“True hope dwells on the possible,
even when life seems to be a plot written by someone
who wants to see how much adversity we can overcome.”
So, anyway, I saw a documentary on PBS, which left me minimally gobsmacked.
I did some research.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, does an okay job but I found the work of a high schooler offered the most artistic perspective. I like the kid’s style, which just oozes critical sincerity.
Walter Anderson: A Biography, using Approaching the Magic Hour and other sources
by Jeff Durst (Starkville, Mississippi)
Walter Anderson was a brilliant man. He was also a little crazy, which seems to be a trend among great artists. He was a man that lived in agony caused by his genius and a burning desire to create the world around him.
Walter Anderson changed the face of water color in the twentieth century, but he was an enigma, neither appreciated nor understood in his time. He led a rather rocky and interesting life.
Walter Inglis Anderson was born on September 29, 1903 in New Orleans. From the beginning, he showed an interest in art and nature. His earliest interests were in birds. His mother, Annette McConnell Anderson, encouraged Walter by giving him sketch books. She was also an artist, and she felt that she had wasted her skills. To compensate, she stressed good habits such as writing and drawing every day to her children.
Annette once gave Walter a book with “200 words a day” written on the cover. He scratched out “words” and wrote “birds” in its place. He had two brothers, Peter and Mac, whom he often hunted with along with their father.
When he was twelve, Walter Anderson was sent to Manlius Military School in New York State, where he was miserable. There he would send home brief letters showing an increasing propensity for art and an increasing closeness to nature. One such letter read: “I go for a walk in the woods nearly every day and I have special places where I can go and read and draw.”
Years later he told his mother that Manlius had almost destroyed him. In 1922, with his mother’s blessing and his father’s scorn, Walter went to Parson’s School of Design in New York. Rural life had not prepared him for the big city, and there were many distractions.
In 1923 he transferred to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he excelled and made money by selling wood carvings. While enrolled at Pennsylvania, he spent a great deal of time at the zoo, drawing the animals there. These pictures won him the Packard Prize for Animal Drawing in 1925. He also won the Cresson Prize for traveling and used the money to travel to Paris in 1927 to study the cave paintings and Gothic cathedrals.
It was in 1927 that Walter Anderson met his future wife, Agnes Grinstead, and he began his strange courtship of her. Walter was working summers at Shearwater Pottery, which had been started by his brother Peter in 1928. Agnes had decided to spend her summer at her parents’ summer home, Oldfields, which was near Ocean Springs, Mississippi. She spent some time with Walter that summer, and the very next year he asked her to marry him. Her father disapproved of Walter, but they were soon married in April, 1933.
Walter Anderson did not have much of a family life. Agnes once said, “He[Walter] was a painter always, a lover at times, a husband and father never.” Walter never wanted to have children and would only accept their third child, Lief, as being his. During the first years of their marriage, he made Agnes use birth control because he didn’t want to bring a child into a world “so filled with pain and terror.” So he and Agnes lived together without children of their own in the cabin which had been given to them as a wedding present.
After his father’s death in February 1936, Walter Anderson had a mental breakdown and spent most of the years 1937-1940 in mental hospitals. After trying to kill himself by jumping in front of a greyhound bus, Walter was sent to Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, where he would spend the next year.
While a patient at Phipps, he relegated himself into a total state of apathy. He wouldn’t even speak. When a new doctor, Dr. Mead, took over his case, Walter began to speak. Dr. Mead thought that Walter felt he had become impotent. When Agnes told him that she was pregnant with their first child, Walter tried to kill her. Their daughter Mary was born on December 8, 1937 while Walter was still a patient at Phipps.
Walter was released in July of 1938 and sent back to his cabin. He was frightened by his books and art, and when Agnes presented him with a clip board, paper, and pencils, he tore the paper to shreds and hit her over the head with the clip board. Soon after he was sent to Shepard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. He was there for six weeks before pushing a bookcase over on his attendant and walking home.
Their second child, Billy, was born in October of 1939. Walter Anderson would accept neither child as his and made another attempt on Agnes’s and the children’s lives. He was soon in Whitfield, where he began to draw again, mainly birds. After a short stay, he jumped out of his window, leaving behind soap pictures of birds on his wall. He then lived in Jackson, Mississippi, as an outpatient before returning to his family in 1940.
Upon Walter’s return, the Andersons moved into Oldfields to watch over Agnes’ sick father. Although he remained kind to his children, Walter became less and less tolerant of family relations and responsibilities. In May the Anderson’s third child was born, Leif, a girl. Leif was the only child Walter would ever admit to fathering.
