A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 189)

enigmatic photographs including Savagery Speaks From Our Cities, Dweller in an Empty House, and Counter Movement, Number Two, all staged with models in abandoned houses and local cemeteries around New Orleans. He also began a series of surrealistic plantation photographs, including Under Loss of Moss; Enchanted Tree, Number One; and The Mighty Pillars, Number Four, that eventually formed the foundation of his major publication, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, a highly influential and widely collected volume of his photographs. Surrealism and the vision of the European Surrealist artists were major influences upon the emerging New York School artists, which they often encountered at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery in New York. Laughlin shared this interest with them, even from his home in New Orleans. The art of the New York School (also known as Abstract Expressionism) became prominent after the war, as seen in the works of artists including William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and others, many of them achieving their signature styles during the late 1940s.10 Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings were known by 1947; Clyfford Still’s dark painted fields were evident by 1947; Franz Kline’s black-and-white gestural canvases were known by 1949; and Mark Rothko’s floating, rectangular color forms were evident by 1950. Some writers have divided the first generation Abstract Expressionist into separate groupings, including the Action Painters (Pollock, de Kooning, Kline) and the Chromatic Abstractionists (Newman, Rothko, Gottelib, Still, and Reinhardt), with others crossing over (Guston, Motherwell, and Tomlin).11 Many of these artists studied art in New York during the 1930s (Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton, for example), and many were employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s, surviving the Depression by working on canvases and murals for government art programs, often painting in the American Scene or Regionalist style, even though many critics and advocates rejected these influences after the war.12 The emergence of Abstract Expressionism, with New York as the new art center of the world, accompanied a complex and dynamic new period in the nation’s history. After World War II, returning soldiers, female factory workers, black factory workers, and others left rural regions and small towns and moved to American cities, with higher expectations after the Great Depression and the global war, like most Americans. The Civil Rights Movement began as the era of “separate but equal” associated with Jim Crow laws was coming to an end. Returning soldiers came to expect equal opportunities for themselves and their families. Many African Americans moved away from Louisiana and the South, settling in the cities of the North and the West. As recently indicated by Isabel Wilkerson, the Great Migration did not end with the war, but continued into the 1950s, in effect extending from 1915 into the 1970s. Wilkerson records that over “the course of six decades, some six million black Southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country,” noting that it “would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched…The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South began finally to change—the ‘Whites Only’ signs came down, the all-white schools opened up, and everyone could vote. By then nearly half of all black Americans—some forty-seven percent—would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began.” In Chicago, for example, the black population increased from 44,103 at the start of the Great Migration to more than one million by its end.13 A foundation for the Civil Rights era was established during World War II, when President Harry Truman ended segregation in the military. Countless African-American soldiers returned reluctantly to the segregated conditions of the South, after living under those new military guidelines and traveling the world, experiencing life in other countries where segregated conditions did not exist. In 1954, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, called for an end to segregated schools, though that process took a long time to begin reversing decades of an older order. In Little Rock, Arkansas, federal troops were dispatched by President Eisenhower in 1957 to guarantee the orderly integration of schools in that city. This process continued in 1961, as Freedom Riders rode on integrated buses through the South, with New Orleans as their destination, incurring violence and assaults in Alabama that caused the Kennedy administration to send federal troops to ensure their safety. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson guided the process leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964, major legislation that ended the discrimination that had begun with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which had been initiated in New Orleans in the 1890s. During the 1950s in Louisiana—an era marked by oil booms, building booms, commercial and banking booms—New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport, and other cities became increasingly active as art centers, with museums, galleries, and art collectors mirroring this in their own activities. As the economy boomed and as architects were hired to design new houses, museums, office buildings, schools, hospitals, airports, and commercial buildings, many of these projects called for art, sculpture, and related design commissions, offering new opportunities for artists in the state. As the rise of art schools and university art programs evolved, supported by returning veterans, the GI Bill, and the emerging Baby Boom generation, art became more accessible, then more attractive as a career option for many. Once-remote locations evolved into significant and often well-funded art centers, enticing national artists who ART IN CONTEMPORARY LOUISIANA 189 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

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

https://www.nxtbook.com/leh/uniqueslant2012/uniqueslant2012
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com