LOUISIANA BLEND
In the course of a 30-year career, Douglas Bourgeois has knowingly reconciled the hallmarks of regionalism with the formal concerns of modernism. A traveling retrospective now showcases his trenchant and witty art.

By Isabelle Loring Wallace, ART IN AMERICA

As Louisiana”s leading fantasy-based realist painter, Douglas Bourgeois deserves both a broader audience and more probing analysis. In the wake of his first retrospective, “Baby-Boom Daydreams,” he is likely to get both. With their uncanny dramas and enamel-like clarity, Bourgeois”s paintings are typically grouped with the work of other so-called Visionary Imagists from Louisiana (George Febres, Jacqueline Bishop, Dona Lief).1 One particular joy of the current exhibition is its demonstration of the ways in which Bourgeois both reflects and transcends this regional kinship.

Bourgeois, who graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in painting in 1974, purposefully adopts certain hallmarks of an unsophisticated, self-taught esthetic—frontality, inconsistent scale, awkward perspective, the absence of facture, brilliant color—often deploying them in conjunction with references and motifs (voodoo, oil refineries, local musicians) that mark him as the product of a specific place. Yet his choice of subject matter and theme just as often exceeds and undermines the regionalism to which he seems to subscribe. The show exposes Bourgeois”s affinities with a much larger, more diverse constellation of artists (its brightest stars being Frida Kahlo and Joseph Cornell).

Organized by David Rubin, curator of visual arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the exhibition features 65 works produced between 1975 and 2001, an impressive number given that the artist”s painstaking attention to detail severely limits his out put. The majority of the works in the exhibition are small-scale oils on either linen or panel, and there is a sampling of Bourgeois”s three-dimensional work.

As with other fantasy-based realists who came of age in New Orleans in the early 1980s, Bourgeois”s work is indebted to religious icons and comic books in equal measure, and though his airless, graphic esthetic does betray some shifts and developments over time, such changes are ultimately outstripped by the force of a single vision, the first traces of which appeared in the mid-”70s. Dividing his initial efforts between explicitly religious works (Annunciations, portrayals of saints and martyrs) and erotically charged representations of celebrities (movie stars, poets and musicians of varying renown), Bourgeois makes no stylistic distinction between the two, perhaps because as a boy he was himself both an aspiring priest and an avid consumer of pop culture.

This continuity can be appreciated when one compares a work like Setchie as St. Francis (1983) with the contemporaneous portrait of Vanity 6 singer Susan Moonsie (1984). The overt and highly stylized sexuality of the African-American performer, who wears a purple gown and long gloves, is augmented by flaming, heart-shaped portraits of Prince, her onetime lover, that are as much emblems of their “fiery” love affair as they are the sacred heart of Catholic iconography—a motif which Bourgeois surrounds with thorns and repeats in the wallpaper pattern, alternating with bands of suggestively profane calla lilies. Similarly, Bourgeois”s image of St. Francis conveys the saint”s swooning spirituality with all the appropriate trappings—halo, monastic robe, stigmata and the animals to which he preached. Yet the title underscores the masquerade, while the tousled hair and bare nipple (not to mention the exaggeratedly phallic rendering of the neck and head) infuse this icon with the signs of Bourgeois”s interest in the latent erotics of a celibate monk.

With near-caricatural faces and a supersaturated psychedelic palette, works like these are camp in both form and content. Their dual preoccupation with—even conflation of—Catholicism and fame also recall Andy Warhol. Twilight High Yearbook (1978), a painting of a high-school yearbook page with headshots in grid formation, suggests that Bourgeois was aware of this connection early on, even if his slow and very unmechanical process bears no resemblance to that of his famous predecessor. A subject he returns to later in his career, the yearbook page makes for an uncharacteristically straightforward engagement of esthetic concerns dear to postwar art: flatness, repetition and the relation of painting to photography. But in compromising the original seriousness of the grid with the cheeky names—Desire J. Guillory, Chastity Rouge, Sylvan Sheets and Bambi Stiletto—and racially diverse faces of fictional students, Bourgeois makes plain the oblique nature of his relation to modernist orthodoxy.

In the late 1980s, Bourgeois made a series of assemblages in homage to Joseph Cornell. Comprising both two- and three-dimensional elements, these works are the artist”s only foray into sculpture, though even here, the wall-mounted presentation ensures that they are perceived in terms of painting. Fewer than 10 in number, these pieces are among the weakest in Bourgeois”s oeuvre, perhaps because their shallow, tripartite compositions conjure the stage, altarpiece and icon simultaneously and directly, making unambiguous the suggestive analogies that were only implicit in the paintings that preceded them.