Although the years spent at Oldfields were happy for Walter and his family, he became increasingly disturbed. One Sunday at church he told Agnes: “Normalcy. All that you give yourself for is to see that I remain normal, to see that I live in the world and not in a hospital. I am grateful for these beautiful years, but you have to understand something, too. I am normal…I must paint. I am going to try to order my life so that this becomes possible”.
One night in December, 1946, Mary was suffering from a nagging cough, and Agnes was pregnant with a fourth child. The girl’s cold kept Walter up, and finally he stormed into the room and declared, “I came to tell you I’m leaving. I’m not coming back, ever! I can’t take it. I’m an artist; I have to be”.
The Anderson family saw very little of Walter from that night until his death in November, 1965. He had to “escape the dominant mode on shore,” as he put it. He lived in the cabin and began spending more and more time on the offshore islands, particularly Horn Island. When onshore, Walter smoked and drank to excess, which he did neither of on his islands.
After his death, Agnes and her sister Pat opened his cabin for the first time and discovered a veritable treasure: literally thousands of Walter Anderson’s works. Even more amazing was the mural they discovered in his little room. Upon entering the room, Pat exclaimed, “It’s the creation at sunrise!” The name stuck.
Walter Anderson was a man that lived in a world that could neither understand nor appreciate him. His was a unique genius: an absolute understanding of nature and the need to bond with it through painting. Today, he is considered one of the greatest American artists, and his works and books are displayed with pride across the nation.
Walter Inglis Anderson (September 29, 1903 – November 30, 1965) was an American painter and writer.
Anderson died from cancer November 30, 1965, at the age of 62.
Early life and education
Anderson was born in New Orleans to George Walter Anderson, a grain broker, and Annette McConnell Anderson, a prominent New Orleans family member who had studied art at Newcomb College. He was the second of three brothers, the eldest being Peter Anderson and the youngest James McConnell “Mac” Anderson.
As a child, Anderson attended St. John’s School in Manilus, New York until his schooling was interrupted at age 14 by World War I. He then transferred to the Manual Training School in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In 1922 he enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons School of Design). After a year at Parsons, he won a scholarship to study at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Here (1924–1928) he would study under iconoclastic modernists like Henry McCarter, Hugh Breckenridge, and Arthur Carles, winning a Packard Award for his animal drawing and a Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which allowed him to spend a summer in France. While in France, Anderson was particularly impressed with cave paintings, which noticeably influenced his drawing style.
Ocean Springs
Anderson’s older brother Peter opened the Shearwater Pottery Factory in Ocean Springs, Mississippi in 1928, on a 24-acre parcel of property his parents had purchased in 1918.
Anderson moved to Ocean Springs after his years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked as a designer in the family business, Shearwater Pottery. In 1928-29 he designed his earliest ceramic pieces: pelican and crab bookends, lampstands, peculiar “Resting” and “Sitting Geometric Cat”; a “Horse and Rider” and innumerable plates and vases. His work as a designer and decorator at Shearwater Pottery from 1928 until his death, included incised pieces, sgraffito – decoration by cutting away parts of a surface layer to expose a different colored ground – work, underglaze decoration, woodcarvings of saints, and designs for furniture.
Among his early projects, launched with his younger brother James (“Mac”), was a “Shearwater Pottery Annex” which produced inexpensive figurines, giving Anderson enough of an income in 1932 to marry Agnes Grinstead, an art history graduate of Radcliffe College, who would later write a poignant memoir of their life together (Approaching the Magic Hour).
During the early years, manufacturing of the figurines, which he called “widgets”, prevented Anderson from painting and led to considerable tension.
In 1934, commissioned by a family friend, Ellsworth Woodward, Anderson painted an ambitious mural in the auditorium of the Ocean Springs Public School (“Ocean Springs Past and Present”) as part of Public Works of Art Project. Paintings from this period include: “Indians Hunting”; “Jockeys Riding Horses”; four oil portraits of Sissy, 1933–37; “Black Skimmer”; “Androcles and Lion”; “Man on Horse”; and Birth of Achilles (Memphis Brooks Museum of Art); along with watercolors of flowers, animals, and birds; studies for a projected book on birds of the southeastern U.S.; and linoleum blockprints, including “Tourist Cards;” “Alphabet”; nursery rhymes; “On the River”; “Valkyries”; “Butterfly Book”; and scenes from Shearwater Pottery.
