A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 395)

CARNIVAL DESIGN by D. Eric Bookhardt HENRY SICARD LITHOGRAPHY COMPANY (Paris, France) Rex Ball Invitation, 1887 Color lithograph The Historic New Orleans Collection MARDI GRAS HAS LONG EXISTED AS A MULTIDIMENSIONAL PHENOMENON that somehow incorporated both the street and the elite, the mainstream and the esoteric, dark and light, Apollonian and Dionysian—though the Dionysian has always held a distinct advantage. Forever skirting the margins between the officially celebrated and the outré or forbidden, it has been propelled by a spirit of creative anarchy that harks to its origins in the myths and mysteries of preChristian antiquity. The Carnival tradition that the French originally brought to New Orleans in the form of Mardi Gras has roots in the ancient Roman winter rites of the Lupercalia and Saturnalia, which over time became orgiastic exercises in excess, as well as in the early Druidic version of Carnival in which the kings were chosen by drawing lots (a ritual replicated with our “king cake babies” today) and then sacrificed at the end of their year-long reign. This human sacrifice component was eventually replaced with animals such as Le Boeuf Gras, the fatted ox still seen in the Carnivals of New Orleans and Pais and from which the name, Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday,” is derived. Initially opposed by early Roman Catholicism, Carnival was too deeply rooted to defeat, so the Church incorporated it as the prelude to Lent. All of which makes it very difficult to explain or comprehend in the context of an America defined by Calvinist and utilitarian rationalist traditions. But Mardi Gras does express a psychically atavistic and dreamlike spirit of creative abandon that has artistic parallels in movements such as surrealism and the French symbolists who preceded it. A cursory look at the float and costume designs of the nineteenth-century New Orleans Mardi Gras and their modern equivalents reveals clear correspondences with the work of French Symbolists such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, himself a son of Louisiana parents who returned to their native France only after he was conceived. And while Carnival has been celebrated in New Orleans from the settlement’s early eighteenth-century beginnings, it was only in the latter nineteenth century that it came into its own in the creative efflorescence that was its golden age, and spawned the gaudy organized parades for which it is known today. By far the biggest, richest and most diverse city in the South, with a large free black professional class and immigrants from all over the world, antebellum New Orleans attracted characters as varied as Walt Whitman, who wrote for what is now The Times Picayune, and the Afro-Parisian expatriate Jules Lion, whose New Orleans daguerreotype studio became the first in the South while making him the first African-American professional photographer. By all rights, the Civil War’s economic devastation should have put an end to the CARNIVAL DESIGN 395 

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