Pickens Museum presents Thomas Calloway Lea III: Southwestern Landscapes

The Art of Tom Lea. Tom Lea attended the Art Institute of Chicago. After art school, he apprenticed and assisted John W. Norton, a Chicago muralist, from 1927 to 1932. In 1930 Norton, his mentor, suggested that Lea and his wife take a tour of Europe to study the great art masters of the past. During this trip and while visiting Paris, he got to see a Eugene Delacroix exhibit at the Louvre. After seeing the work of Delacroix, Lea declared that he was his favorite artist and you can see his influence in Lea’s future artwork.

The Art of Tom Lea. Tom Lea returned to the art studio, painting southwestern subjects and scenes from his travels to Mexico and other lands. He kept a list of friends who requested his work and called them when a new one, with a subject of particular interest to them, was complete. Tom Lea never had a representative until 1993 when he asked Adair Margo if she might help him with his work.

Pickens Museum presents Thomas Calloway Lea III: Southwestern Landscapes

To be displayed at City Central, 400 E. Central Ave., Ponca City, OK 74601

Please join the Pickens Museum and PCDA for a night of art and socializing as we enjoy and celebrate the career of Tom Lea by viewing the prints of his Southwestern landscapes from his abundant art career. Hugh Pickens has signed a contract with PCDA to showcase, for a limited time, his vast art collection in a rotating exhibit to be seen at the City Central Building on the main floor. This presentation of Lea’s works is the first of many exhibits on loan from the Pickens Museum that will be available for viewing each month going on through the 2020 calendar year.

Thomas Calloway Lea III was an American artist born July 11, 1907 in El Paso, TX. El Paso was his home most of his life and is the resting place for Lea after passing away there on January 29, 2001. A large portion of his art and writing dealt with his World War II experience and his love of the Southwest’s many, vibrant and ever-changing landscapes. Lea was an illustrator, muralist, war correspondent, novelist and historian.

Tom Lea attended the Art Institute of Chicago. After art school, he apprenticed and assisted John W. Norton, a Chicago muralist, from 1927 to 1932. In 1930 Norton, his mentor, suggested that Lea and his wife take a tour of Europe to study the great art masters of the past. During this trip and while visiting Paris, he got to see a Eugene Delacroix exhibit at the Louvre. After seeing the work of Delacroix, Lea declared that he was his favorite artist and you can see his influence in Lea’s future artwork.

After their four-month tour of Europe, the Lea’s returned to the United States and settled in Santa Fe, NM to be near other artists, while living in the region that the they loved so much. After a short time in Santa Fe, Mrs. Lea suffered from a medical issue that required them to return to El Paso. There is where Tom Lea found work from the Federal Art Project (FAP) for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that hired artists during the Great Depression. Through FAP, he won the United States Department of the Treasury competition for a mural commission in the U.S. Post Office Department Building (now the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building) in Washington, D.C. This mural, The Nesters, started his own career as a muralist which include murals in the post offices in Odessa, TX (Stampede), Pleasant Hill, MO (Back Home, April 1865) and Seymour, TX (Comanches). After the deaths of his wife, grandmother and mother (all in 1936); he started doing illustration work in 1937. This led to a partnership with author J. Frank Dobie, a close friend of his father. Dobie wrote about life of settling the rough Texas frontier and Lea’s illustrations were mostly of cowboys and landscapes. That same year he started his lifelong partnership with Carl Hertzog, a book designer and typographer that resided in El Paso also.

In 1941, he decided to paint for LIFE magazine as a World War II artist and correspondent which lasted until 1945. While traveling with the United States military, he traveled all over the world. When asked about his experiences during this war time, he was quoted as saying, “My work there consisted of trying to keep from getting killed and trying to memorize what I saw and felt.” His vivid and realistic images of what he saw would impact him and the readers of LIFE. His time in the western Pacific would really make a name for himself as an illustrator and writer. The Price and That 2,000 Yard Stare would become his most famous works.

His correspondent work for Life magazine lead him into career as a novelist that lasted until 1964. After telling his publisher that he was no longer interested in writing novels; it was suggested that he write about his artwork, his creative process and influences. Lea completed the book, A Picture Gallery, in 1968 which became more of an autobiography. Through creating this book, it inspired him to focus on painting once again. He then put down pen and picked up a paintbrush once again. He would continue painting until his death in 2001 at the age of 93.

Tom Lea Biography

Growing Up

Thomas Calloway Lea III was born in El Paso, Texas, on July 11, 1907, at 4:44 in the morning, at Hotel Dieu Hospital. A day and time, his father said, would ensure he would be “lucky as hell at craps.” His father was Tom Lea Jr., a frontier lawyer, and his mother was Zola Utt Lea. His childhood memories included the sounds of the horses from the fire station trotting down Rio Grande Street and the excitement of being awakened by a tipica band playing in front of their home on Nevada Street after his father was elected mayor.

