Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson

Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson by Pickard, Mary Anderson. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781934110256.

Walter Anderson (1903–1965), an artist known for his vibrant watercolors, murals, pottery, and sculpture, also carved more than 300 linocuts. Among these were the first monumental block prints in American art. When Picasso produced his first large prints in 1952, Andersons six-foot fairy tale linocuts were already hanging in museums in Memphis and New York. Between 1933 and 1950, when American printmakers were restricted by the size of paper and competition rules, Anderson was carving blocks ranging in size from 6" x 4" to 6 x 4. Gulf Coast flora and fauna, and myths, fairy tales, and legends inspired the images which he offered as affordable art to an uninterested public. Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson features full-color and black-and-white reproductions of over 250 of the artists prints. Timeless, dynamic syntheses of natural form or folklore, they have earned recognition in the United States and abroad. The volume includes essays by Mary Anderson Pickard, the artists elder daughter, and by Patricia Pinson, curator of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, with a chronology by Christopher Maurer, author of Fortunes Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson, published by University Press of Mississippi.