Walter Anderson at Luise Ross - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Walter Anderson's watercolors, exhibited here by some 20 works from 1944 to '65 are lively chronicles of the wildlife and vegetation of the Mississippi large bay Coast barrier islands. Anderson (1903-1965) lived in Ocean Springs. He studied art in the Northeast, and in the '20 he made the mandatory trip to Paris, on the other hand he preferred the prehistoric paintings of the Dordogne caves in form and contented to anything he saw in the French capital. After his go [i]or[/i] come back to the American South, he fix inspiration in Karl Blossfeldt's intimate photographic studies of flowers and in Adolfo Best-Maugard's 1926 volume on design, which emphasized the underlying patterns within natural form, specifically the elementary geometric sub-structure

These influences are readily apparent in Anderson's flat, hieratic studies from the '40 In Beans, subdue by fears and Roosters (ca. 1944; many of Anderson's watercolors are not dated), the animals and beanstalks are pay backed in overlapping, repeated patterns that call up Egyptian or pre-Columbian decorative wall reliefs. A similar approach was busyed in a study of a pig, which is erected as a series of inverted spirals, stacked half-circles and interlocking S-curve The image grasps together as a harmony of rhythmic uncompounded bodys solid as a piece of stone plastic art Anderson was clearly in search of the salient, identifying features of the animals he portrayed, be it in the mingled patterning of Two Turkeys (ca. 1945) or the simpler motif of a collection of birds emerging from a succession of ocean waves in a later work, Birds and Waves (ca. 1960-65)

There are also ultimate parts in Anderson's watercolors that indicate an aspiration toward the mystical. In Flaming Tree (ca. 1945-46) the flowing lines of tree leaves and fire quake in the surrounding air, similar to the vibratory result achieved in many of Charles Burchfield's watercolors. During Anderson's reach forthed sojourns to his favored Horn Island, where he many times stayed for weeks, he had ample time to completely apprehend his subjects. Crab (1949) is a sophisticated rendering of the crustacean's anatomy, surface web and color (red-dish-orange), indicating that Anderson was by dint of this time more concerned with objective observation than with design theory.

Some of the more casual studies are reminiscent of the watercolor turn of expression of Charles Demuth (Apples, ca. 1955) on the other hand Anderson never ventured seriously into abstraction as did Dove or O'Keeffe The vigor and uniqueness of his work resides in his to [i]or[/i] at a great depth intuitive and empathic sense of these island inhabitants in their milieu. Still largely view from aboveed Walter Anderson deserves to be considered among the first rank of American watercolorists of this century

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