A move to establish a French Quarter Bohemian colony in 1920 eventually led to the Jackson Square fence becoming one of the world’s most beloved art galleries.

– by Michael Warner

 Back in 1851, the stately cast iron fence surrounding Jackson Square park was built with utility in mind – and for more than 180 years, it has performed that duty admirably, protecting the green-space gardens at night. But Baroness Pontalba, who reputedly designed the fence, couldn’t have imagined its eventual evolution into one of the most popular art galleries in the world.

Most New Orleanians have childhood memories of artists staking out space on the fence and a bit of ground along the banquette, where they showed colorful paintings of magnolias or bayous – fresh and smelling of linseed oil – or offered pastel portraits for a 30-minute sitting. And while it’s a beloved French Quarter feature for locals, the art colony is also a magnet for visitors seeking an authentic New Orleans experience and an artistic keepsake to take home.

Elaine Cummins, a second-generation Jackson Square artist, is aware of the mystique of the iron fence and its place in the story of New Orleans.

“A lot of the texture of Jackson Square is fiction and hyperbole,” she said.  “There’s an element of fanciful myth… But that’s part of the catalyst that has kept the artists creating so well.”

Should you ask artists on the Square when the outdoor art gallery began, some will tell you that John James Audubon used to sell his works around the Place d’Armes in the early 1820s. But this story is apocryphal. Part of the fanciful myth.

But when exactly did painters and sketchers begin to gather around the Square and display their art for sale?

The Fence

Beneath every painting is a support, whether canvas or panel or plaster wall. Similarly, artists could not hang their work on the Square today without the fence.

Micaela Almonester, Baroness de Pontalba, returned from France in the 1840s to her childhood home of New Orleans as an experienced businesswoman and real estate developer.[1],[2]

When the Baroness saw the Place d’Armes in the center of the Vieux Carré, it was little more than a muddy military parade field surrounded by a low iron fence and a variety of small houses and shops built by her father. And the plaza was perhaps cluttered with debris from demolition and construction.

Through the Baroness’ vision, and occasional battles with the city administration, the Place d’Armes was transformed, and by 1851 the plaza had come to resemble today’s Jackson Square, with its high fence and iron lamp posts. Bordered by St. Louis Cathedral and government buildings on the lake side, and flanked by the Upper and Lower Pontalba Building apartments, this neighborhood was to be a showcase of architecture and urban planning.

Slum and Salvation

By the early 20th century, however, the environment of Jackson Square had again changed—it had become an embarrassment to the uptown residents of the city, a slum threatened with demolition, a poor neighborhood largely of immigrant families and a handful of remaining Creoles. Laundry hung from the iron railings of the Pontalba Buildings, litter lined the streets, and alleys smelled of urine. Prostitutes called out to merchant sailors who arrived at the nearby wharfs.

But a handful of urban saviors saw art in the architecture and forged a loose alliance to save the French Quarter, names like writer Lyle Saxon, artist Alberta Kinsey, socialites Martha Westfeldt and Elizabeth Werlein, and businessman Ben Casanas. Gay preservationists like Allison Owen and William Ratcliffe Irby were also pivotal in preventing the wholesale demolition.

Part of the plan was to reinvent Jackson Square as a “Mecca of Bohemians” that would surpass Greenwich Village of New York. “Natives of [New Orleans] cannot realize the wealth of material for artists, writers and musicians to be found here,” proclaimed advice columnist Dorothy Dix in a 1919 interview.[3]

By late 1920, the Pontalba Buildings had been purchased by preservationists and plans were in place to rent inexpensive living space to artists and musicians, an effort to seed a Bohemian colony. Soon, newspaper ads began to offer Pontalba Building studios and apartments to “Clubs, Bachelors and Artists,” a potent mix.[4]

The newly-formed Artist Guild (the fore-runner of the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans) held an art exhibit on January 18, 1921, in a building at the corner of Royal and Conti Streets.[5]  

Though the show was successful, there were skeptics. Art critic Keith Temple groused as loudly as anyone.

But Bohemia. No trace of it. No champagne; no Trilbies; no bobbed curls, except on the society girls who had just ‘dropped in;’ no queer-looking types, not even a long-haired man; no outbursts of temperament; no blasé utterances or affected poses, nothing but disappointments. ...Well, it’s dead, gone and buried, sho’nuf.[6]

The lack of champagne was no surprise—it was Prohibition, after all. The Bohemians probably had to settle for bootleg liquor.  

Despite Temple’s cynicism, the die was cast. Artists painted in the Square. Students sketched from live models in the Pontalba Buildings. Galleries held exhibitions that spilled into St. Peter and St. Ann Streets. In May 1922, what was perhaps the Quarter’s first dedicated art supply store, the Maison d’Art, opened at 623 Royal Street, less than two blocks from the Square.[7]

Lyle Saxon penned a lengthy response to Temple documenting the New Orleans artist colony as a fact! “There’s new life coming to the French Quarter,” he announced in the Times-Picayune.[8] The Quarter was still a model of urban decay, but Saxon was optimistic that the rebirth had begun.   

