Tom Lea: West Texas Regionalist
by Susan Pittman
F
or eight years artist
Tom Lea’s Rio Grande
hung in the Oval
Office of President George
W. Bush, lending to that
room’s gravity the spirit of
the Trans Pecos. A near-
monochromatic landscape, it
reveals the rugged and
serene grandeur of the land
Lea loved so well, a region he
would never leave.
Rio Grande (on loan from
the El Paso Museum of Art)
was for President Bush “a
symbol of (Lea’s) hopeful
outlook for each day.” In
numerous speeches, includ-
ing his acceptance speech
for the Republican nomina-
tion, Bush quoted Lea’s
thoughts that he preferred
living on the east side of the
mountain so as to see “the
day that is coming,” for
him, “the best day.” This
thought was echoed at the
dedication ceremony of the
George W. Bush Library in
the former president’s emotional sum-
mation that he will always believe
“our nation’s best days lie ahead.”
And regarding that Library, the Oval
Office replicated therein has a repro-
duction of that landscape as well as
other Western-themed art Bush so
appreciated.
Rio Grande is only one of many
paintings and murals inspired by Lea’s
beloved El Paso region. These desert
landscapes resonate with the space, the
light, the mass, and the life that springs
from rocky soil. The infamous Rock
House and other fires of 2011, consum-
ing the window dressing that had, over
the years, camouflaged large swaths of
land in the Chihuahuan Desert,
exposed its bare bones. Lea’s land-
scapes, painted in earlier times, cele-
brated that starkness. When asked
once what he found so special about
8
when she fell ill and ulti-
mately died from a botched
appendectomy. He had
returned home to stay.
By the time the WPA art
project began in 1935, Tom
Lea had adopted the style
most frequently found in his
public works, American
Scene painting.
A
Regionalist, he saw rural life
as America’s cultural back-
bone and expressed that
belief in the murals he did
for government buildings.
In 1935, he was commis-
sioned by the Texas
Centennial Celebration to
create two murals for the
Hall of State, the shrine to
Texas history to be built at
Fair Park in Dallas. At one
end of the room that is now
the Dealey Library is an
iconic cowboy; at the other,
a Family, with father, moth-
er and son in a wagon head-
Rio Grande, 1954. Oil on canvas, 22¼ X 32. Collection of the El Paso Museum of Art,
ed out from a settlement
El Paso, Texas. Image courtesy of the Tom Lea Institute.
that could have been early
kidnap the two Lea sons, so for six
the “dried up, bare, empty country” he
El Paso. Lea used his brother and sis-
months Tom and Joe went to school
chose to live in, his reply back then res-
ter-in-law as models for the scene.
every day with a police escort.
onates with many of us today: “I love
When the United States became
Tom began art classes in school as
it for the intensity of its sunlight, the
involved in World War II, Lea was
soon as he could – his sophomore year.
clarity of its sky, the hugeness of its
commissioned by Life magazine as a
By his senior year he was taking double
space, its revealed structure of naked
combat artist. From four tours of duty,
classes of art and English at the junior
earth’s primal form without adorn-
his best-known drawings were those of
college level. Also, he was editor-in-
ment.”
the Marine assault on Peleliu. He went
chief and illustrator of the yearbook.
Tom Lea was an El Paso boy, born
ashore 15 minutes after the first wave,
Upon graduation he went to the Art
and raised three miles from the Rio
armed only with the Marine Ka-Bar
Institute of Chicago where he studied
Grande. With the exception of brief
knife he used to sharpen his pencils,
and later apprenticed under muralist
sojourns, he spent his entire life there.
and spent 32 hours under withering
John Norton, a former Rough Rider
He was born in 1907, his father a
fire. More than two-thirds of the divi-
whose western type of instruction
lawyer who became the mayor of the
sion was either killed or wounded.
pleased his father, who wanted to see
city during the Mexican Revolution.
Unable even to sketch anything during
his son study under a man’s man.
Once, when his father and Pancho
the shelling, he returned to the ship and
That he never got over being home-
Villa had words and Tom Sr. threw
“before (his) hand steadied. . . put down
sick for El Paso while in Chicago was a
Villa’s wife and brother in jail on suspi-
the words and pictures of the fight.”
condition that remained with him. He
cion of gun running, the Revolutionary
Public reaction to his paintings in Life
general put out a notice in Mexico
and his first wife Nancy spent a short
was to recoil at the horrific images of
offering $1,000 in gold for the mayor,
time in Santa Fe after they left the Art
war; even today viewers find them
dead or alive. He also threatened to
Institute, but returned to his native city
haunting. For Lea, however, what he
Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2013