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2011:10:24 18:37:24

Troy on the Beach

George Dureau (1930 – )
Troy on the Beach

Dureau

George Valentine Dureau is many things: painter, draftsman, photographer, raconteur, provocateur, humanist, classicist and modernist. From the very start, though, he is a New Orleanian. Born in 1930 to Clara Rosella Legett Dureau in the Bayou St. John neighborhood, Dureau was named after his father, a name that combines two saints: one a dragon-slayer and one the symbol of love. He was taught to paint as a very young child by a beloved aunt, and began his first formal art classes at the Delgado Museum at age nine. His first solo exhibition occurred two years later at John Dibert Grammar School. He attended St. Aloysius High School, studied Fine Arts at Louisiana State University and operated a small lamp shop in the French Quarter. Inducted into the U.S. Army in 1954, he served mainly as a file clerk before returning to New Orleans in 1956 to begin a Master’s program in Architecture at Tulane University. The following year was pivotal in Dureau’s life. He had taken a job as a window dresser at Kreeger’s Department Store on Canal Street and taken a studio at 611 Esplanade Avenue. He quickly realized that architecture was not the field best suited to his talents, and he left Tulane. More importantly, though, he left work to pursue painting full-time. His first solo exhibition as an adult was mounted at Naomi Marshall’s influential Downtown Gallery in 1960. He has been an integral part of the Orleans Gallery, and Arthur Roger Gallery, where he continues to show today. Other than a brief, unsatisfying move to New York, Dureau has always called New Orleans home.

The Painting

As is the case with most successful painters, the work of George Dureau has moved from early experimentation through a process of refinement to the creation of a highly personal and unique aesthetic. In the 1940s, Dureau worked for a few years in the dominant style of the age — non-objective abstraction. He felt limited, though, by the lack of narrative potential in abstraction, and returned to figurative painting. The lessons he learned about surface and color during that time did not leave him, though, and his distinctive emphasis of medium and color is extremely modern.

In the 1950s, as Dureau was developing his skill as a painter, he began with boldly colored landscapes and still lifes — oranges on a table, trees along the levees of St. Francisville and Oakville, Louisiana. His emphasis shifted as his skill level developed, though, and by the early 1960s, he was painting figures in the landscapes — swimmers on a beach, workers on Esplanade Avenue, barrooms and restaurants in the French Quarter filled with activity. His work was met with broad acceptance in South Louisiana, and he had a series of successful annual exhibitions at Naomi Marshall’s influential Downtown Gallery between 1960 and 1964.

In the mid-to-late 1960s, an important change occurred in Dureau’s work — the figures were taken out of the landscape and disrobed in the artist’s studio. Dureau saw no reason to paint clothes, when his main concern was the human figure. He was trying to convey personality through posture and stance. The fleeting nature of fashion was another concern. In a Dixie Magazine interview from 1970, Dureau says:

The human body is eternal, but clothing styles change from day to day, so painting a person in contemporary clothing reduces the painting to the level of pop art or a clothing store advertisement. It becomes, not a statement about a particular person, or a universal statement about mankind, but merely a statement about current fashion.

In that statement, we see not only his ambition of creating an eternal commentary on the human spirit, but also the foreshadowing to a life dedicated to depicting the human form.

Another transition in George Dureau’s work, which began in the late 1960s and continues to this day, was the introduction of fantasy, classical allusion and allegory into his work. In his attempt to show the dignity of man, his models, denizens of the French Quarter, were morphed into classical gods and goddesses. In an attempt to show the enduring human spirit, he chose models on the fringes of society — little people, hustlers, those with physical or emotional damage — and painted them as cupids and satyrs, heroes, chimeras and beasts of legend. Dureau, himself, is often painted as Chief Satyr. While this may seem pure fantasy, it is important to note the social and political relevance to this work in context to time and place. Dureau elevated socially disenfranchised individuals — poor blacks, homosexuals, little people and the physically handicapped — to legendary status. He placed the outsider on equal footing with the King of Rex or Poseidon himself.

The Drawings

For a short period in the early 1970s, and again in his most recent endeavors, Dureau moved his focus from painting to drawing. Although he often executed charcoal drawings as preliminary studies for larger works in oil, rarely before this time were they approached as final works. Moving the focus from color and paint quality, Dureau was able to place more emphasis on the narrative, the content, and the movement of the human form. In the early drawings, the landscape is removed completely, and the emphasis is entirely and unapologetically on the model. They convey not only his skill as a draftsman, but subtly expose the intimacy shared between artist and subject.

The most recent drawings, or “re-drawings” as his calls them, are an exercise in memory. Pulling from a lifetime of relationships, he draws figures from memory and earlier works, placing them in new combinations. From a carefully curated pantheon of personalities, he is retelling his personal mythology

The photographs

George Dureau borrowed a medium format camera from a friend in the early 1970s, and began taking photographs of his models. Initially, they were intended as reference material far painting. Before long, though, the photographs took on an independent life of their own. Dureau brought with him to the camera the same penchant for classical composition and subtle humanism that he used in his paintings and drawings. His models were almost exclusively friends and guys from the neighborhood — the same models he used for paintings — with special emphasis on young muscular black males, guys with amputations or other physical disabilities, and little people. His use of available light, long exposures and conservative compositions combine to create poetic images, rich in their depths of blacks and grays. This traditionalist approach and classical composition creates an environment where the figures become iconic — an amputee becomes a broken Hellenistic marble statue, a neighborhood hustler becomes a warrior bronze. Those familiar with the photographs of George Dureau easily recognize his distinctive style, the intimacy and respect apparent between the subjects and photographer, and the reserved, traditional approach to the process.

The work of George True hangs in many of the grand homes in New Orleans, as well as French Quarter gay bars and humble artist studios throughout the city. He has shown not only in New Orleans and New York, but has also opened exhibitions to great critical praise in London and Paris. His work is held in private and public collections both nationally and internationally. The British writer/poet/curator, Edward Lucie-Smith, has written extensively on George Dore, and Bruce Weber included Dureau among his Southern icons in ‘Till I Get It Right: An Anthem for the South. He has been an influence on artists ranging from Kendall Shaw to Robert Mapplethorpe. Over the past eighty years, Dureau has made his mark … and is still making it.

Bradley Sumrall
Curator

⚐ 29° 56′ 37.199″ N 90° 4′ 15.684″ W, ⛰ 82.6m