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June 2 - September 18, 2005
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It is with delight and great pride that we welcome the Walter Anderson Centennial Exhibit home. Everything I See Is New and Strange, which premiered at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arts and Industries Building on September 25, 2003, was on view to critical and public acclaim until January 11, 2004 to over 250,000 people. After the excitement of the Smithsonian debut and the equally stunning success at the Dixon Galleries and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, it is a pleasure to showcase this beautiful body of work here where it was conceived. This was the largest solo exhibit ever to feature a Mississippi artist at the Smithsonian Institution, and we are immensely pleased that we are able to present the exhibit in its entirety. I invite all of you to join me in celebrating the work of this native son.
– Marilyn Lyons
WALTER ANDERSON:
EVERYTHING I SEE IS NEW AND STRANGE
1920s AND 1930s: THE EARLY PROFESSIONAL YEARS
Walter Inglis Anderson was born in 1903 in the Garden District of New Orleans, the second son of George Walter Anderson, a well-educated, prosperous grain merchant and of Annette McConnell, who came from a prominent, civic-minded New Orleans family. In 1924, he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and studied drawing and painting under Arthur B. Carles and Henry McCarter. His ability in drawing won him a Packard Award for animal studies and a Cresson Scholarship for travel in Europe, and in Summer 1927 he traveled to France and Spain.
When Walter Anderson returned to Ocean Springs in 1928, he began to work at Shearwater Pottery, where he decorated bowls, vases, cups and plates thrown by his brother, Peter. In 1931, Walter and his younger brother, Mac, opened an “Annex” to the Pottery where they created several series of figures: pirates, baseball players, and a picturesque series of blacks. Walter Anderson also produced other, larger molded figures: a Chesty Horse, the bust of Allison, and pelican bookends.
In 1933, Anderson married his sister-in-law, Agnes (Sissy) Grinstead, who had graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, where she majored in art history, and had also studied for two years in France. In the Cottage at Shearwater, which they had been given as a wedding present, Walter worked 
on furniture and rugs, evidence of a life-long interest in design, and of his belief, shared with William Morris, that “... a man should be able to make all that he needs: not only his house and his furniture, his tools and utensils, his tapestries and pictures, but even his music and song.”
During his first years as a professional artist, Anderson painted in oils, sketched the wildlife around him, and created small block prints to sell in the Shearwater showroom. In the little time available to him for painting, he did several oil portraits using a rather dark palette, influenced, perhaps, by Cézanne and the German Expressionists. In 1934 —a year when he canoed down the Mississippi from Louisville to Arkansas on a belated honeymoon with Sissy—he was commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to paint a series of large murals for the Ocean Springs High School. He was unable to complete a second commission for the Indianola Post Office due to mental illness and intermittent hospitalization from 1937 to 1940.
1940s: THE WAR YEARS AT OLDFIELDS
After receiving treatment in Maryland and Mississippi, Anderson settled with his family and Sissy’s ailing father at Oldfields, the Grinstead family homestead in Gautier. Here he began one of his most productive periods, a time of renewal and healing with his family, exploring the fields, marshes, and pinelands, and observing plants and insects. Freed from the routines of the Pottery, he had time to draw, paint, and make block prints; to illustrate some of his favorite books; to produce toys, puppet plays, and stories for the children; to build his own kiln and fire a new series of figurines. He kept the house stocked with firewood, and celebrated the passing of the seasons and daily hours in lyrical “calendar drawings” which capture seasonal phenomena and record events in his daily life.
He created large watercolors at Oldfields that use the primary colors and repetitive design in a manner reminiscent of ancient hieratic presentation. One of his favorite books, during those years, was A Method of Creative Design by the Mexican theorist Adolfo Best-Maugard, a work which reduces all of art to seven basic motifs: zigzag, half-circle, circle, straight line, s-curve, wavy line and spiral. These motifs— found both in art and nature— he combined in every possible way.
