From under the wings of aircraft in line on a carrier’s deck, from high in a carrier’s central tower while surrender ceremonies were in progress, from the heart of bombed-out Yokohama, and from San Diego to Tokyo Bay, William Lewis recorded a sailor’s view of the war in the Pacific during World War II. But he did his recording not by pen, typewriter or camera, but with a brush.
"Dear Mom, send me my paints," he wrote after a call to active duty in 1941 interrupted his studies at Michigan. She did. And so began a four-year trek that took him and his paints from the deck of a converted yacht in the basin at San Diego to the Asian theater of World War II.
While awaiting deployment from the West Coast aboard the former yacht, transformed to the Marcasite, the sailor/artist began his documentation of the life and death of men and ships.
Lewis didn’t stop his painting after the fighting ended. He drew pictures of sailors boogying on the flight deck with gunners sitting atop the turrets. He painted the sunset and moonrise in Tokyo Bay, and Mt. Fuji looming over the waterfront dotted with a collection of American and British ships. He painted Yokohama as he saw it when he went ashore Sept. 21,1945—a burned-out street car in the downtown area, crowds of "desperate, frightened and awfully shabby" people in a narrow street, rubbish piled high on both sides and the gutted remnants of buildings.
Ashore in Tokyo, Lewis found the central section "astonishingly like an American city. The buildings were built largely of reinforced concrete and steel, so the effect of smashing up a city like that had a greater impact on me than even the burning out of Yokohama. It was terribly depressing and rather scary because of the sense that this was a modern city. This looked like an American city, and here it was in this desolate condition. One of the things that surprised me was the general use of English in central Tokyo. Signs were as likely to be in English as in Japanese."
Lewis recorded his somber feelings in watercolors immediately after he returned to his ship. In these watercolors and drawings Lewis first explored themes that would become the heart of his work—"what the human race has done to itself and the landscapes in the last 200 years, with its industrial revolution, wars and national delusions."
William Lewis resumed his studies at U-M, graduated in 1948, and joined the School of Art faculty where he continued teaching until his retirement in 1985. An exhibition of his World War II paintings, "‘Dear Mom, Send Me My Paints’: An Art Student in the United States Navy, 1941-1945" will run through Dec. 22 at U-M’s Clements Library.
. . . October 1995