This week brought a double dose of Walter Anderson to Mississippi State. Two of his children, John and Leif Anderson, visited the art department on Monday and Tuesday which coincided with the Walter Anderson exhibit in the art department gallery.
The two-day visit involved a formal reception welcoming the Andersons to the viewing of MSU’s exhibit of their father’s works, as well as a lecture by both Leif and John and a dance/lecture by Leif titled “Dancing With My Father.”
John’s lecture, titled “Walter Anderson: The Art of Loving Life,” focused on his own perspective of growing up the youngest of the Anderson children. He approaches his father as a child and as a doctor of psychology that he is now.
He professes that as a child he didn’t understand his father’s artistic ability-both technical and philosophical.
“I wasn’t a very good child,” he said. “My father wasn’t a normal dad. So we were a little embarrassed of him as kids.”
However, after growing up, John realized the depth to which his father’s artistic eye felt.
“Once as a kid I accidentally looked into his eyes,” he said. “It was infinite. I saw that he knew more about love, tolerance and pain than anybody else knew. Later in life I would see the same thing staring into a sea turtle’s eyes. They seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.”
Now John feels he is still able to visit with his father through his works.
“This is a lucky family, in that we can all still visit with our father through his works,” he said. “He’s not gone. He’s very much still here.”
John also read some of his father’s love letters to his wife, who describes her husband as a bright light shining on everything at once.
In one of these letters Anderson tells his future wife that he wants to dance in the water with her. It is from this passage that Leif gathers the title of her dance/lecture piece “Dancing With My Father.”
Leif has studied ballet most of her life and has participated in many companies and symphonies around New Orleans. She was later inspired by the modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, which led to the formation of Leif’s own style-Airth.
Her dance/lecture integrates spoken word from which she recounts tales of her childhood and reads excerpts from her latest book “Dancing With My Father” with her unique dance.
The event almost didn’t come to fruition after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Anderson family compound.
Luckily, most of the pieces included in the exhibit were brought to Starkville a few weeks before the hurricane, thus being saved.
Mississippi State has played a huge role in salvaging and bearing the Anderson legacy.
“Luckily, the officials at Mississippi State allowed us to send a team down there as quick as possible without getting mired in bureaucracy,” gallery director Bill Andrews said.
It is estimated that 80 percent of Anderson’s works were affected by Katrina.
Yet, as Anderson saw the beauty in everything, there is a positive side to the salvaging.
“To us, [Shearwater] was a whole world complete in of itself,” Lief Anderson said. “With Mississippi State’s help, this has become part of our world now.”
This resilient optimism, inevitably inherited from their father, is evident in all the Anderson children.
John Anderson described it best when he said that “there were some that said my father knew how to love because he was an artist. I like to think he was an artist because he knew how to love.”