A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 4)

C ARPE DIEM AND LAISSEZ LES BON TEMPS ROULEZ Mortality is a human reality, but never more insistent and imbedded in a culture than in Louisiana where in the early years of the eighteenthcentury colony the annual death rate approached eighty percent, beggaring even the terrible New England winters that halved the Pilgrim settlements. Prisoners incarcerated in the awful and notorious Bastille rioted in protest at the prospect of being released in exchange for servitude in the struggling Louisiana colony, the poorest in the French empire. Even today, the annual harvest of mostly young black men murdered in New Orleans—at a rate more than ten times the national average for homicide—casts a tangible pall over the spirit and consciousness of the city. Small wonder then that such a landscape and culture would nurture vodun and be home to Anne Rice’s myths of vampires. A carpe diem or seize-the-day mentality underlies and informs the laissez roulez devotion to the present moment and all the sensual, libidinous, alcoholic, and frantic gaiety that is naturally inherent in such a place. The tenuousness of life itself can help explain the tender and lavish attention artists paid to the beauty of young women and to their own and others’ families, as is evident in Jose Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza’s late eighteenth-century The Family of Dr. Joseph Montegut and Francois Jacques Fleischbein’s Portrait of Betsy, or Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans’ Creole in Red Headdress, or the endearing portraits by George David Coulon. Among the pivotal issues addressed in our contextualization of the art of Louisiana is the advent of the daguerreotype and photography prior to the Civil War, a medium that reached its maturation in the decades following. This new genre played a significant role in not only providing a technology capable of inexpensively documenting subjects and scenes previously the private province of painters, but in turn photography compelled painters to pursue new styles and eventually an entirely new aesthetic. Following the Civil War and the defeat of the South, the “natural order” of things and the economic system founded on slavery was overturned and all the attendant economic, political, social, and even psychological disturbances that ensue from such a transformational event were in evidence nowhere more clearly than in the art of the period. Thus was generated a remarkable body of work, especially in the rendering of the Louisiana landscape, that evaded the trauma of the historical moment in glorious idealizations of Louisiana’s unique and exotic landscape. Richard Clague, Jr., and his disciples in the Bayou School, such as William Henry Buck, and Joseph Rusling Meeker, among others, left a legacy of exceptional and distinctive beauty. 4 INTRODUCTION CLEMENTINE HUNTER (b. 1887, near Cloutierville, Louisiana – d. 1988, Natchitoches, Louisiana) Flowering River, ca. 1950 Oil on panel; 94 x 28 in. Ogden Museum of Southern Art Gift of Dr. and Mrs. James Mitchael Fortino  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=446 http://knowla.org/entry.php?rec=457 http://knowla.org/entry.php?rec=457 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=587 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=588 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=595 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=595 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1163 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1163 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1310 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=446

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

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