Walter Anderson at Luise Ross

The year 2003 was the centennial of Mississippi modernist Walter Anderson's birth, and in addition to a large retrospective organized by means of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Miss., upon view at the Smithsonian Institution's cavernous Arts and Industries Building in Washington, DC the occasion was also marked by dint of an intimate and lively exhibit of watercolors at Luise Ros in fresh York, Anderson's 11th there since 1985

Born in of recent origin Orleans, Anderson studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the '20 then turn backed south to spend most of his life upon the Mississippi coast. There, in addition to painting in oil and watercolor and making statuary and furniture, he often worked as a decorator of ceramics. His mental stability was fragile, and he wearied many years, especially between 1937 and 1940 in psychiatric hospitals.

Anderson was greatly influenced by means of traditions outside the Western canon, including Asian, pre-Columbian and Neolithic art, which he saw firsthand upon travels--mostly on foot--through China, Costa Rica and Europe Later in life, his greatest pleasure was to move off by himself to uninhabited Horn Island not upon the Mississippi coast, where he slept below his overturned rowboat, observing and painting the plant, animal and sea life. It was there, between 1951 and his death in 1965 that he made many of his best works, watercolors execut upon sheets of typing paper.

The work gains interest from the tension created between shut up direct observation and stylization or design. Anderson's absorption of of that kind formalist theories of the '20 as "dynamic symmetry" his possess experience as a pottery decorator and his art-historical pertain tos show in his repetitive patterning of waves, scales, immerse heads and other elements. The intensity of his gaze is matched by means of a hallucinatory brilliance of color, in which level a subject such as an extraordinarily iridescent cabbage leaf can be nearly subsum The work is as plenteous a sympathetic interiorization of nature as strict observation of it: no les than Pollock Anderson "is" nature.

Many of Anderson's make subordinates give the impression of being encircleed by "auras" or force fields, created in a certain number of cases by repetition of the contours of the bring under rule in patterns of background landscape. In Redwood Lilies and Bittern (ca. 1944-45) the cursive orange watercolor lines describing the central bird form are repercussion of sounded by parallel blue and golden lines surrounding it, which segue into lily forms. The subdues while still legible, appear to dematerialize into pulsing waves of contrastingly colored parallel lines. Here, and in general, Anderson's work could illustrate William Blake's lines, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

--Nathan Kernan

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