The Earthly Delights of Bourgeois’s America

By Dan Cameron

Douglas Bourgeois hails from St. Amant, Louisiana, where he has lived and worked since 1981 and where his family has resided for several generations. That would seem to make him the kind of artist who, some years ago, would have been labeled “regional.” A fantasy-based realist with a penchant for intimately scaled paintings crammed with detail, Bourgeois would be a full-fledged regionalist if he depicted the distinctive life and culture that distinguish his semirural environment. One of the recurrent joys of his art, however, is his near-palpable disdain for subject matter that smacks in any way of hometown boosterisin, the joys of living close to nature, or nostalgia for bygone days. Instead, most of his work reveals a deep sensitivity toward broader sociocultural issues, which are deftly woven beneath the surface of paintings that fuse private fantasy with a kind of social document. Acutely sensitive, perhaps, to the possible contradictions implicit in being a small-town artist grappling with issues of a much larger and more tumultuous society, Bourgeois magnifies the daydreams of a visual diarist, residing happily at the art world’s geographical fringe.

Not all of Bourgeois’s subjects emerge directly from popular culture, but a majority of his paintings are valentines to his abiding passions: music and movies. Especially when he portrays recognizable musical artists, we are acutely aware of experiencing them via the subjectivity of an avid, unapologetic fan. Even those paintings the artist has completely fabricated suggest an artistic sensibility that is constantly replenished by the latest songs, TV programs, commercial products, and consumerist mores. But there are other connections between Bourgeois and his subjects that reflect a deep probing into the American psyche. Despite his fan status, he repeatedly depicts his characters at a metaphorical crossroads, where they experience a strong pull between destiny and free will.

At one level, the intensity of Bourgeois’s identification with the position of the outsider, coupled with the preponderance of female soul singers and male Adonises in his work, reflects a gay outlook that is both ironically campy and unabashedly idolatrous. At another level, he lives out, through his paintings, the dream of a fully biracial existence. For those who strain against the many cultural obstacles that hinder efforts to reconcile one’s own experience of American identity with that of Americans whose realities may be worlds apart, Bourgeois’s projection of a life fully integrated in terms of both race and class is more than merely ideal. For example, his 1981 painting Edgar Allan Poe Appears to a Ronette, which suggests the fusion of two important but seemingly unrelated figures, is an act of sheer willfulness based on a melding of Victorian America and modern-day American popular culture. Bourgeois’s insistence that they both belong within the same sweeping vision can also be interpreted as an argument that the singer Ronnie Spector”s lifelong fight for legitimization parallels Poe’s struggle against largely private demons. Both fit the mold of eternally misunderstood artist, but Spector faced the additional danger posed by a pop-culture ethic that erases anybody attempting to wrest the spotlight away from more youthful success stories. In positioning Spector as Poe’s equal in the dimensions of her tragedy, Bourgeois also elevates a bit of rock n’ roll arcanum to the status of historical event.

Bourgeois’s musical tributes intentionally honor relatively underrated rhythm-and-blues or soul artists such as Florence Ballard, William (Bootsy) Collins, Morris Day, Fishbone, Little Eva, and Joyce Sims. In this pantheon is a place for anyone whose musical stylizations, personal idiosyncrasies, or both have prompted him to ponder the vicissitudes of fame and the pursuit of immortality. Two recurrent figures in this parade are Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, whom Bourgeois admiringly celebrates. His painting Al Green at 3 O’clock, 1983, however, recognizes a lower-tier performer and seems a forerunner of some of Bourgeois’s later excursions into the darker corners of the human soul. The artist finds it particularly meaningful and vivid to depict, the pathos and struggles of mass-culture figures in paintings that affirm what he sees as the dignity of our common strivings for spiritual well-being.

The hybrid nature of Bourgeois’s cast of characters and repertoire of incidents is not limited to music or the movies; nor is it exhausted in the ways he handles private eroticism and racial matters. In fact, the most pervasive manifestation of that hybridity is Bourgeois’s highly self-conscious adaptation of the visual idiom of the self-taught painter. In his paintings’ centralized compositions, naive rendering of faces, and blending of fact with fantasy, he pays tribute to a regional visual culture that has produced many remarkable self-taught artists of the past century. He is, of course, a university-trained professional artist and a socially responsible adult who cannot permit himself to be mistaken for someone who is self-taught. Indeed, one distinctive attribute of his work is that it presents a worldview at once urban, contemporary, and culturally nuanced.

