A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 67)

MAURITZ FREDERIK DE HAAS Farragut’s Fleet Passing the Forts below New Orleans, ca. 1863-1867 Oil on canvas; 58 x 105 in. The Historic New Orleans Collection River School in New York and later the 1870s focus of the European Barbizon school of landscape painting, which eventually informed Impressionism toward the end of the century. Its principal Louisiana practitioners were Richard Clague, Jr., and his various disciples and contemporaries, among whom was George David Coulon who, like Clague himself, was adept at both photography and painting. European influence was further effectuated by several Louisiana artists being educated or receiving training in Europe, including John Genin (France), Charles Giroux (France), Luis Granier y Arrufi (Barcelona), Andres Molinary (Italy and Spain), Paul Poincy (France), and Bror Anders Wikstrom (Sweden). Others, such as William Henry Buck, who studied with Italian landscape specialist Ernest Ciceri in Boston, were trained by Europeans living in the United States. Edgar Degas, who in 1872-1873 sojourned briefly with his cousins in New Orleans and would become one of the most famous artists of the period, was years away from his recognition as one of the great French Impressionists and left no documented influence on his contemporaries in Louisiana. The second major factor impelling painting away from a tendency toward realism or the kind of documentation of historical event and material life it was more apt to capture in the colonial period, was the painful nature of reality itself in the post-Civil War period when the severe material decline and corresponding social and political upheaval generated a degree of violence, brutality, and injustice muted in the antebellum period. In contrast, the absolute nature and control of slavery, exploitative and dehumanizing as it was, diminished the necessity to resort to gratuitous violence and was further moderated by Southerners’ belief that bondage of Africans constituted the natural order of things. But the social climate changed once emancipated slaves became de jure equals and carpetbaggers populated the landscape while immigrants began to flood the cities, especially New Orleans. These demographic changes further magnified by the dual grievances among Confederate sympathizers of the actuality of losing the war coupled with the self-justifying “lost cause” ideology that channeled their resentment. Consequently, there was forged a culture of violence from which people of more refined sensibilities, such as artists and their patrons, recoiled and repressed from their consciousness, and art responded accordingly with idealized renderings of Louisiana landscapes and scenes. As has often been cited by cultural studies as a tendency in the American psyche, such as in R.W.B. Lewis’ The American Adam, many of these harkened back to an Edenic past, locating in nature itself a purity that preceded the violence perpetrated by humanity. Literally hundreds of examples of these abound, such as William Henry Buck’s Swamp Scene, George David Coulon’s Louisiana Sunrise, Charles Giroux’s Golden Twilight in Louisiana, Joseph Meeker’s Bayou Plaquemines, August Norieri’s Natchez Bound Down the River at Night, and Meyer Straus’ Louisiana Swamp. RESPONSE TO THE WAR In a similar sense, the South and in particular Louisiana both shared common reactions and a keen and transformative sense of loss following the devastation of the Civil War and pursued their own idiosyncratic responses to the war and its aftermath. The destruction of the physical landscape was in conjunction with the corresponding rending of the social, economic, and political order, central to which was the dissolution of the system of enslavement on which the economy and the cultural CIVIL WAR THROUGH THE NEW CENTURY 67  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1310 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1179 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=595 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1366 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=588 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1258 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1261 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1261 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1178 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1333 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1178 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1378 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1163 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1378 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1163 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=528

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

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