Designs for a second mural, in the Jackson, Mississippi, Court House, were accepted by an illustrious committee, then rejected by a Washington bureaucrat, causing Anderson considerable frustration. This disappointment, coupled with the death of his father in 1937, lingering bouts of both malaria and undulant fever, and the struggle to eke out a living with work he detested (manufacturing figurines) led to a mental breakdown, with psychotic episodes, in 1937.
Oldfields
In 1941, Anderson moved to Gautier, Mississippi, to live on his wife’s father’s estate (Oldfields) with his family. An extraordinarily productive period followed. Freed from his work at the Pottery, he had time to draw, paint and make block prints; to illustrate some of his favorite books; to experiment with theories of dynamic symmetry and with the drawing methods of the Mexican artist and educator Adolfo Best Maugard; and to translate from Spanish part of Jose Pijoan’s history of art (probably without realizing that the work had already been translated into English).
Horn Island
The Oldfields period came to an end in 1945 when he left his family and moved back to a cottage at Shearwater. From then until his death in 1965 he lived a reclusive life, working as a decorator at the Pottery and making frequent excursions in a rowboat sometimes rigged with a sail, from Ocean Springs to Horn Island, Mississippi, where he lived in primitive conditions and portrayed the life around him – birds, sea creatures, animals, trees, landscapes – in radiant watercolors and in a series of logbooks.
He also ventured abroad to Costa Rica and China, and made numerous bicycle trips, on some of which he traveled for thousands of miles. “The wheels are turning again”, he once wrote. “A bicycle seems to leave no room for other evils, or goods for that matter. It is an inclusive and exclusive wheel.”
One of his greatest works from this period is a series of murals in the Ocean Springs Community House. Along one wall, he painted the landing in Ocean Springs of the 17th-century French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville. Along the opposite wall he painted what he called the “Seven Climates”, in the sense of “a belt of the earth’s surface contained between two given parallels of latitude.”
The Gulf Coast – Ocean Springs in particular – is seen as a microcosm of these climates, each of which Anderson associates with a corresponding celestial body and with a season of the year: Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon, beginning with Mercury and ending with Uranus. Anderson must also have been aware of the doctrine that the seven planetary spheres, with their different tones, produce a celestial music.
Around the same time, Anderson painted murals along the wooden walls of a padlocked room in his cottage at Shearwater. These murals, now called the Shearwater Cottage Murals, were discovered after his death and are inspired by Psalm 104. They are a radiant hymn to light and to the beauty of one day on the Coast, beginning on the east wall with sunrise and continuing around the room through noon, sunset and night. Both murals may be seen at the ‘Walter Anderson Museum of Art.
Erstwhile Mississippi high schooler Jeff Durst offered this perspective:
Walter Anderson’s most famous and most controversial work is, without a doubt, his little room in the cabin. Many people have many different opinions as to what it represents and why it was painted. There is even more speculation over what the woman figure on the chimney is, or whether or not he finished it. Walter Anderson’s family believes that the woman is the Mississippi river, and the mural a tribute to God.
Others think that the entire mural is a depiction of Psalms 104, and the female figure is an angel. Still others think he painted the mural for nature, and all the wonders it had provided him. He could also have painted the mural to create a world that he could live in, a place where he could be accepted and allowed to simply be. Although we’ll never know why he painted it, his mural will always be his greatest work.
https://www.mswritersandmusicians.com/mississippi-writers/agnes-grinstead-anderson
When the Brooklyn Museum invited Anderson to an exhibition of his linoleum block prints in 1948, he chose instead to travel to China, where he hoped to gaze upon unknown landscapes and examine Tibetan murals (the China trip ended, deep inland, when his passport and other belongings were stolen and Anderson returned, partly on foot, to his point of departure in Hong Kong.)
Walter Anderson as a writer
Among Anderson’s most vivid writings are logbooks recording his travels by bicycle to New York City (1942); New Orleans (1943); Texas (1945); China (1949); Costa Rica (1951); and Florida (1960); an account of his life among the pelican colonies of North Key, in the Chandeleurs; and about 90 journals of his trips to Horn Island, off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in which he combines close observation of the natural world with reflection on art and nature. Another noteworthy log describes a walking tour to a colony of sand- hill cranes north of Gautier, Mississippi, in January 1944.
