Mississippi's Genius Walter Anderson

Walter Anderson self portrait

Any discussion about Mississippi’s great visual artists must include the late Walter Anderson. But that wasn’t always the case. A painter, writer, poet, and naturalist, Anderson’s art and ideas were before his time. But as MPB arts reporter Ron Brown tells us, the rest of the world is catching up.

Walter Anderson was born in New Orleans in 1903 but lived most of his life on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, where he died in 1965. During his lifetime he created thousands of paintings, sculptures, pottery and illustrations. He also wrote eloquent poetry, stories and journal observations about life in general.

If there was a renaissance man of his generation, noted Mississippi art historian Patti Carr Black says Walter Anderson was one.

“His brilliance, his self examinations, his apprehension of the world, his belief system, about the inter-connectiveness of the world, he was an unusual thinker.”

He may have thought deeply about most things in the world, but Anderson’s recurrent theme choice for art was the nature he saw on the Gulf Coast.

“He used that as his subject matter more than anything and it has become just an incredible richness to look at as a Mississippian. Because we see those birds in a certain way, and then he sees them in a completely elevated and expansive way. And so it helps you to see things in a new light.”

While Mississippi art lovers embrace Anderson with understandable pride, Carr says he should not be thought of as a Mississippi artist, or even a regional figure. Carr says Anderson’s talent far exceeded those limitations.

“I think he was one of the top American watercolorists of his period and also in the whole sweep of American art. I think he is quite extraordinary. But for Mississippi, particularly he is an absolute chronicle of our natural world.”

Native Mississippian and renowned artist William Dunlap, agrees.

“He had his own voice. And he was the first artist that I really saw enough of his work to realize that this was a voice that he had developed on his own, and for me it seemed to be coming from centuries past.”

Dunlap, an established artist now living in Virginia, often returns to Mississippi and he says he always returns to the work of Walter Anderson.

“I am still just fascinated by it. I just saw the exhibition up at the library at the university of Mississippi and saw some things that I hadn’t seen before and the extraordinary way that he took nature and he reduced it to four or five or six different symbols and he could apply them everywhere, it was truly a language and to find out that he was the most probably the most literate and well read artist of his generation doesn’t surprise me at all.”

The near universal acclaim and respect for Anderson’s work as an artist was not always apparent. In fact, Anderson’s youngest son John says during his lifetime, Walter Anderson wasn’t just taken for granted as an artist, he was considered an outsider.

“He was not revered at all when I was growing up. He was considered to be a fool. He was pursuing something that was abnormal. And people are not fond of abnormality. In one of her short stories, Eudora Welty wrote, ‘a man who gives everything embarrasses us.’ And when I first read that sentence I thought she was referring to my father because he was a great embarrassment to us.”

In his later years, Anderson spent much of his time alone in his cottage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or out on his storied trips to Horn Island. And much of what Anderson found there while alone, he converted to art: stunning watercolors, books, poems, and drawings.

“He’s remained so popular because his essential perspective was so valid. He was so much in harmony with nature. That his perspective and the things that he did that flowed from that perspective had this incredible validity and that validity will continue through the years because it was an honest thing it was not artificial in any way. Something that universal doesn’t change.”

What seemed odd about Anderson to people at the time, has now been recognized as genius. No longer a solitary figure, the world now not only knows about Walter Anderson, but embraces him and his creative vision.

William Dunlap: “I think he’s one of America’s greatest artists of his generation! I mean, I’d put him up there. He’s certainly our greatest visionary. Walter Anderson, our greatest visionary artist.”

The works of Walter Anderson are on display at the Walter Anderson museum in Ocean Springs.
For MPB News, I’m Ron Brown.