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Title: Fortune's Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson by Christopher Maurer ISBN: 1-57806-539-9 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Paul Richard, "The Washington Post," Oct. 25, 2003
Comment: "The makers of great American watercolors -- Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, John Marin, Charles Demuth-- are a select few. Anderson is worthy of inclusion in that company... Here's this Mississippian whose light-struck pictures throb, as do [Van Gogh's], with furious, methodical ecstasy, and are as American as can be. Art poured from Anderson as it does from such unstoppable producers as Red Grooms and Frank Stella. Anderson was a natural."
Rating: 5
Summary: An American Original
Comment: It is the centennial of the birth of one of America's visionary artists, whose fame continues to expand beyond his Mississippi home. Walter Anderson has never before had a full biography, but now University Press of Mississippi has brought out _Fortune's Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson_ by Christopher Maurer. It will be treasured by those who love Anderson's vision shown in his thousands of prints and watercolors, as well as his murals. It is certainly true that Anderson had an uneasy life as detailed here in full, but also an extraordinarily productive one. The biography cannot explain the idiosyncratic genius which inhabits his pictures; nothing can do that. But it does allow us to appreciate the way in which a talented man could triumph over enormous difficulties, not the least of which was a serious mental illness which prevented normal or reliable work habits or relationships with others.
Anderson was born in 1903, in the garden district of New Orleans, one of the big cities he would return to repeatedly, although his sphere of expression was almost always wilderness or rural areas. He was schooled in art in New York and Philadelphia, and during some of the time he was at school, his family set up a fledgling business in Ocean Springs. Shearwater Pottery, set on land acquired by his mother and financed by his father, was a real family endeavor, with his brothers throwing and designing pots, mother decorating them and worrying over aesthetics, and father balancing the books and promoting the business. Once Anderson returned, he took part in the effort, decorating plates and designing figurines. Shearwater was to become a mainstay in his life, and a financial anchor; he never made much money from it, but he didn't need much money for his unconventional way of living, and he was singularly uninterested in profiting from his artwork. He had an unconventional marriage with many separations and general unhappiness. Nonetheless, his wife knew better than others how to appreciate him, even in the beginning: "He isn't just gifted or talented. He really is an artist, a genius," she wrote to one of his psychiatrists. His attacks on others, and upon himself (with cutting and burning), fueled by delusions and paranoia, would land him into one psychiatric ward after another. He took long trips by bicycle all over the country, and even spent time in China to study murals there, always sleeping rough and traveling with no luxuries. His most famous excursions were of course his trips to Horn Island, the eight miles to which he would row with his watercolors and scanty supplies, spending weeks at a time, away from all humans and rejoicing in the neighbor animals he found.
Anderson died of cancer in 1965, during a hospitalization for a lung tumor, a hospitalization he smilingly admitted was the first one of his own volition. Only afterwards did his family start gathering up the huge amount of notes, sketches, and watercolors with which he had been consumed for a lifetime. But even they had no idea what they would find in the padlocked door of a little room that had been added to his cottage at Shearwater Pottery. When they pried open the door, they discovered that all the walls and the ceiling had been crammed with brilliant murals of sunrise, sunset, nighttime, and all the cranes, fish, pelicans, and other creatures that had been subjects of such intense lifetime study. It was just one more instance of his relentless motion to depict and to participate in nature for his own sake, realizing nature through art. The discovery of the room, now part of the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, is the close of this satisfying, moving, and well-illustrated biography.
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Title: The Art of Walter Anderson by Patricia Pinson, Colin Eisler, Susan C. Larsen, Christopher Maurer, Francis V. O'Connor, Mary Anderson Pickard, Ernest Pinson, Linda Crocker Simmons ISBN: 157806600X Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $60.00 |
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Title: Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson by Agnes Grinstead Anderson, Patti Carr Black ISBN: 0878058036 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Walls of Light: The Murals of Walter Anderson by Anne R. King, Walter Inglis Anderson, Walter Anderson Museum of Art, John Lawrence, Stephen E. Ambrose ISBN: 1578061288 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $48.00 |
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Title: The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson by Walter Inglis Anderson, Jr. Redding S. Sugg ISBN: 0878051686 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: July, 1985 List Price(USD): $48.00 |
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Title: A Symphony of Animals by Walter Anderson, Mary Anderson Pickard ISBN: 0878059091 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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