After hurricane Katrina
Anderson’s work (his family’s collection) was partially destroyed when Hurricane Katrina struck Ocean Springs in 2005, and the storm surge penetrated the small cinderblock building that had been built after Hurricane Camille to house safely those of his works owned by his family. There was extensive water damage to the watercolors, drawings, manuscripts, and other objects that were kept there, and much of this work, from the Anderson Family collection, was dried and removed to Mississippi State University. Some has been restored by conservator Margaret Moreland.
Bibliography
Major works by and about Anderson are listed below. Most have been published by the University Press of Mississippi.
- One World, Two Artists: John Alexander and Walter Anderson, Essays by Annalyn Swan, Bradley Sumrall, and Jimmy Buffett, New Orleans: Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 2011, distributed by University of Mississippi Press
- Walter Anderson. A Symphony of Animals, Introduction by Mary Anderson Pickard, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996
- Agnes Grinstead Anderson. Approaching the Magic Hour. Memories of Walter Anderson Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1989
- Walter Anderson. Birds. Introductory essay by Mary Anderson Pickard. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990
- The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson. Edited by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. Rev. ed., Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985
- Walter Anderson’s Illustrations of Epic and Voyage. Edited and with an introduction by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simmons, 1980
- Redding S. Sugg, Jr. A Painter’s Psalm. The Mural from Walter Anderson’s Cottage. Rev. ed. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1992
- Walter Anderson: Realizations of the Islander. Selections of Paintings and Essay by John Paul Driscoll. The Walter Anderson Estate, 1985
- The Voluptuous Return. Still Life by Walter Inglis Anderson. Foreword by Patti Carr Black. Ocean Springs: Family of Walter Anderson, 1999
- Lisa Graley, ed. Interdisciplinary Humanities: Special Issue 2004-2005: Walter Inglis Anderson. National Association of Humanities Education. Vol. 21.1 2004
- Anne R. King. Walls of Light. The Murals of Walter Anderson. Jackson: University Press
- Christopher Maurer, Fortune’s Favorite Child. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003
- Norma Tilden, “Walter Anderson, Zographos,” Yale Review, April 2005 (No. 2).
- Dod Stewart, Shearwater Pottery, privately printed, 2005.
- Documentary film, 2005: Win Riley and David Wolf, Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist (with the participation of the Anderson family and critics Christopher Maurer, Paul Richards, and Patti Carr Black.)[1]
- Mary Anderson Pickard and Patricia Pinson, editors, “Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson.” Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
- Patti Carr Black. American Masters of the Mississippi Gulf Coast : George Ohr, Dusti Bongé, Walter Anderson, Richmond Barthe. Jackson, Miss.: Mississippi Arts Commission; Starkville, Miss.: Department of Art, Mississippi State University, 2009.
Some of Anderson’s best watercolors, oils, drawings, and decorated pottery may be seen at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art; the Memphis Brooks Museum; the Mississippi Museum of Art (Jackson); and the Lauren Rodgers Museum of Art (Laurel). In 2003, his work was featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, titled “Everything I See is New and Strange.”
- Official web site*Christopher Maurer / Maria Estrella Iglesias Research Collection on Walter Anderson and Shearwater Pottery at University of Mississippi
- National Public Radio: The Art of Walter Anderson
- National Public Radio: A Family of Artists Picks Up the Pieces
- National Public Radio: A Painter’s Hurricanes by Christopher Maurer
- Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist Documentary Film. Mississippi
- Walter Anderson: Extraordinary Life and Art of the Islander. Mississippi Public Broadcasting.11/04/21.
https://www.walterandersonmuseum.org/
A Review of Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson
by Jeff Durst (SHS)
Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson by Agnes Grinstead Anderson is not so much a biography of Walter Anderson as it is a look at what life with him was like. It is an interesting book which provides insight into the atypical life and times of Walter Anderson. From their days of courtship to the time he spent institutionalized, Approaching the Magic Hour allows us to look into the mind of one of the most complicated men in the twentieth century.
Approaching the Magic Hour begins in the summer of 1929 when Agnes first met Walter Anderson. Agnes knew that Bob, which is what everyone called Walter, was unique. A year later Walter’s brother Peter and Agnes’s sister Pat were married. Walter and Agnes followed suit in 1933. The book then follows their wonderful and often rocky relationship until his death in 1965.
The reader is allowed to see what life with Walter Anderson was like, what kind of father he was, and how he dealt with the world around him. It helps explain why he had to paint and why he felt it necessary to leave his family.
Approaching the Magic Hour is an excellent book, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
It can only begin to explain Walter Anderson, but it certainly does a good job trying.
If I may… Jeff Durst just killed it with that last sentence. Good work, young man.
Shout out to his teachers!
