since 1942, Menaboni’s work has been made even more widely available through prints and lithographs produced by many institutions and companies, including the National Audubon Society. In 1953 and 1959, respectively, his birds appeared in an ad for the Prudential Insurance Company and on a calendar produced by The Coca-Cola Company.
In 1950, Sara and Athos Menaboni published Menaboni's Birds. His paintings illustrated the text written by his wife, and the volume was voted one of the "Fifty Best Books of the Year” by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. It was reissued in 1984 using the original text with thirty-one new full-color reproductions. Menaboni was also asked to illustrate several other authors’ books, including Never the Nightingale by Daniel Whitehead Hicky (a Georgia poet).
It was also in 1950 that Time magazine declared Menaboni the heir of James Audubon, an apt designation, given the fact he would eventually paint over 160 different species of birds. During his career in Atlanta, which spanned 63 years, he received awards from the American Graphic Society, the Georgia Writers Association, the New York Art Directors Club, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Atlanta Beautiful Commission, the Capital City Club, the American Institute of Architects, the Italian Cultural Society, the Garden Club of Georgia, and the Office of the Governor of Georgia (the Governor’s Award in Visual Arts).
In 1990, Athos Menaboni suffered a stroke and died two months later, on July 18, at age ninety-four. His body was donated to the Emory University School of Medicine. A memorial service was held at the Ida Cason Callaway Memorial Chapel at Callaway Gardens (Pine Mountain, Georgia) on July 22, and the eulogy was delivered by Elizabeth Carlock Harris, Georgia’s first lady. Sara died three years later on August 10, 1993.
Menaboni’s works have been exhibited in many galleries and in art and natural history museums across the United States. They include the Kennedy Galleries, the Columbia Museum of Art, the Pensacola Arts Center, the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, the Albany Museum of Art, The Martha Berry Museum at Berry College, Emory University, the Vose Gallery, the St. Louis Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta History Center, the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum, the Detroit Art Museum, the Stark Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Booth Western Art Museum, The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts, and the Jekyll Island Arts Association.
In 2007, Russell Clayton, a retired Marietta, Georgia, educator and friend of the Menabonis, donated Menaboni's art to Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. Following a generous gift from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, KSU built a gallery to honor the life and work of the artist. The art collection includes paintings, drawings, three-dimensional works, prints, and lithographs. Since Clayton’s donation, the Athos Menaboni Permanent Art Collection continues to grow with works given by other donors.
Exhibitions continue to be planned and mounted. The art of Athos Menaboni lives on.
Sources: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library Building, Emory University (Atlanta, GA); Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia (Athens, GA); Troup County Archives (LaGrange, GA); and personal recollections and interviews of D. Russell Clayton. Vintage photographs courtesy of the Troup County Archives.
