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Southern Masters
The Ogden Museum Highlights Long-standing
Artists
Story by Debra Kronowitz
The Ogden Museum’s ongoing Southern Masters series highlights artists who
have made a long-standing contribution to the art of the region.
Many of these artists began their careers in the transitional
post-war era, when contemporary art was beginning to gain
visibility and a larger audience across the nation.
The basic concept of the series is to
juxtapose a significant body of recent work within the context
of the different periods of each artist’s evolution. This career
overview, while not a full-blown retrospective, offers a
chronological survey of the individual artist’s work within the
context of our ever-expanding view of American art in the last
50 years.
The series was formally
launched in April 2007 with the work of acclaimed artist George
Dunbar’s Coin du Lestin series of clay and metal leaf paintings. Dunbar played a pivotal
role in introducing contemporary art into the cultural life of
the American South in the 1950s. His distinguished career is
recognized with many exhibitions, including a large scale
retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1997. Dunbar’s
elegant clay-based paintings incised with gold, palladium and
metal leaf are instantly recognizable and uniquely his own.
Intimately linked to New Orleans, Dunbar
declares himself a “local yokel,” yet he is serious about his
craft. In the mid-1950s, Dunbar and five fellow artists created
the Orleans Gallery, the first artists' co-operative gallery in
New Orleans, and almost certainly the first in the whole of the
American South. The Orleans Gallery is now acknowledged as “the
kernel from which the whole of the present vigorous contemporary
art scene in New Orleans was to sprout.” |
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| Photos by George Dunbar, Sylvia Schmidt Fine Arts and Jean
Seidenberg |
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It must nevertheless be added that the
growth of contemporary art in the city might not have been so
rapid without the support of the New Orleans Museum of Art, then
known as the Issac Delgado Museum of Art. Dunbar
was given a solo exhibition there in August 1964.
A pioneering abstract painter in the region,
Dunbar has steadily developed his own highly personal style of abstract
art.
In August, artist Robert Warrens premiered a new body of work that grew
out of his experience of losing his home and studio in the Lakeview
neighborhood. One of Louisiana’s most acclaimed and influential art
educators, Warrens retired from the art faculty at Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge after 31 years, and his exuberant narrative
work has been an important part of the region’s art scene for decades.
He continues to sculpt and paint.
January 2008 will showcase the work of Jean
Seidenberg, an artist who began as an abstract painter in the
1950s and today is recognized as one of the region’s leading
figure painters.
"I am a painter of people. I am and have always been a figurative artist. My subject has
persistently been family and friends, children and lovers, and
the relationship of artist to model within the intimacy of the
studio. My recent work has been much concerned with the nude,
that formidable icon in western art. The lump and hollow, the
hard and the soft, the density of pigment expressing muscle and
bone,” he said.
The exhibition will include sculpture, drawings and paintings,
and chronicles Seidenberg’s stylistic evolution from abstraction
to realism. |
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In April, the museum will showcase New
Orleans artist William Moreland, who taught painting at
Southeastern University in Lafayette
– a journey which took him
through miles of bayou landscapes. Primarily an abstractionist,
Moreland's images are based on his close observations of nature.
In August, artist and urbanist Robert Tannen will present projects, both realized and
unrealized, which document his diverse work as an artist and
planner. Tannen came to the region in 1969 to master plan the
Gulf Coast recovery after Hurricane Camille; he has lived and
worked in New Orleans for 26 years. His Modgun is
stylistically drawn from one of New Orleans' most prominent
architectural structures, the shotgun house. Its simple modular
design, affordable construction, rapid installation and its
ability to be modified and expanded is what Tannen hopes will
set it apart from conventional modular home concepts.
Tannen is also one of the founders of the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center.
As the Southern Masters series evolves, The Ogden Museum
will continue to look closely at the ongoing contribution of
Southern artists, many of them in their 70s and 80s, to the art
of the region and nation.
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