By Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
The “Pierre Joseph Landry: Patriot, Planter, Sculptor” exhibit that opens at the New Orleans Museum of Art on Friday (Oct. 16) is the first solo show of one of Louisiana’s earliest self-taught artists, a transcendently talented whittler whose works reinterpreted French neoclassicism in New World timber.
Pierre Joseph Landry (1770-1843) was a French expatriate who crossed the Atlantic with his widowed mother at age 15. He set foot on the fertile lands near the mouth of the Mississippi River at roughly the time Napoleon Bonaparte graduated from military school, less than a decade after the United States broke away from Britain. History simmered around him.
Landry fought with Andrew Jackson’s ad hoc army in Chalmette, helping to drive the red coats back to the sea during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. He founded a plantation between New Orleans and Baton Rouge and helped pioneer sugar refining and was a slave owner. He kept a journal that is a window into Louisiana’s colonial past, with all the warts.
NOMA curator William Fagaly and Louisiana State Museum curator Katie Burlison provided Landry’s backstory as they led a preview tour of the unfinished exhibit on Tuesday. Fagaly is especially pleased to see the Landry show finally approaching opening day, since he’s been imagining an exhibit illuminating the worthy, but rather obscure artist for 20 years or so.
There were never many Landry sculptures to begin with, Fagaly said. The carver produced only a few of the laborious creations in his waning years. He might not have produced any if he hadn’t been stricken with crippling tuberculosis of the knees in his 50s. Confined to a wheel chair, Landry busied himself with art.
The late-blooming sculptor appears to have had no art training, but he certainly had a gift.
Just look at the clever way he carved out the ghost of Napoleon in the negative area between tree trunks in his memorial tribute to the dead Emperor.
Look at his mastery of design in his depiction of a Peeping Tom ogling a nude female bather.
Look at the absolutely exquisite, though anatomically imprecise, carving of the backbones and muscles in his enigmatic allegory, featuring two men seated on stumps. The exact meaning of the piece is lost, but the artistry is extant.
Let your eyes wander his multi-part, seemingly autobiographical wheel of life — a melancholy masterpiece that begins with a baby’s head emerging from a stylized birth canal and ends with an old man’s boots disappearing into a casket.
And consider Landry’s not particularly heroic self-portrait, which seems eerily awake for a nearly two-century-old block of walnut or tupelo gum (the exact type of wood is unknown). Fagaly said that Landry might have used an array of mirrors to capture every angle.
You’ll agree that in each case, Landry found ways to elevate his sculptures significantly beyond simple three-dimensional illustration or decorative carving. His historical vignettes, religious devotions, genre scenes and allegories are windows into the Louisiana colonial mindscape.
To fit Landry’s carvings in art historical context is a tale of two worlds. In his homeland, artists were doing their best to revive the glory of golden-era Greece and the high renaissance. Their goal was to produce architecture, furniture design, sculpture and painting that was technically splendid enough to befit the 19th-century Age of Enlightenment and the power of imperial France.
Landry’s sculpture seems to have some of the same motivation, but it has a spare, somewhat stiff quality that distances it from the supple neoclassic style of the moment. To 21st-century eyes, his works have some of the sleekly simplified properties of Art Deco. Think of the sculptures by the late New Orleans master Enrique Alferez (1901-1999) that stud City Park.
In short, Landry’s work appears to be an amalgam of sophisticated, informed Empire taste and DIY frontier skill.
Fagaly said that Landry whittled his sculptures for friends and relatives – one was a gift for President Andrew Jackson — and he thinks the exhibit includes all of the known examples. But he holds out hope that the show will flush out any unknown Landrys hidden in family treasure troves. Celebrating the abundance of Landrys in Louisiana, NOMA offers half-price admission to anyone with the surname.