He also recalled the details of being escorted by policemen to Lamar Elementary School with his brother Joe after Pancho Villa put a price on his father’s head and threatened to kidnap the Lea boys. Young Tom attended public schools in El Paso from 1912-1924. Through his art teacher, Gertrude Evans, he learned about the Art Institute of Chicago and the noted muralist John Warner Norton, who taught there. Lea attended the Art Institute from 1924-1926, studied briefly under Norton and became his apprentice. He quietly and independently set about building his own standards, taking from his academic training whatever seemed useful to him as a craftsman.

Early Career as a Muralist

From 1926 to 1933, Lea worked as a mural painter and commercial artist in Chicago. He perfected his skills and was grateful for anything that came along – lettering for a five and dime store: Talcum Powder 59 cents, or drawing weekly portraits for the speakers scheduled at the Jewish Relief Fund. He said that every job that came along gave him the opportunity to perfect his craft.

While in Chicago he married fellow art student Nancy Jane Taylor and he earned enough money to travel third class to Europe in 1930, seeing the works of masters such as Eugene Delacroix in Paris, and Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli in Italy. Upon returning from Europe, he continued to work for Norton, leaving in 1933 for New Mexico, the place he loved visiting as a boy.

And I knew exactly where I wanted to go, but we came back to El Paso first and I bought a 1926 Dodge sedan for seventy-five dollars. One of the back windows of this sedan got broken and never was replaced. That was a two-day journey to Santa Fe in that old Dodge, and I saw my friend Fremont Ellis up there and he didn’t live on Camino del Monte Sol anymore. He lived out about eleven miles south of town in this place that he had bought, called the Rancho San Sebastian… He let me have four acres… and I had enough money to build this one-room adobe house.

In Santa Fe, Tom Lea worked for the Laboratory of Anthropology, did illustrations for New Mexico Magazine, and worked briefly for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After Nancy Lea suffered a botched appendectomy, the young couple returned to El Paso where she died in 1936.

Back to Home In Texas

While working and living in El Paso, Tom Lea completed murals for the Texas Centennial celebration and for the Branigan Library in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He competed for government projects under the U.S. Treasury Department, Section of Fine Arts and won competitions to create murals across the United States including the Benjamin Franklin Post Office, Washington, D.C.; Federal Courthouse, El Paso, Texas; Burlington Railroad Station, Lacrosse, Wisconsin; Post Office, Pleasant Hill, Missouri; Post Office, Odessa, Texas; and Post Office, Seymour, Texas. In 1938 he met and married Sarah Dighton, who became his lifelong partner. Sarah was from Monticello, Illinois, and had a seven-year-old son, Jim, whom Tom adopted as his beloved son. He met the typographer and book designer Carl Hertzog, as well as the noted Texas writer J. Frank Dobie. These friendships led to numerous collaborations. Lea illustrated Dobie’s books Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver and The Longhorns. In 1940 Tom Lea applied for and won a Rosenwald Fellowship, but declined it after receiving an invitation from LIFE magazine to become an accredited war artist and correspondent.

War Artist correspondent for LIFE magazine in World War II

From 1941 to 1946, Tom Lea was a War Artist correspondent for LIFE magazine, traveling over 100,000 miles to theaters of war where American forces were involved, including the North Atlantic, the South Pacific aboard the USS Hornet … a trip to China where he met Theodore H. White, and the landing of the Seventh Marines on Peleliu. The next four years were a huge break from work in my cherished corner of homeland.

I became, for deeply felt reasons, an eye-witness reporter, in drawings and paintings, of men and their machines waging a war worldwide. I want to make it clear that I did not report hearsay; I did not imagine, or fake, or improvise; I did not cuddle up with personal emotion, moral notion, or political opinion about War with a capital-W. I reported in pictures what I saw with my own two eyes, wide open.

Doing it that way I traveled more than a hundred thousand miles outside the United States, north and south of the Equator, east and west of the International Date Line, in lights and shadows as shaky as the Aurora weaving mysteries over the empty Ice Cap of Greenland, or a shine of parachute flare bringing night-time flash of gunfire from black jungle on a coral island.

In those years, 1941-1945, I saw, and I drew, and I painted, many kinds of things, many men, in many situations, in many places.

To this day, you see a man here who is proud- exceedingly proud – that he went out and saw it, and came back home bringing a legible, trustworthy record of what he saw. And to this day, you see a man here who is grateful- humbly grateful – that he got home with his hide intact.

I had a snapshot of Sarah which I carried in my wallet during the whole war. It was a good picture of her, taken in the sunlight in our back yard on Raynolds Boulevard. I looked at it, homesick, all over the world. When the war was over, the first painting I began was a full-length life size portrait of Sarah in the same dress, the same pose, the same light as the little snapshot.

