by Steve Garbarino, via The Advocate

Artist George Dureau left mark like few others

 

The Vieux Carre’s figurative freak flag dropped to half-staff last week when news circulated that one of the district’s last remaining embodiments of local color had faded to black.

George Dureau, one of the city’s most nationally recognized artist and a major player in the local arts scene from the 1970s through the ’90s, was dead at 83, having succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease.

While Dureau’s influence as a neo-classical master painter and boundary-shattering photographer reached far outside the Quarter, the impact of his passing hit hardest among the denizens of New Orleans’ oldest neighborhood, many of whom lament the loss of its bohemian traits as property values have increased and a wealthier set has moved in.

“The Quarter for so long has been identified by these tremendously eccentric people who exist without shadows, their personas are so large,” said Dureau’s longtime art dealer and friend Arthur Roger, who was 19 when he was introduced to the already established artist.

Destined to be both a visual artist (he was born dyslexic) and the consummate life of the party, Dureau was raised during the Great Depression in the Bayou St. John neighborhood and was formally educated in the fine arts at LSU, briefly studying architecture at Tulane. After an Army stint, he honed his skills dressing windows at Maison Blanche on Canal Street, then began showing his canvases and chalk drawings at Orleans Gallery, more of a French Quarter bohemian scene than a formal art space.

Informal showings of his figurative canvases followed in his new home, a spare but magnificent rental house on Esplanade Avenue, where he would photograph, paint and charcoal-sketch models he plucked from the city’s streets.

While the provocateur’s first official shows were held in the mid-’70s at Royal Street’s 927 Gallery, Arthur Roger would become his dealer from 1988 forward. Now Roger is helping to stage Dureau’s finale, a memorial service to be held at 1 p.m. Friday at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Patrick Taylor Library. The service will be open to the public.

“I’ve been looking around to find who might be a vestige of a replacement, and I just don’t see anyone,” said Dr. Brobson Lutz, a French Quarter neighbor who was 22 and entering medical school when he first met Dureau passing on his bicycle. “None, in any case, that could compete with that level of creativity and productivity, and who lived that kind of over-the-top life he shared with so many people.”

Dureau was hardly unaware of his endangered species status, said Lutz, who hosts frequent French Quarter dinner parties and owns a sprawling triptych by the artist. “I’m looking at him now,” he said, referring to the Dureau canvas that hangs in his dining room. “He’s looking down at me as we speak from above my dining table with those fiery nostrils and flowing hair. At least he’ll continue to hold court here.”

Other rare birds who once roamed the Quarter’s streets included “Tinker Bell,” a beloved Lucky Dog-vending drag queen; the “Chicken Man,” a voodoo showman whose act consisted of eating fire, handling snakes and sticking needles in his throat; “The Lady with the Cross,” who carried a cross and crawled on her knees down the sidewalk; and “Ruthie the Duck Lady,” who was often seen on roller skates or with ducks in tow.

An oft-repeated story goes that shortly after the passing of Eloise Lopez Arolo Samakintos (the lady with the cross), Dureau ran into his friend Ruthie Grace Moulon (the duck lady), who said to him with a mischievous smile, “There ain’t a whole lot of us left, George.” Moulon died in 2008.

“George ended up being the last of the Quarter’s characters of a certain magical era,” Lutz said. “From the ’60s through the ’80s, the Quarter was filled with them.”

Amid what’s now a galaxy of street performers, from silver-coated robots to “living statues,” one of the things that distinguished Dureau was that he had no shtick up his sleeve.

“He was bona fide,” Roger said. “George was always just … George. From the first time I met him when he was living in this magical house on Esplanade by Claiborne, he was comfortable in his own skin. From then on, there was no progressive development into a ‘character’ of sorts. He was simply high-low culture personified.”

His operatic carriage, old-world mannerisms and even the fact he often spoke of himself in the third person weren’t cultivated or put on, say his closest friends. And unlike so many veteran and self-described “Quarter rats,” he didn’t wear “downtown” as a badge of honor, turning up his nose at the city’s power structure or society-page fixtures.

On the contrary, Dureau shined in their company. “Uptown New Orleans loved him. Sure, they had their landscape paintings … but they bragged about their Dureaus,” said Roger, who christened his Julia Street gallery in 1988 with a black-tie opening of Dureau paintings. “George was the only artist I know that managed to make it acceptable to hang photographic nudes of African-American men in the grand mansions of the Garden District and Old Metairie.”

Dureau’s stark black-and-whites were dominated by muscular African-American nudes (many captured in full-frontal or backside-up views), including amputees and dwarfs. His longtime house butler also was a little person. And while bringing the underground to the surface would seem a daunting task, Dureau somehow managed, with his engaging personality and seduction skills, to traverse the most conservative parameters.

“George was very comfortable in that milieu,” Roger said. “And like Truman Capote before him, he had his ‘swans’ ” — benefactors and friends like Mickey Easterling, Sandra Freeman, Sunny Norman, Françoise Richardson and influential gallery owner Simonne Stern. “It wasn’t phony,” Roger said. “I saw a real emotional connection with them, a kind of chemistry they shared with him.”

