Tom Lea; Artist of Frontier Life, War Also Wrote 2 Novels

“My father and Pancho Villa were personal enemies.”

--Tom Lea

*

Indeed, they were. Tom Lea could recall the wild days on the Texas border when he had to be escorted to school by police because Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had threatened to kidnap him.

It was the sort of story with historic underpinnings that one expected from Lea, an artist known primarily for his murals and paintings of the American Southwest.

But Lea also was an accomplished war artist, novelist and illustrator. His books “The Brave Bulls” and “The Wonderful Country” sold briskly in the early 1950s, and each was made into a successful movie.

Last year, Lea’s name came to public attention again when President Bush drew from the artist-author’s writings in his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.

Lea died Jan. 29 in El Paso at the age of 93 of injuries sustained in a fall.

Born and raised in El Paso, Lea had vivid boyhood recollections of the revolution on the other side of the border and the level of uncertainty it brought to the U.S. side.

Lea also remembered the time that Spanish-language fliers turned up around El Paso offering 1,000 gold pesos for the capture of his father, then the mayor of the city. The bounty offer came from Villa, who was none too pleased when the senior Lea arrested his wife on gunrunning charges.

Along with the bounty offer was the threat to kidnap Lea and his younger brother, Joe.

As a child, Lea was drawn to drawing. After high school, he joined the exodus north, landing in Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute. There, noted muralist John Warner Norton helped him develop a sense of historic sweep.

After a brief stint studying art in Italy, Lea received commissions for murals in several public buildings, including the Benjamin Franklin Post Office in Washington, D.C. His murals depict vast landscapes and reflect the struggles of frontier life.

In the late 1930s, Lea was a commercial artist when he got a commission to illustrate a book by the Texas author J. Frank Dobie. That book, “Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver,” was followed by another, “The Longhorns.”

When World War II broke out, an executive of Life magazine who had seen the Dobie books invited Lea to join the publication as a war artist. Lea readily accepted.

Lea traveled more than 100,000 miles covering the war theaters in Europe and the Pacific. He drew beach landings and naval combat and recorded the everyday activities of men and women in the service.

The process was often quite laborious. He made rough sketches on site, often under fire, refined them into polished drawings and then paintings, which Life published.

One drawing, “The Price,” showed a member of the U.S. First Marine Division on Peleliu, in the final moments of life with blood streaming down the left side of his face and covering his left arm. Another drawing, “Thousand Yard Stare,” showed the hollow-eyed face of a young soldier as a stunning reminder of the psychological costs of warfare.

Lea also turned to writing during this time, offering wonderfully descriptive first-person accounts of the combat he witnessed.

“I learned sharp grunt prose from the sharp grunt events of Peleliu,” he later commented.

After the War, He Wrote Novels

After the war, Lea wrote “The Brave Bulls,” which was widely acclaimed as a manual on the art of bullfighting. Serialized in Atlantic Monthly, the book has gone through about 30 printings. It was made into a movie starring Mel Ferrer.

“The Wonderful Country,” Lea’s second novel, sold more than a million copies and was made into a film starring Robert Mitchum. Both books were illustrated by Lea.

But as the years passed, Lea focused again on his art.

“I wanted to paint more. Writing is kind of a burden to me, which painting is not. I sweat and stew and fight paintings, but I am not overwhelmed, something like I was in writing. . . . I taught myself to write by reading, reading good stuff. And I have the feeling that my painting is by no means a new contribution to the long train of the history of art or anything. It’s a man born in West Texas who’s looking at the world as he sees it, with the means he has at hand.”

Lea’s work is displayed in several museums, including the Smithsonian Institution. A gallery at the El Paso Museum of Art bears his name.

One of his admirers was Bush, who knew the artist and drew from Lea’s autobiography, “A Picture Gallery,” in his acceptance speech.

Lea wrote of living with a sense that place had an impact on his life, of living “on the east side of the mountain.”

“It’s the sunrise side, not the sunset side,” Lea wrote. “It’s the side to see the day that is coming, not to see the day that is gone.”

In his address, Bush said that “Americans live on the sunrise side of the mountain. The night is passing, and we’re ready for a new day to come.”

Lea is survived by his wife, Sarah Dighton Lea; a son, Jim; and a granddaughter.