French Night

A symbol of that rebirth came the evening of October 16, 1922, which found thousands of women and men listening to brass bands and dancing in the streets around Jackson Square in honor of French Night—a celebration of the American Legion and the soldiers’ return from the Great War.

This presented the new artist colony with their first grand street festival, and an opportunity to hold open houses with refreshments and dancing in the studios and galleries of the Pontalba Buildings. “Everyone is to be hail fellow, well met,” wrote Saxon.[9]

Scores of adults and children wore French peasant costumes, while shops and coffeehouses stayed open well into the small hours. “Every restaurant and coffee house in the Quarter will have tables and chairs upon the sidewalk, ‘just like in Paris,’ and there will be out-of-door service at these tables.”[10]

From then, and through the 1930s, the artist community grew rapidly around the Square and elsewhere.

Like Attracted Like  

Word of a growing Bohemian scene in New Orleans soon drew other interesting personalities. William Faulkner arrived in 1924 and took up residence in an apartment on Pirates Alley, hardly a block from the Square. There, he wrote his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, and with his roommate William Spratling, created the endearing booklet, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles.[11] 

Book shops and tea rooms popped up, such as Martha Westfeldt’s Green Shutter, Mary Wood’s Courtyard Kitchen book shop,[12] and the Pelican Book Shop on Royal Street.

And what can be greater evidence of a robust Bohemian colony than a Modernist literary magazine based in New Orleans? The Double Dealer, published from 1921 to 1926 by Julius Weiss Friend drew early works by Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder and Hart Crane, among others.

A Banner Year

It’s no surprise that a menagerie of clubs, bachelors and artists would make a rowdy bunch.

A newspaper report from 1927 declared that artists in the top floors of the Lower Pontalba Building were afraid the city might tear down a political campaign banner slung across lamp posts at Jackson Square.

The sign supported a candidate for governor, Riley J. Wilson, and had been posted there by an Old Regular leader of the Fifth Ward.

Some thought the sign an eyesore. But “Artist residents of the square declared the banner added much to the beauty of the spot where most of the early history of New Orleans transpired. They were apprehensive lest the city authorities should learn of its presence and order its removal.”[13]

A beautiful banner, they called it. A beautiful target, in fact, for their new air rifles.

Open Air

It was not until the early 1930s that artists formally began to show works in the open air of Jackson Square.

The country was deep in the Great Depression, and the image of a starving artist was not hyperbole. One day in early December, Mrs. I.I. Lemann, an uptown socialite, answered a knock at her door to find an artist-acquaintance “with a stove under one arm and a painting under the other” after he had been evicted from his room.

Lemann got together with Elizabeth Werlein—a name well known to New Orleans music students of a certain age—and organized a two-day exhibition to furnish “assistance to painters, etchers, sculptors and others in art work who are in need.”[14] 

On December 17 and 18, 1932, artists were to staff booths around the Square, where they could barter or sell their works. In the background, a jazz band with dancers and tin pan musicians provided entertainment. 

Most artists shivered under the arcade of the Cabildo on these frigid days, and huddled around smoky coal-burning braziers to keep warm. The sale was a success, though. Many traded canvases for meal tickets or suits of clothing, and sometimes for cash.[15] Popular artists Knute and Colette Pope Heldner, and Clarence Millet were among the exhibitors.

The success of the December show was quickly followed by a public exhibition in Pirates Alley and Royal Street on February 25-27, 1933.[16] Rather than booths, however, the artwork was hung directly on the black iron fence of St. Anthony’s Garden, behind St. Louis Cathedral. Warmer weather enticed a larger crowd to attend.

Photographs on the cover of a catalogue published in 2000 by the Jean Bragg Gallery likely document this event, with participation by numerous artists, included the Heldners and Millet, and also Warren Reed, the Baroness Lucienne de St. Mart, Alberta Kinsey, George Castleden, Jean Jackson and nameless others.[17]

They repeated their success in 1934, and then—silence. Some artists on their own initiative probably hung works in the Alley. But it was not until 1937 that organized shows resumed, in association with the annual New Orleans Spring Fiesta celebration.

Thereafter, exhibitions occurred once or twice a year in Pirates Alley and Royal Street, except in 1945, at the height of World War II. In 1947, Wiley S. Churchill formed the Pirates Alley Outdoor Art Show Group to manage the exhibition for the Spring Fiesta.[18]

The Move to Jackson Square

In 1948, the New York Daily News ran a travel story that described artists working on Chartres Street, right at the Square, as they painted canvases of St. Louis Cathedral.[19] But it’s hard to find mention of artists selling their wares directly on Jackson Square. 

Elaine Cummins has a theory for this. There was still a courthouse in the Presbytère, she says, across from Jackson Square. And there was heavy traffic, with autos angle-parked all around the block. And sidewalks were still made of uneven slate or cobblestone. “So it’s really not an inviting environment for artists to set up and show their work. It would be like setting up your easel in the Central Business District.”