Of course, some of the most significant self-taught painters of our time have also pursued a predominantly urban idiom, so it is not entirely inappropriate to connect part of the lineage that informs Bourgeois’s work to the blues, soul, and jazz artists celebrated by the New Orleans tourism industry. In Louisiana, a state with a distinctive musical culture, painters in particular are attracted to the aura of excitement surrounding great singers and instrumentalists. At the same time, there are significant distinctions between rendering the faces of blues or jazz artists, on the one hand, and conjuring an entirely self-contained visual world on the other. In Bourgeois’s art, a further distinction is drawn between musical subjects who may be accurately described as legends and those whose followers resemble cults. In his 1982 portrait of Morris Day, for example, Bourgeois surrounds his subject’s face with some material attributes of a ladies’ man, which is the image that Day, lead singer of a group called the Time, projected. While the painting incorporates references to women’s shoes, perfume, jewelry, and fast cars, it also includes two floating packs of cigarettes, with the brand name intentionally misspelled to express the fact that Day was seen as an embodiment of cool. Similarly, in his 1981 homage to the singer Florence Ballard, Bourgeois highlights the fact that Ballard, one of the original Supremes, never received the same attention bestowed on lead singer Diana Ross and on the group’s producer, Motown founder Berry Gordy. By giving Ballard star treatment in his painting and relegating the others to the background. Bourgeois not only rejects the imposed hierarchy of pop-music history but also expresses his sympathy for the potential star who was overlooked.

While Bourgeois’s excursions into the high-camp territory of homages to writers, actors, singers, and other romantic figures surpass what most artists have accomplished in this genre, these works constitute only a portion of his output; and most of them were painted during the first decade of his career. Yet these powerful images laid the groundwork for the quite different forms of composition that Bourgeois would begin pursuing in the mid-1980s. The turning point in this phase of his artistic development is evident in the dense crowd scene in Burning Orchid Nightclub (1984), a three-by-four-foot canvas packed with nearly one hundred figures. Until this point, only one or two individuals populated a Bourgeois painting, but Burning Orchid Nightclub reflects the artist’s desire to recognize a social milieu that represents America’s ongoing experiment with pluralism. Black and white, gay and straight, single and partnered, punk and princess, beautiful and plain, the patrons of this Utopian establishment embody the possibility that people of different backgrounds and realities can mingle and play together harmoniously. Historically, Burning Orchid Nightclub refers to Florine Stettheimer’s eccentric evocations of New York high society in the 1920s, and it prefigures works such as Faith Ringgold’s whimsical depictions of urban crowds in her quilt-painting Subway Graffiti #3 (1987). In these examples, as in Bourgeois”s animated party scene, the artists’ desire to convey the individuality of each person represented creates an unintentional blurring, as if the true face of humanity becomes a kind of mosaic of difference, brought together through a constant merging of identities, resulting in the ultimate hybrid.

A year after painting Burning Orchid Nightclub, Bourgeois began constructing scenes in which tragic, or at least melancholy, situations were played out by seemingly anonymous characters in an atmosphere of heightened fantasy. In an early example, They Dreamed They Were Lost (1986), a miniature man and woman, dressed for a stroll along city streets, wander transfixed through a nocturnal landscape. Blades of grass tower over their heads, and a hovering moth looks almost threatening. The body language of the man and woman suggests that they don’t know each other very well and that they cannot see the male corpse lying at the bottom of the image. Another man and woman, naked and hiding in the weeds, watch the first couple warily, as if contemplating whether to hide, flee, or add them to their list of victims. The gothic overtones of romance and danger are here intertwined, putting us at the threshold of a moment that may shatter the frail illusions of the unsuspecting couple—or leave them blissfully oblivious.

An ominous atmosphere also pervades the 1988 painting Nightflame, in which a woman stands, lost in thought, in her decrepit apartment, her head slightly bowed, eyes closed, and fingers pointing outward, as if contemplating the slashed chiffon ball gown she wears. The pendant on her necklace contains a photograph of an unidentified man (representing one of Chile’s “missing” citizens of the 1970s, and around her waist is a sash belt made from barbed wire. A row of three windows frames the belching smokestacks of a nearby chemical plant. The focus here is on the woman’s struggle for dignity. Perhaps she has reached a turning point in her life and is now summoning up the courage to break with the past and start anew. Many of Bourgeois’s later paintings deal, as does this one, with urban tension by depicting a single, theatrically mysterious scene.

