Tom Lea:
Muralist, illustrator, best-selling novelist, historian, World War II War correspondent, and studio painter. His work reflects the motivating ideas of the twentieth century.
In honor of Tom Lea’s Centennial Celebration, the Adair Margo Gallery is honored to launch the official web site for this remarkable American artist and El Paso’s greatest native son.
The eleventh of July, 2007 marked the 100th anniversary of Tom Lea’s birth and July was declared Tom Lea Month by the City of El Paso. Proclamations honoring the life and work of Tom Lea were read on the floors of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate in Washington, D.C. and President and Mrs. George W. Bush served as Honorary Chairmen of the Tom Lea Centennial Celebration. Twelve organizations in the region of El Paso, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Juarez, Mexico held classes, hosted lectures, mounted exhibits and showed movies adapted from Tom Lea’s bestselling novels, The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country Every occasion focused attention on a part of Tom Lea’s life and work. Bringing so many activities together was an effort to share Tom Lea’s overall achievement with a broader public.
The contributions of Tom Lea’s life are extraordinary and not easily categorized. He worked as a muralist, illustrator, novelist, historian, World War II artist correspondent and studio painter. Tom Lea’s work reflects his life and its breadth was captured by Jim Yardley of the New York Times when he wrote:
The muralist, painter, and author Tom Lea is probably the only person, dead or alive, who can say he has been threatened by Pacho Villa, interrupted by Chiang Kai-shek and regaled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Tom Lea lived most of the twentieth century and knew some of its most noted individuals, many of whom he captured in portraits. Yet he worked alone on the east side of Mount Franklin in El Paso, Texas, remote from colonies, groups and movements in the Art and Literary Worlds.
He moved from painting to writing back to painting, using the art his subjects demanded. To him they were two distinct yet interacting adventures and ways of working, one in pictures and one in words. People would sometimes say to him, “I want to be a painter” or “I want to be a writer” and his response would always be, “Well, what do you want to paint about?” or “What do you want to write about?” Tom Lea believed that an artist must have something deep inside to share with others in order to paint or to write.
Tom Lea knew what he wanted to share and, at the end of his life, he told me that “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.”
When Tom Lea died at age 93 in El Paso, he had not lost the wonder of being alive. We hope that in sharing his paintings and words, we might discover some of that wonder, too.
Adair Margo