It was a painter’s votive offering made in the gladness of being home. I worked a long time making a preliminary drawing in charcoal and chalk, designing the glow of light and the placement of the figure against a clearness of blue sky, the mountains like Mount Franklin, the leafy trees and green grass in summer sunlight, before I transferred the drawing to the canvas. It was a detailed and precisely measured drawing. For instance, Sarah’s height of five feet six inches in high heels was drawn on the canvas exactly five feet six.

The painting was done with devotion and without haste, first the back-ground, then the figure, and finally the head. I remember that I worked twenty-six days painting the pattern of all the little flowers on the dress. The canvas would stand in the studio untouched during intervals when other work made immediate demands, but I went back to the portrait each time with an interest that grew rather than diminished.

Though I used oils, it was something like painting a fresco: the design was firmly established beforehand, the painting itself was executed area by area within predetermined contours. Two years after I began work on it, longer than any other painting ever took me, I signed it, framed it, and gave it to Sarah. I see it every day in our living room, and I see Sarah... ‘Sarah in the Summertime’ means more to me than I could ever put on canvas.

Author

After World War II, Tom Lea taught himself to write. His first novel was The Brave Bulls, which he illustrated using brush and ink in a controlled, stylized way. It became a bestseller and was turned into a motion picture. His next book was The Wonderful Country, a story set in a fictitious town called Puerto – based on the city of El Paso. He illustrated it with pen-and-ink drawings that were very different than those for The Brave Bulls. Tom Lea never strove to develop an identifiable style, but preferred using the style his subject demanded. The Wonderful Country also became a bestseller and was adapted for the big screen.

In addition to works of fiction, Tom wrote and illustrated the two-volume history of The King Ranch. When he was hired, he and Bob Kleberg thought it would take about a year to complete the project and they agreed to this. The result was to be a single volume to commemorate the ranch’s centennial anniversary, but the more Tom learned, the more the project grew. It was an epic story, grew to two volumes, and was released four years after the King Ranch Centennial.

Other books include The Hands of Cantu about the training of Spanish horses on the North American continent, and In the Crucible of the Sun about King Ranch operations in Australia.

Studio Painter

After achieving success in the literary world, Tom Lea returned to the art studio, painting southwestern subjects and scenes from his travels to Mexico and other lands. He kept a list of friends who requested his work and called them when a new one, with a subject of particular interest to them, was complete. Tom Lea never had a representative until 1993 when he asked Adair Margo if she might help him with his work.

In a broad sense I conceive of all representational painting, every line and tone and hue of it, as portraiture. To portray a tree or a stone or a lizard, a storm cloud or a horse, a river or a rainbow, is to engage in a kind of portraiture. Each requires its own study. Each demands its own probity of for . . .

Good or bad, I became a most independent practitioner of the limner’s trade, and by a notably easy method I have maintained that independence to this day. When the occasional portrait commission is offered to me, I decline it. I reserve portraiture for my own pleasure. I select my subjects, they don’t select me…

What I’ve tried to do as a painter is to express, when it comes down to it, the great privilege of living in such a majestic and mysterious world made by the Almighty. We have the privilege of living in this life in this marvelous place. And writing and painting to me don’t have anything to do with who I am and what I do, but with what is so wonderful about what’s out there. Having love in your life, having energy enough to pursue a thing with all your might and all your spirit. You’re not telling anyone about how good you are, but about how good they are because look at what they can see and do and feel in this marvelous life.

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Osage Warrior in the Enemy Camp

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Gallery

Osage Warrior in the Enemy Camp by Sculptor John Free.
Osage Warrior in the Enemy Camp by Sculptor John Free.
Three Faces of the Pioneer Woman by Artist Daniel Pickens at our Ponca City location.
War Club" by Osage Artist Yatika Starr Fields
Three Faces of the Pioneer Woman by Artist Daniel Pickens. located in City Centra in Ponca City.
Pickens Doctor Pickens Museum of Turquoise Jewelry and Art.
Native American Artist Yatika Starr Fields Completes Mural for Pickens Museum.
The World's Largest Naja. Future location of Pickens Museum on Route 60 and "U" Street West of Ponca City
Architectural Renderings of Pickens Museum.
Future location of Pickens Museum west of Ponca City
Display of Turquoise Jewelry.
Drum player by Allan Houser. This stone carving is part of the collection at Pickens Museum.
"Red Man" by Native American Artist Fritz Scholder. Pickens Museum Director Hugh Pickens on right.
Osage Warrior in the Enemy Camp.
Native American Jewelry Artist Tonya Rafael with a silver frame she created to honor Dr. S.J. Pickens.
Native American Artist Jolene Bird with her Fender Stratocaster guitar
American Indian by Paul Manship This piece at Pickens Museum is the only known existing copy of this sculpture.
Painting by Peruvian Artist Josue Sanchez. Photo Credit: Hugh Pickens Pickens Museum
Dancer in Red by Clyde Otipoby.
Dancer in Gold by Clyde Otipoby.

Pickens Museum presents Thomas Calloway Lea III: Southwestern Landscapes

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