A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 73)

642 banks failed, 16,000 businesses went bankrupt, and the Dun & Bradstreet firm reported 119 cities with more than three million unemployed. American society during these decades was bifurcated along the class lines of capital and labor, with the middle class that prevailed during the mercantile period prior to the Civil War now threatened by the two looming newly emerged protagonists on the national stage. While the South was party to many of these same issues, by virtue of its relatively retarded industrialization and urbanization, the extent to which it participated in these national trends was muted; further, in the Southern imagination, the Civil War and its aftermath, especially under Reconstruction, trumped the larger national issues in its politics and self-image. Despite professions of mutuality of interests by both the middle class and plutocrats such as Andrew Carnegie, in 1894 there was the first real nationwide strike, involving more than one hundred fifty thousand members of the American Railway Union, headed by Eugene V. Debs. Ironically, much as with Reconstruction, the strike was broken by federal troops and an injunction based on the Sherman Anti-Trust act of 1890, which had been designed to control the predations of monopolies, but was used instead against the workers. Though declining from its eminence as the third largest city in the United States in 1840, New Orleans remained the principal city of the South, and its urbanization paralleled the demographics of the cities of the North. This is an important phenomenon in relation to the arts. Artists require patronage and the vibrant commercialism of a city in order to flourish. A port city, with its hub of commerce, is also a virtual prerequisite for being exposed to the dominant European trends and influences. In 1870 New Orleans’ population was 191,418, making it the ninth largest city in the country. Contrary to some twenty-first century revisionist misconceptions, only twenty-six percent of its population was black. In 1880 its population was 216,090, ranking it tenth; in 1890 it grew to 242,039 but declined to twelfth where it still remained in 1900 when its population reached 287,104, the percentage of blacks at 27 percent. Baton Rouge became the state capital in 1879 and both its and Shreveport’s populations began to significantly increase during the course of the century, but still lagged considerably behind New Orleans. Midway through the post-war period New Orleans enjoyed a momentary ascendancy in the national and even the world’s view when it hosted the 1884 World Cotton Exposition in what today is Audubon Park. Still brokering almost a third of the nation’s cotton, and supported by a $1 million grant from the federal government, New Orleans’ Fair featured the marvel of technology for the time including a glass pavilion that encompassed thirty-three acres and was lit by thousands of the then novel electric bulbs. Sadly it also was notable for the embezzlement of nearly $2 million by Edward C. Burke, the state treasurer, including the vast bulk of the Fair’s budget. The same year, however, saw the founding of Tulane University and in 1895 the establishment of the renowned Newcomb School of Art by the Woodward brothers, Ellsworth and William, which not only produced high-quality distinctive pottery, but pioneered one of the first examples of creating an entire program of education and industry to train and enable young women in the arts and crafts. The dramatic cultural alteration, largely occasioned by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, which characterized the post-Civil War decades, demanded and received the attention of the nation, and particularly its literature as it moved more distinctly toward realism, but less so its art, which in the South tended to serve a different social and aesthetic function. This followed the sense of many Southern historians, foremost among them C. Vann Woodward, who posited the exceptionalism and radical discontinuity of the South after the war in diverging from the national norms and character. Not only did the South conceive of itself as a romantic locus of a lost and noble cause, it so fiercely defined itself in contradistinction to the North that the North itself might have ceased to exist altogether as a concept were it not for the imagination of Southerners. The major consequence of this change was the nineteenthcentury city with its unplanned sprawling growth, slums, tenements, and poverty, a phenomenon more Northern than Southern, but certainly manifest in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans. The concentration of humanity in those urban centers created a new social context, one in which the unpleasant aspects of society pressed demandingly upon the attention of the literate class despite their best efforts to avoid them. There was a dual response to this phenomenon on the part of the literate or middle class. One movement in literature sought to escape the press of unpleasant reality through ethical evasions no more subtle than the evils they were meant to hide. In Louisiana this was manifest in the literary tradition of “local color” as practiced by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, and Kate Chopin, which emphasized the quaintness, and eccentricities of New Orleans rather than unrelentingly confronting them, with the possible exception of race which inevitably crept into the narratives as the predominating theme of that society. ARTISTIC RESPONSE In art, predictably, this generated a reverence and nostalgia for the plantation-centered social order that once was, but would forever be irrecoverable, except for in the imagination and psychological need of Southerners. It also gave rise in addition to nostalgic and pastoral depictions of plantation life, but also emotionalized and impressionistic scenes of landscapes. Contrary to the burgeoning realism that was manifest in Northern literature, photography, and art, rarely were the cotton or sugar fields that were the actual source of the agrarian wealth of the state the subject of paintings, but rather the focus was upon an idealized CIVIL WAR THROUGH THE NEW CENTURY 73  http://knowla.org/entry.php?rec=902 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=529 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=530

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

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