George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans
George Dureau in the 1707 Esplanade studio in 1977, photo by Sarah Benham Spongberg, courtesy UPM
April 2025This new book by Howard Philips Smith takes a deep dive into the mythos – and the contemporary influences – of the iconic French Quarter artist, the late George Dureau.
- by Thomas Uskali
photos courtesy University Press of Mississippi
This column is underwritten in part by Karen Hinton & Howard Glaser
For many New Orleanians, Dureau’s name brings to mind sumptuous brushstrokes, subtle gradations of color and tone that capture strong, languid figures in paint, charcoal, and photographs. His art is confident, intimate, sensual, louche, and redolent with re-imagined mythology.
Fittingly, Howard Philips Smith’s George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans is gloriously overwhelming in its scope. His writing builds from a sturdy backbone of scholarship and research that makes this an engrossing compendium.
To wit: “Dureau channeled the essence of the city of New Orleans into his prolific artwork, which explored almost exclusively the figure in his painting, drawing, and photography, deftly dancing back and forth between the three mediums with masterful depictions of back-of-town neighborhood denizens, friends and lovers, and most assuredly those who were on the fringes of society, especially midgets and dwarfs, the handicapped, the deformed, the so-called thugs, homosexuals, and grifters.”
Published in March 2025 by University Press of Mississippi. Click anywhere on the cover to order from your favorite Indie bookstore.
Smith takes a masterful tack; he presents Dureau’s life and work in the main portion while also addressing relevant social and artistic history. He then spotlights selected artists in their own sections.It’s an elegant way to showcase an otherwise unwieldy range of talent. The experience is like taking a gallery walk on a beautiful night with well-connected folks.
Smith includes photos from art openings and gatherings that are envy-inspiring in the way they capture the ethos of the “in crowd.” And there are stops at Marti’s, Café Sbisa, Miss Dixie’s Bar of Music, Restaurant Jonathan, La Casa de los Marinos, Café Lafitte (and Lafitte’s in Exile) that remind readers of New Orleans’ art scene’s intertwining worlds.
Each section contributes organically to the whole, with overlapping stories and chronologies of what folks remembered. There are tales of rivalries, bar fights, artistic slights, and accounts of “who said what to whom” that take readers from the 1950s to post-Katrina New Orleans.
Smith sure-handedly addresses the various influences on Dureau and his work, including classical art and architecture, racial tensions, circuses, the midget wrestling circuit, tent revival meetings, homosexuality, and street trade.
The Historic New Orleans Collection was a core resource for this monumental work; as Daniel Hammer notes in his foreword, THNOC “houses most of the materials consulted by Smith in the making of this book.”
Hammer also reminds us that “we have the capacity not only to create, but also to preserve,” and “as you read, consider also what else is out there, and how it will be known in the future.”
Smith makes that charge easy with clear, compelling prose. The extensive thumbnail photos and images that accompany the text offer their own visual narrative, and they echo Dureau’s love of photographic contact sheets that hung all around his studio.
Smith opens with “Studio as Theatre,” an apt analogy for the way Dureau worked and lived, whether in one of his Esplanade studios, on North Rampart above Gigi’s Bar, the expansive Dauphine studio at Barracks, or even his small refuge on Bienville toward the end of his life.
Dureau was a native New Orleanian who grew up the Bayou St. John neighborhood, a beloved only child who “grew up amid these hot and humid atmospheres and instinctively knew he would thrive here like a hothouse flower, whose roots delved deep in this swampy soil.”
George Dureau in front of his 1964 painting of La Casa de los Marinos, courtesy The Times and UPM
He attended St. Aloysius High School, endured 4 years of military service (stylishly, according to sources), studied art at Louisiana State University, and worked in Canal Street department stores while working toward full-time devotion to his art.
By the early 1960s, Dureau had begun selling enough to make the shift, and he perfected his technique through sketching, reworking, and building the classical influences that became his signature.
Dureau moved from abstract art to the human figure in the early 1960’s, when Abstract Expressionism was a driving force in the art world. Dureau recalls painting a landscape along the levee in a small downriver town; a neighbor came to watch him, and Dureau painted him into the scene; “the figure took over the landscapes after that.”
La Casa de los Marino, 1964 by George Dureau, image courtesy UPM
His art and photographs pushed the boundaries of propriety, and after a harsh critique in 1971, he retreated for a time, but with the encouragement of George DeVille, who championed his work at his gallery, Dureau became established among the most important collectors in the city.
As William Fagaly notes: “Who else was able to convince Uptown society matrons to hang naked black men with their most enviable attributes above their dining room tables but the master magician himself, George Valentine Dureau?”