A vein of social critique, connected to his observations of daily life, runs through much of Bourgeois’s work of the 1990s. It is evident, for example, in his various portraits of African-American men and women. For the most part, these are not paintings of celebrities, but the artist nonetheless accords them a heroic treatment. The subject of Woman from St. Gabriel (1991) clearly possesses supernatural powers, since she has charmed the depicted reptiles and insects to act as her protectors. Her most striking feature is her beauty, which does not seduce so much as envelop the viewer in its radiant energy. The man with closed eyes whose face fills the center of Sanctuary (1994) has the enviable ability to derive deep satisfaction from the ordinary things of life—nature, red beans and rice, cars, coffee—that encircle him like a wreath of religious icons. Even within the broad category of his paintings of well-known musicians, Bourgeois is especially interested in black popular music, which helps explain why there are more paintings of Aretha Franklin in his oeuvre than of anyone else and why, in each of them, he gives the singer the stature of a goddess. When one pauses to consider the abundance of contemporary images associating black American culture with violence and poverty, Bourgeois’s steady focus on the inner and outer beauty of African-American life seems all the more compelling.

In some of his work, Bourgeois communicates his concern over the erosion of respect for individual and cultural differences. The painting Mistaken Identity (1991) shows a policeman who has burst into the bathroom of a nude man who is shaving and pointed a pistol at his head. The tension is heightened by the jarring contrast between the fully clothed cop and the naked suspect. Even the title is alarming; too many innocent people have been victims of mistaken identity. In Scapegoat Cabaret (1991), Bourgeois has lined up a few individuals representing minorities, immigrants, and the poor in general; they comprise an integrated trio of single-parent families. It appears as though each of them is about to take a turn entertaining a row of callous spectators. But their facial expressions make it clear that they are under no illusions about what the world in general, or the torturer partially hidden behind the curtain, have in store for them. In The Development (1993), two front yards stand side by side; the one belonging to the modern, suburban house is perfectly manicured, while the yard next door is overgrown. Although not a metaphoric statement about race per se, The Development makes the visual argument that your neighbor’s world is a realm unto itself and that the only limit to personal freedom is the border dividing your neighbor’s property from yours.

Several of Bourgeois’s paintings from the early 1990s transpose social and cultural tensions to domestic surroundings, playing out national problems on an intimate stage. Unlike the explicitly political works cited above, these paintings are often narratively oblique. In Dreaming of Home (1993), a nude woman reclines on a bed in a dreary urban room (her window faces a brick wall) with dilapidated furniture. She holds to her midriff a handful of autumn leaves; her surroundings bespeak her frustrated longings, the sole exception being a top dresser drawer that has been pulled open to reveal a grove of miniature trees. For a moment, the border between reality and dream is suspended, as we experience an unmistakable confusion at seeing something that we know cannot exist appear within a commonplace physical and emotional setting.

In two paintings dealing with kitchens, Bourgeois seems to alert us to the possibility of random miracles unfolding wherever one looks. In Refrigerator (1994), a pale, dark-haired woman in a slinky maroon dress sensually caresses her shoulder as she reaches into the refrigerator for some milk. The refrigerator, its doors hanging open, is packed with groceries but also with such incongruous items as a gun, a globe, and dolls’ heads. A doll-shaped cake sits forlornly on the checkerboard-pattern linoleum floor, one corner crumbling away; an overturned can of beets near the painting’s right edge implies further disarray beyond the frame. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the origin of the malaise in these works, the feeling of unease is nonetheless palpable. The kitchen in Refrigerator is sufficiently modern to suggest middle-class stability, but the underlying disorder is directly related to the woman”s discordant glamour. She seems oblivious to her surroundings, as though detached from the larger reality she happens to occupy. In a related painting, The Kitchen (1990), a young man dressed only in blue boxer shorts stares blankly at a pile of dirty dishes in his kitchen sink. Meanwhile, a divine apparition appears at the window in the form of a miniature dark-skinned virgin typical of Mexican and Andean colonial-era religious paintings. The fact that the man seems as oblivious to this religious vision as he does to the dishes suggests that he is unable to make a fundamental connection to his own surroundings and is therefore beyond redemption. This scene is a metaphor regarding the place of divine revelation in everyday life, and it also expresses the artist’s belief that the world is full of individuals struggling toward self-realization.

Through his wide array of subjects, Bourgeois has created a pictorial world unlike that of any other contemporary artist. While it would be presumptuous and misleading to discuss that world in terms of its relative state of innocence, we can isolate the artist’s desire to share with his viewers something extraordinary that the subjects he paints are often incapable of embracing. In Bourgeois’s America, we are not necessarily all born equal, but we each have an opportunity to transform and enhance our lives. The sole means of escaping the limits of our individuality is through immersion in the material world—not for the sake of economic gain but to restore our vitality through the fuller employment of our senses. The myriad details in his paintings testily to the richness of the physical world, which, if appreciated properly, would provide us with the support and connection we need to overcome our mortal limitations. Even with its frequent allusions to religious ideals of redemption, Bourgeois”s art is deeply rooted in the conviction that being fully alive means exploring the infinite ways of being human.