Tom Lea Peleliu drawing resurfaces

• The shaky Tom Lea drawing will go on display next to the famous painting it inspired.

Her call came the week of Aug. 3, as we were completing the program for Tom Lea Month. A family friend needed an appraisal of her Tom Lea art, since her insurance company requested her policy be updated.

Eager to visit the paintings again, I drove up the west side of Mount Franklin the next day and was moved by what I saw hanging on the walls.

“Dream of a Fair River: Yang-Tze,” a bird’s-eye view of a Chinese hillside along the shores of the Yangtze River, was the first thing I saw.

Tilled fields make patchwork patterns at the base of tall mountains, with the river taking on the gray mistiness of the clouds. Crops, a house, boat and barn for livestock communicate the industry of man in an ancient land, though his presence is small in a vast and wondrous world.

Lea’s admiration for the Sung School of Philosophy – where there was earth, man and sky, with small man giving meaning to the earth and the sky – seemed to be present in Yang-Tze. He painted it in 1946, after returning from covering World War II as an artist correspondent for Life magazine.

A portrait of Dr. Bob Homan – my friend’s father – hung over the fireplace.

Lea chose whose portraits he painted, not accepting commissions but reserving the limner’s trade for his own pleasure – usually of friends he admired most. Stories have been repeated of a warmly dressed Tom Lea on Christmas Eve, knocking on a friend’s front door and thrusting a large framed portrait into his hands once the door was opened, uttering “you don’t have to be rich to own one of my pictures, you just have to be interesting.” He’d then turn to leave, allowing the painting to speak for itself about a man he thought admirable.

In “My Friend Bob,” Homan is as handsome as Cary Grant, his strong head in profile – chiseled like stone. His gaze is determined and fixed, looking at what is to come, unwavering.

After showing me a small ink wash of a calf branding – the forms of man and beast dramatically defined through light and shadow – my friend proclaimed, “I found something I’d almost forgotten my father had!”

After leaving the room, she returned with a leather folder impressed with block letters reading, “Tom Lea The Two Thousand Yard Stare.”

Slowly opening it, the tissue was so thin I gasped when seeing what was underneath.

There, with ink marks as visibly agitated as the day they were put down – and an inscription equally shaky – was a drawing of a man looking out at nothing, with these words written beside him: “Down from Bloody Nose Too Late He’s Finished – Washed Up – Gone.”

Lea’s most famous picture of World War II is called “That Two Thousand Yard Stare,” which epitomized “shell shock” and defines the injury we now call post-traumatic stress. It has been reproduced in numerous articles on the subject.

At the entrance to the Peleliu exhibit at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, an enlarged version introduces the American assault on Peleliu. It was a brutal battle in the Palau Islands which had the highest casualty rate of any amphibious invasion in the Pacific War.

On Sept. 15, 1944, Lea landed with the 7th Marines on the southern end of the island.

As an artist correspondent, he was a civilian who had no obligation to go. The Marines didn’t have a choice, but he did.

Knowing he would be a fake for the rest of his life, Lea decided to land with the 7th Marines, remaining with them for 32 hours under fire with nothing but a k-bar knife. Unable to sketch or write, he spent his effort trying to keep from getting killed and memorizing what he saw and felt.

One horrific scene was a man with his face a “half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick …. The half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I have ever seen.”

That scene became “The Price,” which hung outside the Joint Chiefs of Staff office at the Pentagon, a reminder of the cost of war.

The evening of the second day, he returned to a naval vessel offshore, making drawings and writing his experience before his hand could stop trembling.

About the shattered Marine Lea saw as he passed by sick bay before leaving Peleliu, he wrote, “His mind had crumbled in battle, his jaw hung, and his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head.”

I took a picture of the drawing on the dining table with my phone and sent it to Joe Cavanaugh, director of the National Museum of the Pacific War, telling him about my unlikely find.

For four years we had worked on a Lea exhibit that is part of Tom Lea Month this year. The museum — in Fredericksburg, the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimitz — will exhibit 26 paintings on loan from the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort Belvoir, Va., beginning Oct. 17.

Among the paintings is the famous “That Two Thousand Yard Stare.”

Speechless at first, Cavanaugh blurted, “We’ve got to show it!”

The next day, a loan form was signed and the drawing was on its way to Fredericksburg to be displayed with the painting it inspired, the first time these two pictures have been exhibited side by side.

“Tom Lea, Life and World War II” will be on exhibit at the National Museum of the Pacific War from Oct. 17 until Jan. 16.

With most of Lea’s work inaccessible to the public except for a good collection at the El Paso Museum of Art, this Tom Lea Month provides a rare opportunity of seeing private works at five public museums throughout Texas: The Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin; the Museum of the Big Bend in Alpine; the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg; the El Paso Museum of Art; and the El Paso Museum of History.

Adair Margo is the founder and president of the Tom Lea Institute. She chaired the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities during the two-term presidency of George W. Bush.

In El Paso
Tom Lea Month continues through October in cities across Texas, with talks, exhibits and tours involving the El Paso art and literature icon. Upcoming highlights in El Paso:
• Films, Oct. 11 at the El Paso Public Library: “Tom Lea’s El Paso” with Laura Bush and Adair Margo, 1 p.m.; and “Luciano Cheles on the Tom Lea Trail,” 2:45 p.m.
• “Tom Lea’s Horses,” lecture by Melissa Warak, 6 p.m. Oct. 13 in UTEP’s Rubin Center for the Visual Arts.
• Gallery talk about the exhibit “Tom Lea as Draftsman and Illustrator,” 3 p.m. Oct. 15 at the El Paso Museum of Art’s Tom Lea Gallery.
• “The Story Behind ‘The Turning Point,’ ” presentation by William Stevens, 10 a.m.-noon Oct. 17 in UTEP’s Larry K. Durham Sports Center.
Complete schedule, more information: tomlea.com/local-events.