Charles Banks Wilson, the famed Arkansas-born artist renowned for his drawings, lithographs and paintings of American Indians, and his illustrations for more than two dozen books, including Treasure Island, died Thursday in Rogers.
His daughter, Carrie Wilson, said he died peacefully in his sleep.
The 94-year-old once said he never thought of himself as an artist.
“I’m a storyteller,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “Every one of these pictures exist because I have a story to tell. When I seethe paintings, what comes to my mind is when I did it and what the circumstances were; it’s almost as though I wasn’t the artist, but the observer.”
His friend, the late painter Thomas Hart Benton, called Wilson America’s finest artist-historian.
Born in Springdale on Aug. 6, 1918, Wilson’s family moved to Miami, Okla., while he was a boy. He spent many years near land where several tribes were relocated, which became an inspiration for his life’s work. He began studies at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936.
“My father hoped he would inspire people and educate them about the past with his historical work,” Carrie Wilson said. “He also hoped people would enjoy his work and enjoy what they are doing in their work. He did art because he enjoyed it and believed people couldn’t be truly successful if they didn’t enjoy their work.”
Charles Banks Wilson painted until the last year of his life, she said.
His work has been included in more than 200 exhibitions, including those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and, perhaps most spectacularly, in the rotunda of the Oklahoma Capitol in Oklahoma City, where a series of murals more than 100 feet in length depict Oklahoma history.
But it is at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum where what is perhaps Wilson’s most important achievement resides - his drawings of pure blood American Indians. “Purebloods” is a word Wilson used to describe Indians of a single tribal ancestry. The collection is an important historical record as vital as the 19th-century paintings of George Caitlin and late 19th-century/early 20th-century photographs of Edward Curtis. Many of Wilson’s pure blood drawings and paintings are in his book, Search for the Native American Purebloods.
“I drew the individual - rather than the anthropology - to save a likeness. The face is a record of a life,” he said in 2003. He drew, he said, “what will never again be visible.”
Anne Morand, curator of art for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and former chief executive officer of the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont., is a published writer and expert on Western art. “[Wilson] follows in the footsteps of people like [American] Thomas Eakins and [Spanish painter] Diego Vasquez, who painted to recognize the character, the inner importance, the strength it took to survive what they have gone through,” she said in 2003.
Movie cowboy Gene Autry once tried to buy the entire collection of pure blood drawings, but Wilson declined. “I told the Indians I would never sell those drawings, that they would go to a museum.”
Wilson was also commissioned by Oklahoma to paint portraits of noted Oklahomans, including actor and humorist Will Rogers, Cherokee chief Sequoyah, U.S. Sen. Robert Kerr, singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie and American Indian athlete Jim Thorpe, to hang in the Capitol. His painting of U.S. House Speaker Carl Albert was the first to hang in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
He also founded the art department at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College, leaving in 1960 to pursue art full time. Wilson received many honors over the six decades of his career and has been the subject of documentaries, including 2006’s Charles Banks Wilson, Portrait of an Artist which aired on AETN.
Wilson was preceded in death by his wife of 47 years, Edna McKibben, and their son, Geoffrey Banks Wilson. Besides his daughter, he is survived by grandsons Mick Wilson of Tulsa, Solomon Jones of Dallas and Ben Woodley in the U.S. Army stationed in Germany. Funeral services will be held at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at First Presbyterian Church in Miami, Okla., under the direction of the Paul Thomas Funeral Home. Burial will be at the GAR Cemetery. A celebration of an Oklahoma Treasure honoring Mr. Wilson is being planned for the Coleman Theatre in Miami. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to local libraries, the Council of the Blind or the American Heart Association.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 05/04/2013