A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 186)

in his iconic painting The Parade (1950), depicting the artist in his studio, surrounded (but not distracted) by the parades and revelry of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter. Clarence Millet also studied at the Art Students League in New York and was a founder of and teacher at the Arts and Crafts Club. He reflected an awareness of the American Scene and Regionalism in his paintings of New Orleans, the Mississippi River, and the environment of South Louisiana, which he continued until the time of his death, in 1959. Knute Heldner remained active and influential in the French Quarter from 1923 until the time of his death in 1952, painting and teaching at the New Orleans Art School, focusing on French Quarter scenes, bayou landscapes, and other Louisiana subjects (often presented in a style reflective of Regionalist influences). His wife, Collette Pope Heldner, lived in the French Quarter and painted New Orleans and Louisiana landscape scenes through the 1980s until she died in 1990. Alberta Kinsey was a pioneering painter who remained active in the French Quarter and at Melrose Plantation, near Natchitoches (where, it is said, Clementine Hunter used a brush and paints left by Kinsey to create her first paintings). Kinsey was associated with the Arts and Crafts Club from its founding in 1922 until it closed in 1951, the year before she died. Conrad Albrizio painted a significant mural series for the new Louisiana State Capitol building and a mural for the U.S. Post Office in DeRidder, Louisiana. When he joined the art faculty at Louisiana State University in 1936, he brought a professional profile to the school and its developing art department. He advanced the mural tradition in Louisiana during the 1950s when he competed the murals cycle for the new Union Station in New Orleans in 1954, as well as a new mural in Baton Rouge in 1953. Caroline Durieux also joined the art faculty at LSU, bringing her talents as a painter and printmaker to the university, along with her extensive art world experience in New Orleans, Cuba, Mexico, and beyond, as well as her many contacts from her previous position as director of the Federal Art Project in New Orleans. The LSU art department and its reputation developed rapidly after World War II, and became a growing influence in the state, attracting students such as George Dureau and Kendall Shaw to Baton Rouge in those years. LSU also nurtured a significant visiting artist program, one that introduced emerging and established national artists to the school and to the state. One of those national artists was Ralston Crawford, who served as a visiting artist at LSU during the 1949-50 academic year. He devoted much of his time in that period to exploring New Orleans and its jazz and street music scene, as well as its neighborhoods, historic districts, and unique cemeteries. The music, culture, and spirit of New Orleans became extremely important to Crawford, as well as to the future development of his paintings, prints, and photographs. In 1961 he returned to Louisiana after he was appointed to serve 186 ART IN CONTEMPORARY LOUISIANA as a photographic research consultant at Tulane University’s Archive of New Orleans Jazz, a position that offered him opportunities to explore and document the music and culture of the city during a crucial period in its evolution as Preservation Hall opened in the French Quarter. Crawford came to love New Orleans so much, in fact, that he requested that he be buried in the city, and he was. On April 27, 1978, Crawford was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. His earlier art reflected the Precisionist movement and his later abstract paintings and prints, often suggesting cemeteries and the architectural elements of New Orleans, were important connections to the larger American art world.6 Paul Ninas initially worked in a Regionalist and American Scene style, as evident in paintings including his scenes of the Avery Island Salt Mines, completed during the 1930s, reflecting his awareness of early Cubist compositions (as seen in Cezanne and others). By the end of the decade he completed his famous New Orleans mural cycle installed in the Sazerac Bar in the Roosevelt Hotel in 1939. It recently was restored, post-Katrina. By 1950 he was creating more fully abstract paintings, though not in the more current Abstract Expressionist style of the moment, but rather in a very late application of the Cubist styles popularized by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque earlier in the century. Two of the most important and advanced artists in the South, Will Henry Stevens and Walter Inglis Anderson, were active in Louisiana and offered important precedents for the development and advancement of a modernist vision in the state, and the region. Will Henry Stevens continued to paint in his American Scene and Regionalist manner throughout the 1940s. He retired from Newcomb College in 1948, then returned to his home and studio in Vevay, Indiana. Stevens painted many scenes around New Orleans, including locations such as the Walnut Street wharves on the Mississippi River and scenes in Westwego and the bayou region nearby. He also painted the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee during his summers there. However, beginning around 1937, he also painted a range of increasingly abstract and nonobjective works, commonly inspired by nature and the spirit of the natural world, becoming one of the South’s pioneering abstract painters. Accordingly, Stevens, in significant and under-recognized ways, served as an aesthetic bridge between the earlier American and European Modernists and the emerging Abstract Expressionist painters of the late 1940s and 1950s, yet he is seldom recognized as such. Stevens was inspired by Wassily Kandinsky and many of the same sources as those in the emerging New York School of the late 1940s, and, like many artists in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, he was inspired by the modern visions and legacies associated with the pioneering European artists who fled to America to escape political persecution in Europe. Stevens had two major exhibitions scheduled as the war was  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1127 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1125 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1321 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1126 http://http:// http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=992 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=446 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=583 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1001 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=597 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=527 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1243 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1355 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=594 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=594

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A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

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