Bourgeois”s meditations on Cornell nevertheless had a catalytic effect on his painting and can be considered a hinge between the early and mature work. In the late ”80s, Bourgeois refined his technique, updated his pop-cultural references (the likes of Will Smith, Madonna and Lil” Kim start to appear) and began to exhibit greater interest in the handling of spatial relationships and atmosphere, as if his brief experiment with sculptural space had made more convincing illusionism possible. To his erotically charged investigation of religion and fame, he now added an examination of social and political injustice in which race and sex play prominent roles. These works retain his trademark use of frontality and symmetry, but show a greater variety of compositions and paint handling.

Nightflame (1988), for example, features an extravagantly rundown apartment—an infernal oil refinery visible through three windows—in which a meditative black woman stands wearing a ripped ball gown and a belt of barbed wire around her hips. Bourgeois seems fascinated by the details of a certain kind of real-world decrepitude and grime (note the attention lavished on the bare mattress and the soiled and ripped linoleum and wallpaper), as well as impressed by the spiritual resources required to endure them. At the same time, a work like Nightflame manifests the limitations of a too-direct embrace of subject matter that verges on cliché. The catalogue informs us that the photograph worn around the woman”s neck portrays one of the “Missing” from 1970s Chile. Nightflame”s thematically straightforward investigation of political and social issues (Latin American dictatorships and environmental racism among them) brings too close to the surface an engagement with illustration that in other works is restrained.

That tendency to illustration delivers an unexpected and satisfying jolt in Mistaken Identity (1991), in which a white policeman points a gun at the back of a naked and presumably innocent black man. The racially and sexually loaded encounter is staged in a grungy bathroom stocked with brand-name cleaning and personal hygiene products. We might conclude that, as Warhol deployed Coca-Cola in art for the ways in which it leveled class distinctions, Bourgeois loves rendering Purex (and Prell, and Tide, and Doritos and …) partly for the way in which its mass distribution erodes social and cultural distinctions between the center and its margins.

As McDonald”s wrappers, copies of Newsweek and Marlboros take their places beside some of the Louisiana-only brands in Bourgeois”s still lifes and troupe l”oeil painted “collages” of the late 1990s, his work banishes any lingering notion of the South as a remote and exotic outpost. And asserting the idea of a nonhierarchical culture decentered by mass marketing and technology likewise asserts Bourgeois”s status as a contemporary artist, an artist, in other words, of the present, not to be relegated to that special, timeless category of “regional” expression. In a concurrent exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans viewers could consider Safe and Sound (2002), an ominous image of a blindfolded angel accompanying two children on a rickety bridge suspended over a chasm littered with discarded computers and other detritus of our increasingly wired society. In a departure from the sort of subject matter that has defined his work for 25 years, Bourgeois addresses a cautionary message to all of us, here and now.

1. Along with Andrew Bascle, Charles Blank and Ann Hornback, the artists were thus named in the exhibition “Visionary Imagists,” 1990, organized by Lew Thomas for the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.

“Baby-Boom Daydreams: The Art of Douglas Bourgeois” debuted at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans [Jan. 11-Mar. 23, 2003] and traveled to McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas [June 14-July 27, 2003], and the Andersen Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond [Sept. 5-Oct. 26, 2003]. The tour concludes at the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Ga. [Nov. 22, 2003-Feb. 15, 2004]. The show is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Dan Cameron, Estill Curtis Pennington and David S. Rubin. Coinciding with the show at the New Orleans CAC was an exhibition of new work at Arthur Roger Gallery [Jan.4-25, 2003].

Author: Isabelle Loring Wallace is an assistant professor of modem and contemporary art at the University of New Orleans and a postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at Bryn Mawr College.

Image credits:

Aretha, Mysterious Lady of Sorrow, 1981, oil on canvas, 21 ¾ by 18 1/8 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Courtesy Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans.

Lacrima Christi High Seniors ’56, 1996, oil on panel, 20 by 16 inches. Collection Larry Dumont, Easton, Penn.

The Little Child Inside I, 1988, mixed-medium construction, 21 ¼ by 17 by 4 ½ inches. Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Courtesy Contemporary Art Center.

Kim and Ed-The Remix, 2001, oil on panel 17 ¾ by 16 inches. Private collection.

Nightflame, 1988, oil on canvas, 15 7/8 by 23 ¾ inches. Collection Noel Lee Dunn, Lewisville, N.C.

Mistaken Identity, 1991, oil on panel, 15 by 21 inches. Private collection.

Safe and Sound, 2002, oil on panel, 32 by 24 inches. New Orleans Museum of Art.