I was not going to review this. Lately, too many celebrity art shows have turned out to be embarrassing spectacles, evidence that talent doesn't always translate across different media, so when I learned that a show of Tennessee Williams' paintings was opening at the Ogden Museum, I tried to avoid it entirely. Then I stumbled into it by accident, and while some of these works do border on embarrassing, they also possess a poignant eloquence that reflects the celebrated playwright's troubled yet transcendent psyche. Some suggest the daubings of a decadent yet oddly innocent child, but some of them also radiate an inexplicable mysticism somewhere between William Blake and Sister Gertrude Morgan, as we see in She Sang Beyond the Genius of the Sea, above left.
Named for a poem by Wallace Stevens, it features a dishevelled sea siren emerging on a beach, waving her trident as two guys slog through the brine, one toward the beach, the other toward the far horizon. Fleshy yet evanescent, such scenes distill Williams' narrative proclivities into messy, symbolic daydreams where men and women appear roiled by the whispers of their inner angels and demons. As a playwright, he was a master of human pathos, but as a painter he was a folk artist adrift in a sea of social intrigue as we see in his Sulla Terrazza della Signora Stone, left, painting of an ageing actress and a Roman gigolo. Here he uses his brush to hint at the complexities that underlie the social veneer, and if it suggests a scene from a play, it was actually based on his first novel. If there is any doubt that these canvases are the work of Williams' inner child, his bloody beach scene featuring Truman Capote as a killer baby in diapers, above, illustrates the puerile petulance that ensues when literary friendships go bad. Unlike much celebrity art today, these works were personal ruminations that he shared with a select few confidants. Most were collected by his longtime Key West friend, David Wolkowsky. This is their first formal museum exhibition. ~Bookhardt /The Playwright and the Painter: Paintings by Tennessee Williams, Through May 31, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., 539-9600.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Patrick Lichte and Bob Tooke at Barrister's

Nobody knows why. Even Lichty--whose resume' includes collaborations with The Yes Men among other guerilla raids on the techno status quo -- incorporates them into his creative flow, as we see in his oddly rendered drawings like Predator vs



The Rise of the Machines: Drawings by Patrick Lichty
The Zwolle Paintings: New Work by Bob Tooke, Through May 2, Barrister's Gallery, 2331 St. Claude Ave, 710-4506;
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Artist Studios: Tina Freeman's Photographs at the Ogden Museum; Amer Kobasliga's Paintings at Arthur Roger

Her photographs of Elizabeth Shannon's antique woodwork and swamp relic-infested studio are flanked by a taxidermed alligator climbing an old wooden ladder in an evocation of the animist spirits of the city and nearby bayous, but Robert Tannen's Crucifish assemblage with a stuffed Marlin affixed to a tall wooden cross behind a Savonarola chair suggests something a swashbuckling Grand Isle Francis Bacon might have concocted. Ersy Schwartz's bronze, bird-headed chess pieces look dramatically orderly on their meticulous wooden cabinet, top, but their aura is bizarrely surreal. In Amer Kobaslija's painterly rendering of Jackson Pollock's studio, a solitary chair appears amid an riot of manic paint splatters on the floor. But in the rustic domesticity of Balthus' studio, above left, cats, quinces and a nude, half painted nymphet offer clues to the late artist's inner life. Kokasija's and Freeman's studio scenes are portals into the artists' personas in absentia via the environments and trappings that guided them like loadstones toward uncharted territories. ~Bookhardt /Tina Freeman: Photographs of Artist Spaces, Through July 12, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., 539-9600; Amer Kobaslija: Recent Paintings, Through May 30, Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia St. 522-1999.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
New Art Based on the "Baby Dolls" of Mardi Gras
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Raddy Winner by Ruth Owens |
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Nate Scott's Carved Driftwood Carnival Paraders |
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Ulrick Jean Pierre's Treme Baby Dolls |
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Baby Doll Antoinette & Ernie K-Doe by Annie Odell |