Title: Profile: Life and career of artist Walter Iglis Anderson on the 100th anniversary of his birth Source: Weekend Edition Sunday. (Sept. 28, 2003) Full Text: LIANE HANSEN, host: One hundred years ago tomorrow American painter, muralist, sculptor and iconoclast Walter Inglis Anderson was born. His name might not leap to mind as readily as Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper or other 20th century artists, but to those who have seen his vivid watercolors or epic murals, Walter Anderson's work is unforgettable. Anderson's creations can now be seen by a wide audience. The Smithsonian Institution has just opened a major exhibition of his art, some 160 pieces, the largest showing ever undertaken outside of his hometown of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Linda Crocker Simmons, Corcoran Museum curator emeritus, is guest curator of the Walter Anderson Centennial Exhibition at the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building. She says that Anderson's watercolors of flora and fauna might bring to mind the work of naturalist James Audubon, but the similarity stops there. Ms. LINDA CROCKER SIMMONS (Curator Emeritus, Corcoran Museum): He's not simply an illustrator. You would not use his images of frogs to give you biological information about what a bullfrog is like. He gives you his understanding of the relationship of that frog to the cosmos. He really is concerned more than with the replication of every wart on that frog, the frogginess of it, if you want to put it that way. HANSEN: Blue crabs radiate an iridescent sheen, hummingbirds face off needling beak to beak, menacing fish peer out of a bayou, impossibly green frogs ascend a curtain of bullrushes. Walter Anderson took 8- by-10 pieces of plain typewriter paper and brought them to life with pen and brush. Walter Inglis Anderson was born in New Orleans on September 29th, 1903. His mother was an artist and she groomed her sons--Peter, Walter and Mack--to be artists, as well. Peter, the oldest, became a master potter, and the family business, Shearwater Pottery, was established in Ocean Springs in 1928. It's still in business today. Walter was trained at New York's Parsons Institute of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. But the pressures of the family business and the lean times of the 1930s were hard on Walter. He became reclusive, often stealing away on his bicycle into the wilderness, eventually traveling to more faraway places, Texas, Florida, China, South America. In later years, Walter called himself the islander, and spent much of his time exploring the barrier islands off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, especially Horn Island. Christopher Maurer is author of the soon-to-be-published biography "Fortune's Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson." Mr. CHRISTOPHER MAURER (Author, "Fortune's Favorite Child"): In the face of real adversity, poverty, mental illness, relative obscurity, which would have been adversity for someone else, he felt very fortunate. He felt that not only he but that man was fortune's favorite child and the quote comes from a lovely passage in his Horn Island logs. If you live on an island the way he did, the tides bring you their gifts. And he went out one morning and he says in the logs, `A bleak dawn, but the sun has come out. I took a walk and found a much-needed pair of shoes that fit. Fortune's favorite child, indeed. If man refuses to allow himself to be distracted, driven wild, mad, sick, raving, he would often realize that he was fortune's favorite child and not simply an idle ass with an empty saddle begging to be ridden and driven.' I think his life was a long meditation on the relationship of nature and art and man's role in that relationship, and he dreamed always of making the two one. (Soundbite of crowd noise) HANSEN: A bold oil painting of Anderson's beloved Horn Island greets visitors at the entrance to the Smithsonian exhibition. Water, trees, rock and waves are rendered in florescent orange, blue, turquoise. Patricia Pinson is curator of collections and exhibitions at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and co-curator of the Smithsonian show. Ms. PATRICIA PINSON (Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Walter Anderson Museum of Art): Of course, this was his favorite place to be. During the '50s and early '60s, he would go to Horn Island, which is about 14 miles long, and sometimes stay for two or three weeks camping out. HANSEN: And he would observe and write and draw and paint. Out of this period of his life came Walter Anderson's famed watercolors. Pat Pinson describes a purple- and turquoise-tinged painting called "Rowing at Night." Ms. PINSON: He often rowed at night. Sometimes it would take him 24 hours to get over to the island, depending on the weather. It's about 12 miles from the coast. It can be a very treacherous crossing at times. I think it's interesting here he does not put his whole head in the thing, in the painting, so that the emphasis is on the boat and on the rowing and on the night. HANSEN: Was he pretty prolific? Ms. PINSON: Extremely. He did tens of thousands of these watercolors. Sometimes he used them to start a fire when he was cold. So he was not particularly protective of them. HANSEN: In the 1950s, Anderson created a massive work that covers 3,000 square feet of walls in the Ocean Springs Community Center. Biographer Christopher Maurer. Mr. MAURER: He pours into this mural all of the plants and animals that he most loves and he worked for months on that. He wrote, `I'm not sure that anyone appreciated it.' After the mural was completed, someone was running for office in Ocean Springs, and a supporter of that someone came up and said, `Look, I helped get you elected. The first thing you got to do is get some good white paint and paint over that stuff in the Community Center,' and the word she used wasn't `stuff.' And Walter Anderson was not embittered, but really wounded. HANSEN: It sounds like the people of Ocean Springs, though, were not quite sure what they had in their midst. Mr. MAURER: It took them a while to realize that he had given them something as splendid as a Renaissance palace, you know, in this ordinary cinder-block town meeting hall. HANSEN: Anderson also painted a mural for the Ocean Springs High School, depicting Ocean Springs past and present. The thin, stylized Jacometti-like figures of Biloxi Indians and waves cresting in perfect spirals fire the imagination, a reflection of Anderson's strong belief in the role of art and literature for children. On a smaller scale, he wrote children's stories and fairy tales, often with illustrations depicting one of his favorite animals. Ms. PINSON: This is a story about Robinson the cat. There was lots of cats around the Anderson place. He loved cats. And so he created this story for his children about a cat who drank some magic milk and became a very well-known and a very precocious pianist. The real cat that inspired that book was named Anderson. HANSEN: Walter Anderson's daughters, Mary Anderson Pickard and Leif Anderson, recalled the Robinson stories. Unidentified Woman #1: And he was a pitiful little scrawny nothing cat who came--my father found him on the side of the road and brought him home. And the terrible thing about him was that he was incontinent and my mother wanted him outside. But that cat would get in and he would walk on the piano at night, so... Unidentified Woman #2: Oh, the piano. That was the inspiration, perhaps. HANSEN: Life was not easy for Walter Anderson's wife and their children. Walter suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in the late 1930s. He was variously diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia. Biographer Christopher Maurer says the effect on his family was devastating. Mr. MAURER: They were a very, and are a very, brave group of people. They coped with it. They helped him to readjust. They were told by the psychiatrists that what he needed was freedom. (Soundbite of train) HANSEN: This is a portrait we're standing in front of, his wife, "Sissy at Table." Describe her to us, Patricia. Ms. PINSON: She's sitting, leaning on her elbows. She has on a red blouse and she has on a... HANSEN: Agnes Grinstead Anderson, known as Sissy, and her children, gave Walter the freedom and space he needed to create. For the last 15 years of his life, Walter Anderson spent much of his time alone in his cottage or out on his fabled trips to Horn Island while Sissy stayed at home and took a teaching job to support the family. Ms. PINSON: She was the stabilizing force in his life. She allowed him to be a painter throughout his life rather than having him try to conform into that role of husband and breadwinner, which he found very difficult to sustain. But then he needed the space, and so they were willing to give him that space to become the artist that he was. (Soundbite of train) HANSEN: Christopher Maurer, Walter Anderson died in 1965. He was 62 years old. What's his legacy? How will he be remembered? Mr. MAURER: I think he'll be remembered in art historical terms as one of the greatest watercolorists and muralists that we have ever had.