Noel Rockmore Picasso of New Orleans revisited

NEW ORLEANS (AP) In a four-block radius where he embellished and drank himself into frightening stupors,

Noel Rockmore

was famous by a denizens of a French Quarter as an vast Pablo Picasso-like figure who total a imaginary and a real. He constructed some 15,000

oil paintings

, temperas, collages and sketches over his career and afterwards died in obscurity.

His life was that of an American visitor and a reversion to Europe's good expressionistic and epicurean masters.

In a 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in a

Metropolitan Museum of Art

, a

Museum of Modern Art

and a Hirshhorn Museum. He was a splendid immature American artist who had a ambience for Rembrandt and incongruous paintings, with a opinion of a n American amicable realist.

Then, a art universe changed: Abstract expressionism typified by a paint throwing of Jackson Pollock became a rave.

Rockmore

, who dignified draftsmanship in painting, detested it.

Rockmore changed: He left his mom and 3 children, altered his final name and headed to

New Orleans

in 1959, where he would eventually get mislaid to a New York art world.

The story of

Noel Montgomery Davis

(his genuine name) is removing a long-overdue assembly outward New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art rebirth itself 6 years after Hurricane Katrina. From now until a finish of January, his works are on perspective during a LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia. The retrospective is called "Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore."

"He was kind of an art hobo," pronounced Ethyl Ault, ha lt executive of a LaGrange Art Museum.

She pronounced Rockmore was an ignored genius. "Was it politics? Did he provoke people? Why was he so renouned in New York when he was younger, and afterwards he leaves, changes his name and afterwards goes on into his angel story land?"

The uncover is shaped on scarcely 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units in a arise of Hurricane Katrina. For 25 years,

Shirley Marvin

, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with a goal of creation him famous one day.

But she had lost about a collection due to short-term memory loss, her family said. Marvin was one of Rockmore's many clinging fans. She saw talent in him like many others in

New Orleans

. The unusual collection was entertainment dirt when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in Oct 2006, a year after Ka trina, to get "a few paintings," as her mom described it. Instead, they found a units packaged with ruins of Rockmore's life.

In a arise of a collection's discovery, Rich and his wife, Tee Marvin, have turn Rockmore's biggest impresarios a agents Rockmore famously refused to have via his life as he willfully lived on a corner of a art world. He was scandalous among art galleries for his rage and fits of outrage. His friends contend he suffered romantic problems for many of his life.

The Marvins operative with Rockmore's family and art dealers, collectors and museum curators have begun cataloging his works and compelling him. They guess he constructed about 15,000 pieces of art and conservatively 750 to 1,000 of those are masterpieces.

"At initial we suspicion my mom was crazy," Rich Marvin said. "When a museum or gallery lines adult his tip 200 artistic works, people will be as dumbfounded as we are."

Rockmore was innate in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. He was supertalented. A child prodigy, he played a violin good by age 8. After pang polio during age 10, he incited to painting. He complicated quickly during The Juilliard School and had a studio during a Cooper Union. Family friends enclosed Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.

His 20s were inclusive as he embellished a bums of a Bowery district, monkeys and elephants in a backstage of a Ringling Brothers Circus and parables of Central Park and Coney Island. He was a amicable realist, same to Depression-era American painters such as John Steuart Curry, though these early works contained themes and artistic styles that would stay with him: death, violence, sex, a surreal and a allegorical.

In retrospect, it was a ghoulish and dim in Rockmore that tangible him, creation him a kind of American Hieronymus Bosch.

In a 1950s, Rockmore became fed adult with a call of epitome expressionists afterwards holding reason of New York a prosaic tones and humanless canvases of Willem De Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this duration he drank heavily and his mom kicked him out since of his wildness, his daughter, Emilie Heller-Rhys, said.

At age 31, he changed down to New Orleans and began operative with Larry Borenstein, an art collector, and Allan Jaffe, a business propagandize connoisseur and tuba player. In a 1960s, Borenstein employed Rockmore as a kind of proprietor painter for a new multitude he'd shaped with Jaffe to safety normal New Orleans jazz music. The multitude would turn Preservation Hall.

Rockmore was consecrated to paint a old-fashioned musicians. He prisoner a mood, scent, hold and fume of New Orleans jazz and a musicians Punch Miller, Percy Humphrey, Louis Nelson, Sweet Emma and Billie and DeDe Pierce, and scores of others.

