William L. Garver, Jr., “El Paso, Texas”, watercolor, 1948, Copyright Estate of Lila & William L. Garver, Jr.
William Lincoln Garver, Jr. (1911-1996) and Lila Rowena Selzer Garver (1908-1996) were American artists of exceptional talent. A prolific cross-disciplinary artist, William developed a sustained body of drawings, prints, paintings, and watercolors. Lila articulated their life together in her prose. They both recorded the American Midwest vernacular with an enthusiasm equal to any of the top artists of their time.
As a high school student in Springfield, Missouri, William studied with Birger Sandzen, a renown Swedish artist who was an instructor at Stephens College in nearby Columbia. Soon afterwards William took art courses at Drury College. In 1929 when he was 18 years old, he pursued his artistic dream of training at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Yet his formal education lasted only one year and was interrupted by the Great Depression, when he transferred to Tulsa to support his family that had relocated, attend the university there, and work with the Works Projects Administration (WPA). He also designed window displays for the Brown-Duncan Department Store. In 1936 he began worked as a production illustrator at Bethlehem Steel Company, and in 1943 he held a similar position with National Supply Company, a supplier of oil production equipment for the Oklahoma-Texas oil industry. By 1961 he was the head industrial design illustrator for Oklahoma Steel Casting.
One of the most productive phases in William’s artistic career began in 1932 when he met Frank von der Lancken (1872-1950), who had arrived in Tulsa in 1926 to teach. Given the depth of his talent, Garver’s prodigious output is the result in part to the combined influence of Frank von der Lancken’s Arts and Crafts ideology and Alexandre Hogue’s (1898-1994) landscape sensibility impacted by the Dust Bowl years. Between 1939 and 1965 Garver took one fine art class per year at the University of Tulsa. He studied primarily with von der Lancken and Hogue. The result is a profound body of work that includes oil paintings, drawings, and prints, such as the lithographic series produced between 1956 to 1964 under Hogue’s tutelage.
Guilia and Frank von der Lancken were close friends of Lila and William, and the families intermingled socially and artistically. The Garver children affectionately called them “Aunt Guilia and Uncle Frank.”
William and Frank enjoyed plein-air painting together at various sites in and around the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. Lila recorded their experiences in her prodigious output of personal letters on a beautiful manual dark red typewriter. The families talked about art, politics, history, literature, and progressive art education ideas with the unification of manual and creative arts, central to Garver’s life experience and von der Lancken’s doctrine of the Arts and Crafts movement in America. When Guilia von der Lancken moved from Oklahoma to New York after Frank’s death, she and Lila continued their friendship through a flourishing correspondence.
Garver displayed his artwork in the 1930’s in Tulsa but was never represented by a gallery. In fact much of his artistic oeuvre remained in his possession until his death in 1996, with the exception of the exquisite art cards he regularly sent to friends and family. Lila on the other hand shared and dispersed her prose as letters to friends and family throughout her whole life. Describing American vernacular life with brilliant clarity was part of her being: she was born and raised on a farm in Clearfield, Kansas.
Places to which the Garvers travelled together included Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, Colorado and New York, and they collected maps everywhere he went. Images of industrial sites, steam locomotives, railway yards, shipyards, farms, grasslands, and landscapes figured prominently in their respective oeuvre. Their passion to record what they saw - he pictorially, she in script - continued through their last decade in Houston, Texas, leaving a sixty-five-year legacy of drawing, painting and writing.
William Garver Jr.’s work has been exhibited with the WPA Exhibit Project, Gilcrease Museum, Philbrook Art Museum (now the Philbrook Museum of Art), Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of Tulsa, Rice University, Mulvane Art Museum, Tulsa Art Association, and Bartholic Gallery. His work is in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Gilcrease Museum, as well as in several private collections.