Though Dureau was known to drag his Uptown friends to all-black corner bars and dance halls, he was “never really into a hipster downtown club scene,” Roger said. Instead he favored the café society sanctuaries he helped to cultivate at French Quarter restaurants such as Café Sbisa, where his bar-length mural still hangs, and Marti’s. Coincidentally, both have recently reopened.

But while his tastes were refined — and he often lived well beyond his means — there was a dichotomy to it all. While entertaining at home, it was customary for Dureau to serve prepared foods from Matassa’s Market on Dauphine Street accompanied by polished silver. “George never let you eat in his presence with stainless flatware,” Lutz said. “He loved his silver.”

While he would welcome in some strangers who stopped to admire his house and offer them a glass of red wine, he’d shout from his Barracks Street gallery at others walking their dogs: ‘Pick up your dog’s s–t!”

Sarah Benham, a New Orleans native now living in Dartmouth, Mass., met Dureau in 1964, and he became her lifelong mentor and traveling pal. “George was light years ahead of most people in New Orleans when it came to integration,” she said, “and because he was gay, there was a life he had that none of us knew much about.”

Mostly he brought the scene to him by staging house parties that included all types, from Uptown doyennes to Airline Highway hustlers. Somehow, over the years, Dureau managed to find some of the most majestic of rental digs, where he would host elaborate brunches, having tea with federal judges, ex-debutantes and restaurateurs in the same rooms where he would photograph a model with no arms, transforming him into a classical David statue, a mythological creature or arch royalty.

Many of his fringe subjects used aliases or boasted names such as Atlas, Tex, Troy, Long John and, most famously, B.J. Robinson, a straggly haired but handsome regular whose body ended at his waist. They often bartered their services for a meal, a drink or a room.

“From time to time, one of his subjects would steal his little black Jeep,” Benham said. “But he was very tolerant, and to my knowledge, he never pressed charges. He empathized with anyone less fortunate. There were always houseboys in his apartment, sweeping and straightening up. They came to George when they needed money, and he always seemed to find work for them. Some stole from him, but he never seemed to mind. Money meant nothing to him.”

“He wasn’t very good at balancing his checkbook,” Roger said, but according to Benham, “He never bought anything more expensive than his car.”

Lutz, however, said there were limits to Dureau’s generosity. “I learned from George to never answer your phone until it rings at least five times,” Lutz said. Many of his subjects, he explained, ended up in jail. “They’d call George to bail them out. After five collect rings, the phone would disconnect. That’s all you got in jail. If I rang him six times, then George would answer.”

Frugality and frivolity had a happy balance in his French Quarter world. “George was content with the basics in life: food, shelter, clothing,” Benham said. But Dureau knew how to complete a simple look with a deft touch: “He’d wear a Borsalino hat and knotted scarf, paired with black jeans, shined boots and a work shirt. That ensemble took him to any occasion in the city,” she said, mostly by bicycle, the mode of transportation he was seen riding on Royal Street the day after Katrina hit.

Its seat was always “chewed-up looking,” said his devoted caretaker and legal curator Katie Nachod, 62, a reference librarian at the Law Library of Louisiana whom he met — typically by happenstance — in his later years. “He liked it that way because it fit his ass.” (She once replaced it, only to find the new one mysteriously mangled.)

Benham and her husband, Dr. Andrew Spongberg, also a close friend, flew Dureau to their Massachusetts home to stay with them after the storm. “We thought he was just in shock from the experience,” she said, “but he was already beginning to suffer from the dementia that would claim his wonderfully creative mind.”

Dureau began visibly slipping in the past three years, with many mistaking him for a homeless man. Police were called to investigate disruptions at his apartment. He was destitute and often faced eviction. Led by Nachod, a relief fund was organized: the Friends of George. By the time of his death, more than 100 people whom he had touched somehow over the years had donated. Around $30,000 was raised to pay his debts.

“The French Quarter is still such a true community,” Nachod said. “They really rallied for him when he was going downhill. George had begun to look raggedy. He stopped dyeing his hair and beard. He didn’t smell very good. Everybody in the neighborhood looked out for him, making sure he wasn’t robbed and was OK: the deli, the bank on the corner where he didn’t even bank, the boucherie … they’d just give him coffee, a hug, whatever George needed.”

He also was moved from hospital to hospital, Nachod said. Old friends and acquaintances, missing his enlivening presence, would often show up out of the blue. One was a man who sat for portraits for Dureau in the 1960s. Teary-eyed and pleading, he asked: “Mr. George die?” On another occasion, a diminutive female bartender Dureau had charmed blocked two policemen from taking him to jail or having him committed.

Dureau eventually was moved to an assisted living facility in Kenner, and his friends auctioned off some of his personal effects to pay the bills.

Nachod said he maintained a strong body, good spirits, a sense of humor and at least part of his memory intact. Until his last days, she said, he sang along, loudly “and beautifully,” to one of his favorite tunes: Nina Simone’s “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl.”

George was George until the very end.