The Art of Walter Anderson

In his sixty-two years Walter Anderson was stupendously productive. He created much of his art in obscurity, and only after his death in 1965 did the magnitude of his labors and genius come to light.

His works teem in the thousands and take many forms–watercolors, oil paintings, drawings, block prints, figurines, pottery, and murals. He produced more than ten thousand pen-and-ink illustrations, as well as poems, stories, journals, and letters.

Bringing together more than 175 full-color images, including works never before shown to the public, this catalog places Anderson in the context of his peers in twentieth-century American art and portrays him both as a major artist and a renaissance man.

Born in New Orleans in 1903 and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Anderson spent most of his life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast absorbed by poetry, music, art history, and natural science. A loner, he found his identity in the wilderness of pine savannahs and barrier islands along the coast. It was this natural wild that most imbued his art.

To honor Anderson on his centennial, this representative sampling of his work reveals him as an eccentric genius who explored the profound order of creation and made spiritual excursions into the terra incognita of the mind and inner self.

The contributors to this volume include noted art historians and curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Walter Anderson, and research staff at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. They write in praise and in assessment of Anderson’s art, share insights into his mysteries and techniques, and raise public awareness of his significance.

Patricia Pinson is curator of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.