“Beale Street,” 1964, by William Christenberry. Mixed media on canvas. Collection of C. Richard Belger.
In 1960, a young art instructor at the University of Alabama discovered a book that changed his life. The instructor was William Christenberry, now a national known artist as well as a professor of art at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. The book was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941. It combined the photographs of Walker Evans, along with the text of James Agee, to chronicle the lives of three tenant families in Hale County, Alabama. The text, Christenberry later said, affected him first. “I had never run into a writer who described so clearly, so beautifully, the things I had experienced as a child.” The photographer, Walker Evans, would later become “one of the greatest influences” in Christenberry’s life.
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