His outlay was staggering. He'd turn fixated by a theme New Orleans' Carnival traditions, a mad Port of New Orleans, a characters of a French Quarter, visitor beings, ancient Egypt, spell and mined it artistically.

Some of his many loving and noted pieces are of a Quarter's Bohemians, associate outsiders: Ruthie a Duck Girl; Gypsy Lou; O.M. (standing for "Old Man"); Mike Stark; Johnny White; and Sister Gertrude Morgan.

Yet, his life was pierced by that dim side.

"He was a shining artist, and we don't use those difference lightly," pronounced Stephen Clayton, a New Orleans art gourmet who did not know Rockmore and does not possess any of his works. "He chose to come here, came to a Quarter, climbed in a bottle and never got out."

From his morning vodka, Rockmore kept going all day, muscling his approach by sketches, wall-sized oils, nudes in charcoal, sculptures and churned media and job it quits during one of his favorite bars, mostly The Alpine, within cheering stretch of a St. Louis cathedral and his bed.

There are stories of him trashing art galleries and s tudios. Handcuffing a lady to his stove. Sticking a mummified cat in one of his works. Going on lithium and ethanol binges that left him a wreck. Cursing during tourists viciously. Sitting in streets with his murky tennis boots and rumpled clothing, looking like a bum. Drawing on napkins, grocery bags and usually about anything else he liked. Sitting in bars, celebration and perplexing to get women to go to bed with him.

One of Rockmore's closest friends, Andy Antippas, a former Tulane University communication highbrow and art gallery owner, removed going into Rockmore's unit during one of his lithium binges and anticipating his studio in a state that resembled a home of Charles Manson.

"It was trashed," pronounced Antippas, who found pages from Playboy repository littering a building and feces from his dual dogs in a center of his bed. "He'd apparently been sitting in one place and celebration and portrayal for hours."

"Noel was an autodidact of a top orde r," Antippas said. "There was substantially no artist some-more inclusive than Noel solely maybe Picasso."

Antippas is like many Rockmore fans. He believes he was a genius, a master who ranks among a greatest.

In his home on St. Claude Avenue cluttered with books, paintings, flashy tellurian skulls, African masks and paintings galore Antippas stood in front of a vast resigned portrayal unresolved on a wall nearby his desk. He looked during it and pronounced he owned what he believed to be "one of a excellent paintings, if not a best, portrayal in Western civilization, a bare mural of his father. It's a usually such portrayal ever done."

"He couldn't describe to a genuine world. He lived in his possess world; he was driven by his possess work," pronounced Rita Posselt, a 59-year-old excellent art photographer who lived with Rockmore between 1978 and 1984 and frequently acted for him. "He would arise adult in a morning and go to bed during night, and in between those hours there was a lot of torture for him."

"He wanted somebody to commend his talent, and he wanted critical people in a art world, museums and such, to do so, though he didn't wish to burst by hoops and parties to make it happen."

During his life, and still today, Rockmore was a kind of New Orleans project.

He is woven into a city. Anyone who has stepped into a dejection of Preservation Hall has seen Rockmores they're a vivid oil paintings of jazz greats on a walls. A Rockmore hangs in Johnny White's bar. It's a football scene, a token of appreciation for a bar owner, Johnny White, and typically Rockmore: There are 3 teams on a field. His paintings hang in a Old Mint, a New Orleans Museum of Art, a Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and on a walls of galleries and homes via New Orleans. And who knows where else.

"My feeling was that Noel was a many approved painter," Antippas said. "Every waiter, bartender, in a Quarter has a Rockmore. Go d knows how many Rockmores are unresolved on walls via a city."

Rockmore died in 1995 during age 66 of an untreated infection. When he was taken to a hospital, according to friends, he was certified as a "street person." According to his friends, he sat adult on a gurney and declared, "I'm not a travel person, I'm a good artist."

"I always contend that he is America's Picasso," pronounced Heller-Rhys, his daughter and an achieved artist herself, as she stood during a new revisit outward a Skyscraper building, an 18th-century unit building where Rockmore and many other artists, including Charles Bukowski stayed in a 1970s. "And America has to come to terms with that."

____

Online:

http://www.rightwaywrongway.com/

http://www.lagrangeartmuseum.org/

(news.yahoo.com)