At night he read – and “visualized”— Milton, Dante, Goethe, Homer, Ossian, and the great epics of voyage and discovery, myth and legend. Drawing rapidly as he read, the finished drawings fell to the floor around the dining room table, to be collected the next morning by Sissy. For him, reading was a process of visualization, during which he “realized” scenes latent in the text.
1945-50: THE LINOLEUM
BLOCK PRINTS AND TRAVEL
Transforming the Oldfields attic into a studio, he bought rolls of surplus linoleum and wallpaper and made huge prints, most of them twenty inches wide and six feet long, but some twelve feet. He hoped these prints — the horizontal ones that he called “overmantels” and the vertical ones he called “scrolls”— would provide inexpensive art to ordinary people. Over three hundred large-scale prints were produced from 1945-1949, the first body of oversized prints made by an American artist. When the block prints of the fairy tales were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1949, he wrote to the curator that they were offered as “an alternative to the atom bomb, in a series of explosions so identified with the life of man that they stimulate without destroying.”
Rather than visit the Brooklyn Museum show, Anderson chose to travel to China, in hopes of seeing the murals of Tibet. There, he did a series of watercolors of sea creatures – crabs and lobsters – which mark another new approach to color and texture.
In interesting logbooks, he recorded a trip to Costa Rica, and long excursions by bicycle to draw the landscapes, flora and fauna of Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee. He camped in the open air or in some convenient shelter when it rained, and ate sporadically, enjoying his freedom and intimacy with nature. Travel and “writing up the log” were two constants of his life.
1950-60: THE MURALS AND STILL LIFES
In 1951, the town of Ocean Springs built a new Community House for civic and private events. The 3,000 square feet of cinder-block walls were unpainted, and Anderson— who had thought a great deal about the artist’s obligation to society—and society’s to the artist—offered to create a mural, for the fee of $1. After considering the possibilities of fresco, he decided to use oil paint provided by the city, and applied it directly to the stucco surface, achieving a fresco-like effect.
Distracted by those who stopped to watch him paint, Anderson took to working at night, in dim light that hampered him in his work. After many months of labor, with the mural nearly complete, he broke off work and secluded himself at his cottage. There, on the walls of a little room, he did a more personal mural, his vision of a day on the Coast, from sunrise to night, based on Psalm 104, with its praise for the gift of light. If the Community Center Mural had addressed history, the environment, and the cycle of the seasons, the Little Room was a hymn to creation, and its walls addressed the time of a day. On the ceiling, Anderson painted the mystical zinnia, with its square, swirling petals, and he adorned the fireplace with a muse-like representation of the Mississippi River.
During this time of retreat, he also devoted much time to still life. “Painting still life,” he once wrote, “is one way of paying the debt which we owe to the earth.” He also sailed his skiff thirty-two miles out to the Chandeleur Islands to paint, and to study the life of pelicans.
1950-65: THE ISLAND YEARS
During the last fifteen years of Anderson’s life, he spent extended periods on the coastal barrier islands, particularly Horn Island, living and painting there for weeks at a time, enduring harsh conditions and using his overturned boat for a shelter. He continued to work at Shearwater Pottery where he created new shapes and decorated in bolder, looser lines. Although he continued to travel on the mainland, he was more attracted than ever to the solitude and “infinite refreshment” of Horn Island.
Despite a constant battle with the elements, Anderson did thousands of drawings and watercolors of the creatures of the sea, sand, and air. In the logbooks written on the Island (only about a quarter of which have been published), he records moments of pure ecstasy: “It was an embarrassment of riches . . . 
a concentrated image that nothing could take from me.”
Horn Island provided him with the opportunity for “realization,” the moment of intense empathy or unity of the artist with the subject of his art: “The bird flies, and in that fraction of a fraction of a second man and the bird are real... and he, man, exists, and he is almost as wonderful as the thing he sees.” In fleeting images of change and unity, his Horn Island watercolors capture moments when man and nature seem one, and the island itself becomes a symbol of our power and frailty.
Returning from the island in October of 1965, he was taken to a hospital in New Orleans where he died a short time later of lung cancer. There are drawings of men repairing the roof done from his hospital bed.
– Patricia Pinson