Finally, on October 15, 1949, the Pirates Alley Outdoor Art Show Group held an exhibition directly on Jackson Square, and independently of Spring Fiesta.[20] In following years, their biannual exhibits were large enough that Pirates Alley could no longer contain them, and they spilled onto the Square, sometimes to be joined by the Round Table Writers’ Group, an association of poets.[21] 

By November of 1952, individual painters on the Square were so well-established that sixth grade students from Morgan City took field trips to New Orleans to watch “professional artists at work.”[22]

The site eventually eclipsed Pirates Alley in popularity. In 1954, the first of a long series of disputes over allocation of space around the Square resulted in a permitting system, and even a waiting list to secure a license.

And so it happened—artists on the square had become a tourist attraction. One 1959 guidebook described the scene: “The French Quarter is swarming with café and sidewalk artists, particularly around Jackson Square; they will do your portrait (or that of your favorite movie star, copied from a photograph) in fifteen minutes flat, charcoal or pastel.”[23] Yet the artists remain loved and welcomed by New Orleanians.

Pioneer

Few women worked in Pirates Alley or on Jackson Square in those early days when artists had begun to hang their pictures on a daily basis. Alberta Kinsey was there, of course; She was one of the best-known early 20th century New Orleans painters, and among the most respected of eccentric French Quarter characters. There were not many other women.

But Cummins’ mother, Saundra Bolen, was a pioneer. In 1963, Bolen first tried to set up her easel in Pirates Alley, which  almost exclusively had male artists. Cummins says the attitude was, “Hey lady, how dare you come out here and take bread out of our families’ baskets?”

But Bolen was already a single mom, only 24 or 25 years old. She had to feed a family too. So she stayed with it and carved out a living in the Alley and on the Square for decades, in what Cummins calls “the ass-end of the earning spectrum.”

So when did independent artists first regularly sell their works from the fence rails of the Square? It was probably in the late 1940s, as organized art exhibits began to spread out of Pirates Alley and no city regulations yet existed to govern the displays. On September 8, 1970, the streets on three sides of Jackson Square—except Decatur Street—became a pedestrian mall and essentially all automobile traffic was banned.

The style of art on Jackson Square has changed considerably in recent years. Portraitists and magnolia-painters are hard to find. Fortune tellers and human statues crowd the pedestrian walkway. But the artists are still there and promise to be around as long as there’s space on the ironwork fence.

[1] Roulhac Toledano, The National Trust Guide to New Orleans: The Definitive Guide to Architectural and Cultural Treasures (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996), 10.

[2] Nathaniel Courtlandt Curtis, New Orleans: Its Old Houses, Shops and Public Buildings (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott Company, 1933), 82.

[3] Times-Picayune, “New Orleans Art Center will Rival New Lork [sic] Latin Quarter,” January 26, 1919, p. 9.

[4] Times-Picayune, Advertisement, January 13, 1921, p. 17.

[5] Times-Picayune, “Artists to Exhibit Work Downtown,” January 16, 1921, p. 16.

[6] Keith Temple, “Bohemia in New Orleans Myth, Says Investigator,” Times-Picayune, January 31, 1921, p. 6.

[7] Times-Picayune, “Art and Artists,” May 28, 1922, p. 12.

[8] Lyle Saxon, “New Orleans’ Vieux Carre Now Coming Into Its Own,” Times-Picayune Sunday Magazine, April 16, 1922, p. 3.

[9] Lyle Saxon, “Vieux Carre to Throw Open Doors for Legion Visitors,” Times-Picayune, October 1, 1922, p. 9.

[10] Times-Picayune, “French Quarter to Revive Memory of Legion for Paris,” October 13, 1922, p. 2.

[11]John Shelton Reed, Dixie Bohemia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), pp. 14-16. 

[12] Times-Picayune, “My Own Fifi,” January 11, 1925, sec. 3, p. 2.

[13] Times-Picayune, “Artists Fear City Might Tear Down Campaign Sign,” December 8, 1927, p. 3.

[14] Times-Picayune, “All in Readiness for Artists’ Sale,” December 17, 1932, p. 6.

[15] Times-Picayune, “Work of Artists Hailed as Bazar Opens in Arcade,” December 18, 1932, p. 16.

[16] Times-Picayune, “Paintings Shown by City’s Artists,” February 27, 1933, sec. 2, p. 13.        

[17] Jean Bragg Gallery, Knute Heldner and the Art Colony in Old New Orleans (New Orleans: The Jean Bragg Gallery, 2000), cover.

[18] Times-Picayune, “Art Show Meeting Set for Thursday,” October 25, 1947, p. 7.

[19] Sanford Jarrell, “Jackson Square,” New York Daily News, July 8, 1948, p. 60.

[20] Times-Picayune, “Pirates Alley Art Show is Arranged,” October 12, 1949, p. 19.

[21] Times-Picayune, “Poets, Artists Display Works,” May 6, 1951, p. 28.

[22] The Review (Morgan City, Louisiana), November 28, 1952, p 16.

[23] Oliver Evans, New Orleans (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1959), 13.