In the four-block radius where he painted and drank himself into frightening stupors, Noel Rockmore was known by the denizens of the French Quarter as an outrageous Pablo Picasso-like figure who combined the mythological and the real. He produced some 15,000 oil paintings, temperas, collages and sketches over his career and then died in obscurity.
His life was that of an American outsider and a throwback to Europe's great expressionistic and hedonistic masters.
In the 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a bright young American artist who had a taste for Rembrandt and figurative paintings, with the outlook of an American social realist.
Then, the art world changed: Abstract expressionism — typified by the paint throwing of Jackson Pollock — became the rave. Rockmore, who admired draftsmanship in painting, detested it.
Rockmore changed: He left his wife and three children, changed his last name and headed to New Orleans in 1959, where he would eventually get lost to the New York art world.
The story of Noel Montgomery Davis (his real name) is getting a long-overdue audience outside New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art renaissance itself six years after Hurricane Katrina. From now until the end of January, his works are on view at the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia. The retrospective is called "Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore."
"He was kind of an art hobo," said Ethyl Ault, interim director of the LaGrange Art Museum.
She said Rockmore was an overlooked genius. "Was it politics? Did he offend people? Why was he so popular in New York when he was younger, and then he leaves, changes his name and then goes on into his fairy tale land?"
The show is based on nearly 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For 25 years, Shirley Marvin, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with the intention of making him famous one day.
But she had forgotten about the collection due to short-term memory loss, her family said. Marvin was one of Rockmore's most devoted fans. She saw genius in him — like many others in New Orleans. The extraordinary collection was gathering dust when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in October 2006, a year after Katrina, to get "a few paintings," as her mother described it. Instead, they found the units packed with remnants of Rockmore's life.
"At first we thought my mom was crazy," Rich Marvin said. "When a museum or gallery lines up his top 200 exquisite works, people will be as stunned as we are."
Rockmore was born in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. He was supertalented. A child prodigy, he played the violin well by age 8. After suffering polio at age 10, he turned to painting. He studied briefly at The Juilliard School and had a studio at the Cooper Union. Family friends included Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.
His 20s were prolific as he painted the bums of the Bowery district, monkeys and elephants in the backstage of the Ringling Brothers Circus and parables of Central Park and Coney Island. He was a social realist, akin to Depression-era American painters such as John Steuart Curry, but these early works contained themes and artistic styles that would stay with him: death, violence, sex, the surreal and the allegorical.
In retrospect, it was the ghoulish and morbid in Rockmore that defined him, making him a kind of American Hieronymus Bosch.
In the 1950s, Rockmore became fed up with the wave of abstract expressionists then taking hold of New York — the flat tones and humanless canvases of Willem De Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this period he drank heavily and his wife kicked him out because of his wildness, his daughter, Emilie Heller-Rhys, said.
At age 31, he moved down to New Orleans and began working with Larry Borenstein, an art collector, and Allan Jaffe, a business school graduate and tuba player. In the 1960s, Borenstein employed Rockmore as a kind of resident painter for a new society he'd formed with Jaffe to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz music. The society would become Preservation Hall.
Rockmore was commissioned to paint the old-time musicians. He captured the mood, scent, touch and smoke of New Orleans jazz and its musicians — Punch Miller, Percy Humphrey, Louis Nelson, Sweet Emma and Billie and DeDe Pierce, and scores of others.
His output was staggering. He'd become fixated by a subject — New Orleans' Carnival traditions, the frenetic Port of New Orleans, the characters of the French Quarter, alien beings, ancient Egypt, voodoo — and mined it artistically.
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