Noel Rockmore, ‘Picasso of New Orleans,’ revisited

NEW ORLEANS — In the four-block radius where he painted and drank himself into frightening stupors, Noel Rockmore was known by the denizens of the French Quarter as an outrageous Pablo Picasso-like figure who combined the mythological and the real. He produced 15,000 oil paintings, temperas, collages and sketches during his career, then died in obscurity.

His life was that of an American outsider and a throwback to Europe’s great expressionistic and hedonistic masters.

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(AP/AP) - Noel Rockmore's 1972 ‘Self Portrait in Paris.’

In the 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a bright, young American artist who had a taste for Rembrandt and figurative paintings, with the outlook of an American social realist.

Then the art world changed: Abstract expressionism — typified by the paint throwing of Jackson Pollock — became the rage. Rockmore, who admired draftsmanship, detested it.

He changed: He left his wife and three children, changed his last name and headed to New Orleans in 1959, where he would eventually be lost to the New York art world.

The story of Rockmore, born Noel Montgomery Davis, is getting a long-overdue audience outside New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art renaissance six years after Hurricane Katrina. Until the end of January, his works are on view at the LaGrange Art Museum in LaGrange, Ga., southwest of Atlanta. The retrospective is called “Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore.”

“He was kind of an art hobo,” said Ethyl Ault, interim director of the LaGrange Art Museum.

She said Rockmore was an overlooked genius. “Was it politics? Did he offend people?”

The show is based on nearly 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units after Katrina. For 25 years, Shirley Marvin, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with the intention of making him famous one day. But she forgot about the collection because of short-term memory loss, her family said.

The extraordinary collection was gathering dust when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in October 2006, a year after Katrina, to get “a few paintings,” as his mother described it. Instead, they found the units packed with remnants of Rockmore’s life.

With the discovery, Rich and wife Tee Marvin have become the agents Rockmore famously refused to have throughout his life as he willfully lived on the edge of the art world. He was notorious among art galleries for his temper and fits of outrage.

The Marvins — working with Rockmore’s family, art dealers, collectors and museum curators — have begun cataloguing his works and promoting him. They estimate he produced 15,000 pieces of art and 750 to 1,000 of those are masterpieces.

“At first, we thought my mom was crazy,” Rich Marvin said. “When a museum or gallery lines up his top 200 exquisite works, people will be as stunned as we are.”

Rockmore was born in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. A child prodigy, he played the violin well by age 8. After suffering polio at 10, he turned to painting. He studied briefly at the Juilliard School and had a studio at the Cooper Union. Family friends included Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.