His photographs are often compared with those of Robert Mapplethorpe, who visited New Orleans in 1979 and was “obsessed with” Dureau’s work. Their “tenuous friendship” became strained after Mapplethorpe’s fast rise in the New York art scene, and Dureau reportedly felt “overlooked.” Smith offers a thoughtful appraisal of the differences between the two, noting Dureau’s sense of compassion for his artistic subjects, versus Mapplethorpe’s emotional distance.
Robert Mapplethorpe in 1979, photographed by George Dureau, courtesy UPM
Mapplethorpe as the devil, 1983, by George Dureau, Ogden Museum of Southern Art
As Dureau himself noted: “We all are painfully inadequate in one way or another, either psychologically or physically. And usually, it is those ideas that I want to express. And I think it is very important to create from unhappy ideas. More important art comes from unhappy realizations.”
Art critic Terrington Calas wrote about Dureau’s 1979 exhibition at Gallery DeVille: “In one enormous print he portrays a legless man, balancing himself on one hand. Several days after seeing the show I am still struck by the sheer poetry Dureau created from that image. Only a special love for humanity could effect this and not even mistakenly inject bathos or ridicule.”
By 1988 Dureau was represented solely by Arthur Roger, who played a key role in bringing Dureau to an international audience, establishing yearly exhibitions of his work.
Having spent time with him over the years, I can attest that Dureau carried his own mythos with him; his dark eyes sized up those who neared him, and he could turn from boyishly flirtatious to grandly judgmental in a godlike flash. His work demonstrated a similar blend of whimsy and seriousness, with majestic figures bearing reminders of human frailty.
Author Howard Philip Smith, photo by Michael Joseph Bonnet
Over 200 pages of the volume are devoted to Dureau’s photographs, accompanied by fascinating mini essays that are as well-written and researched as anything from the main text. This is again a testament to Smith’s diligence and expertise. Of special note is how he incorporates the stories of Dureau’s models, giving them life beyond the photographs with honesty and empathy.
Three sections on New Orleans artists from the 1980s are worthy of an entirely separate review. Smith has chosen 24 contemporaries of Dureau and who were in his sphere of influence.
In “Dangerous Visions” he presents Jacqueline Bishop, Douglas Bourgeois, George Febres, among others; “Photography as Excavation” includes the work of Tina Freeman, John H. Lawrence, and Josephine Sacabo; and in “Art in the Time of AIDS” are found Jeffrey Cook, Robert Gordy, and Christopher Guarisco.
The accompanying photographs are a rich reminder of these artists’ significance, both aesthetically and culturally.
Smith returns to Dureau in “Absolution from Bewilderment” to briefly chronicle his final years. Dureau rode out Katrina’s landfall in August 2005 but was evacuated and spent months in Massachusetts with friends. He returned to his water-damaged studio on Dauphine and soon moved to the 500 block of Bienville.
Dureau began to exhibit symptoms of dementia, “that awful disease that robbed him of part of his reason.” He was gently and patiently overseen by the “FOG” (Friends of George) who eventually helped settle him at a care facility in the suburb of Kenner, where he died in 2014.
In his Appendix, Smith includes the full text of ten interviews that were part of his research. Being able to read what scholars call “primary sources” offers a wealth of insights and insider stories that might otherwise have been edited out.
Readers are going to love reading these, especially when Benjamin Morrison and Jonathan Webb get a full head of gossipy steam going. The section ends with W. Kenneth Holditch’s achingly elegant eulogy for Dureau.
If there are any quibbles to note in this massive work, they’re in the realm of minor misspellings and the oddly small photographs of most of Dureau’s paintings. However, the wealth of images in this enormous (nearly 500 pages) volume more than compensates.
Scholar and friend of Dureau, W. Kenneth Holditch, commented that “revisiting and exploring the entire oeuvre of George Dureau is ‘much akin to alchemy and the search for the fabled Philosopher’s Stone.’
To achieve this goal, the alchemist in so doing is always searching for a way to square the circle, a task proved impossible by Euclidean geometry, and thus understanding the entirety of Dureau’s work might prove impossible as well; but by including his archives, his personal papers, his videotape collection, and his book collection, all of these items further square the impossible circle of George Dureau and his Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art).
And in this work by Howard Phillips Smith, who has amassed, researched, and distilled, Smith has given his readers the opportunity to engage in some artistic alchemy of their own.
“Bacchus,” in the Bacchus Room at Arnaud’s Restaurant, by George Dureau, 1980s. Courtesy Arnaud’s Restaurant
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