Walter Anderson would have been 100 years old on September 29, 2003. His birthday was celebrated in style with a 4000 square foot exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution’s Arts & Industries Building and was complimented in a rave review from longtime art critic of The Washington Post, Paul Richard, who compared Anderson to artists like John Marin, Winslow Homer and Vincent van Gogh. In addition, for the first time, a comprehensive catalog of his work with essays written by nationally known scholars, The Art of Walter Anderson, was published by the Walter Anderson Museum of Art and University Press of Mississippi. Perhaps, at last, Anderson is receiving the national recognition that has so long eluded his genius. We hope so. Happy Birthday, Walter! – Marilyn Lyons, Director from the Curator...
Since we are reaching the end of the centennial year, it is fitting that we look again at the life of Walter Anderson. This exhibition is based on the recently published biography, Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson by Christopher Maurer. As guest curator, Dr. Maurer brings new insight as a result of his research.
– Patricia Pinson, Curator Introduction The triumph of Walter Anderson–painter, writer, naturalist – was the momentary defeat of custom. He believed that custom destroys love, and although with love “man can see through a stone wall,” without it we can only say “of course.” There was nothing customary about his own restless life, divided between study and creation, solitude and the longing to “reestablish the relation of art to the people” through “a common language of forms.” Through his life, his painting, and his words, he awakened wonder and gratitude for art, for life, for nature. – Christopher Maurer
In His Own Words... Man begins by saying of course, before any of his senses have a chance to come to his aid with wonder and surprise. The result is that he dies, and his neighbors and friends murmur with the wind, of course! The love of bird or shell which might have restored his life flies away, carried by the same wind which has destroyed him. The bird flies, and in that fraction of a second, man and the bird are real. He is not only king, he is man. He is not only man, he is the only man, and that is the only bird, and every feather, every mark, every part of the pattern of his feathers is real, and he, man, exists, and he is almost as beautiful as the thing he sees. * ...All movement is to invisible music, although only a few people hear it. It comes from the sun and the wind and the movement of water and a running rabbit and a crowing cock, and together it is like a part of a great symphony. The longer we listen and the quieter we are, the more we hear of it, and when we do, we are part of the music, instead of an unwelcome interruption.* We all get what we want. Each painter that paints a picture puts into it exactly what he wants. If he fails, it is because he did not want enough. Teach people to want the right things and they will get them. Teach them to want the wrong things and they will be ruined.
*
True art consists in spreading wide the intervals so that imagination may fill the space between the trees. *
* Color breaks forth. It is a different dimension from form and should break out as it does in poetry that is alive. * Certain fundamentals do exist in art. But as for color, light and shade, structure, the artist has as much freedom and right as the sun itself to clothe them in whatever translucent, shifting. gauzy raiment he chooses if he does not lose the nature of his object. * It is strange that the artist should have no standards and be constantly trying to live up to other people’s standards. * From a certain point of view, all art seems to be simply a means to defer the evil moment. * Power of knowledge and intellect. Power of beauty. Power of social life and manners.
* Every day is the voyage of Ulysses. Every day he passes thru the pillars of Hercules, is awakened by the sun, faces his grey rock, passes the two sisters, loses his wind by falling alseep, and returns home to find his home in the hands of suitors. Life and Works 1903-18 Born in New Orleans on September 29. Second son of grain broker George Walter Anderson and Annette McConnell Anderson, an amateur painter, who transmits to him the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and champions art as part of everyday life. Early schooling in New Orleans, where he shows a love of mythology. He is sent with his older brother Peter, in 1915, to a boarding school in Manlius, New York. 1922-28 Studies commercial art (1922-23) at New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons), and explores the cultural life of New York. Studies successfully at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1924-28.) Three instructors —Henry McCarter, Arthur B. Carles, and Hugh Breckenridge – awaken his interest in color, and Daniel Garber in drawing. Travels in France on a Cresson prize fellowship (1927), and is impressed by its religious architecture and by the cave paintings of Les Eyzies. Interest in the Armenian visionary George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and probable visit to his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris. Decorates ceramics at Shearwater Pottery, founded by his brother Peter.
1941-47 On the Grinstead coastal farm, Oldfields (Gautier, Mississippi), he studies ancient art, writes stories for children, illustrates the classics, records his life in “calendar drawings,” paints large watercolors and tempera paintings, and makes large linoleum block prints, later exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1949). Searching for universal forms and archetypes, he studies and experiments with the “seven motifs” of Mexican art theorist Adolfo Best-Maugard, and the “dynamic symmetry” of Jay Hambidge. Children John and Leif are born.
– Christopher Maurer |
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Coming Up at WAMA |
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Thursday, November 20, 7 PM Monday, November 24, 9 AM Thursday, December 4 Sunday, December 14, 6 PM Sunday, January 4, 2004 January 11 January 25 Thursday, January 15, 7 PM * Dates are subject to change. For more information, please contact the WAMA Education Department, Educate@WalterAndersonMuseum or 228-872-3164, x 111. |
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