The Human Figure
On January 29, 2001, Tom Lea passed away in El Paso, Texas. During a rich and productive life, he contributed an amazing body of work in both written and visual form. He composed stories, drew illustrations, painted murals, sketched battles, and wrote books of fiction and history. He was proud of being a regionalist, yet ventured around the globe, recording foreign peoples and places.
Despite many accomplishments, Tom Lea referred to himself in humble terms to the end of his life. As a writer, he attributed his skill to reading good literature. As a visual artist, he considered himself a craftsman, trained in drawing and painting.
He claimed no honorific standing, and expressed two fundamental roles of a real artist. The first was to revere the work and learn to respect the tools of an artist, both material (pencil, brush, paint, canvas) and visual (seeing the relational and dimensional quality of forms). The discipline of the first role made the second possible which was a reaching out, attempting to communicate the wonder of being alive.
These deeply held convictions were far from the New York School of the twentieth century. Although Lea was aware of modernism and often worked in abstracted forms, he rejected its inflated claims and never sought identification with its movements. He once stated that he had “never been part of any group of artists or any organization of artists or a roundtable of backscratchers or anything of that kind. All of my work has been done by myself, alone.”1 He also expressed that whatever came from inside him had to be made legible. He saw a complication of modern art in its isolation of thought and need for explanation.
Two anecdotes about his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago are revealing. Lea described a miserable life drawing class: “It was a system invented by the guy there named Mr. Forsberg. He was a big, fat, blond guy. And the nude model…why, you’d make ovals and ovals and finally if you made enough ovals, why, it would kind of make the figure…So I didn’t do that.
I’d draw the figure, you know? I never got a grade at all.” The next class was better: “I would take classes in life drawing from a man there who was the illustrator of all the early Tarzan books. His name was Allan Saint John. He was a pretty dadgum good draftsman and he taught me a lot about how to draw the human figure. We worked in charcoal; each pose lasted a week. And we worked from 6:30 to 9:30 five days a week. And I got a lot from that.”2
After Tom Lea’s death, his wife, Sarah, came across a stack of figure drawings in her husband’s flat files. Wrapped carefully in a large sheet of brown paper, the drawings were perfectly conserved and many had images on both sides of the paper. No figures formed by multiple ovals were found; rather, beautifully delineated male and female nudes filled each page.
With these drawings as a foundation, Adair Margo Gallery began planning the exhibition, Tom Lea and the Human Figure, 1926–1936, including other drawings entrusted to it before Lea’s death.
The exhibition provides a rare glimpse of Tom Lea’s formative years. Beginning with life drawing class at the Art Institute, one can see the artist’s mind at work, focusing on the form and contour of the human figure.
Some drawings reveal Lea’s lifelong captivation by the female form and his fascination with Native Americans. Another communicates his reverence for Italian masters like Signorelli and Michelangelo whose work he saw when visiting Italy in 1933. Fascinated by their skill at rendering contrapposto (an asymmetrical posture in which the vertical axis of the human figure twists slightly in an s-curve), Lea posed for himself in the mirror with hands and sketchpad held overhead, studying the musculature of his own body.
All of these drawings reveal Lea’s discipline in learning to draw well and his regard for the materials. He was acting on his belief that an artist must develop craftsmanship, learning to use pencil and crayon and watercolor, and to perfect an ability to see design and form. He was preparing to enter the second role of the artist, the reaching out in an attempt to communicate.
When asked at the end of his life to identify his masterpiece, Tom Lea pointed without hesitation to a painting that still hangs in the Lea living room, Sarah in the Summertime. He had completed hundreds of paintings, but this was his magnum opus. The painting was done after the War, when Tom Lea returned to the love of Sarah. He explained that it was his votive offering for coming home, a tribute to the solidity of a person and a relationship.
In Tom Lea and the Human Figure, 1926–1936, we’re privileged to witness how Lea engaged in the first role of being a real artist. Without these drawings, and thousands of others now lost, a painting like Sarah in the Summertime would never have been possible.
Adair Margo
November 2001