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This month, New Orleans and nearby coastal communities are reeling from a massive oil spill. Less than five years ago, Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the area.
The city “just can’t catch a break,” says David Bates, a Dallas-based painter known for his depictions of the landscapes and inhabitants of the Gulf Coast.
In an exhibit opening Friday at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Bates takes us back to Katrina. Featuring more than 40 arresting portraits and views of devastated neighborhoods and homes, “David Bates: The Katrina Paintings” presents a vivid chronicle of suffering and destruction.
Bates began making drawings of anguished New Orleans residents from the moment their images began appearing on TV.
“I’ve been going there for 25 years or longer,” he said in a recent interview. “New Orleans is the queen of the South.”
He loves the city’s culture and history, and he loves to fish.
Bates usually paints from direct observation, so he was frustrated that he couldn’t get to New Orleans after the hurricane hit in August 2005.
“I felt so bad,” he said. “I wanted to be down there, but they were only shipping people out.”
He decided to work with the information he could get.
“I wasn’t going to not do anything,” he said. “I felt it was important to report on it the best I could with what I do.”
The Kemper exhibit includes the first drawings Bates made of Katrina’s victims as he watched them on television.
“I would record and play (the footage) over and over and spend more time with them,” he said. “Their stories were so strong; it would really be carved in your head.”
In the months that followed, Bates translated residents’ faces and feelings into iconic portraits rendered with dramatic black outlines and thick slathers of paint.
There’s not a smile to be seen.
In the painting “The Deluge II,” a dazed yet resolute-looking man comforts his distraught wife against a backdrop of floating houses and cars. Behind them, another man stands in water up to his waist, clutching a plastic garbage bag, presumably filled with all of his worldly possessions.
Another painting shows an elderly woman in a partly submerged wheelchair. She is attended by her adult daughter, who bellows for help. Bates titled the work “Mother and Child.”
“Every picture tells an amazing story,” said Kemper curator Barbara O’Brien, who co-organized the exhibit with the museum’s director, Rachael Blackburn Cozad.
“They’re very intense. Some are monumental-scaled portraits of individuals and groups of people, and there are beautiful smaller landscapes and works on paper.
“I think the show is ennobling and challenging,” O’Brien added, “a little bit heartbreaking, but beautiful, with great gobs of beautiful paint.”
From Marsden Hartley to Picasso, Rouault and the German expressionists, Bates’ style encompasses a range of influences. Many of his subjects’ faces have the power and spiritual force of African masks, and the whole series carries biblical undertones.
The artist cites African-American folk art, which he admires for its narrative drive, as an important inspiration.
The Katrina project consumed him for more than two years — he painted the final piece in 2007.
While making the paintings, he didn’t think about if and where he would exhibit them. Eventually some works from the series were shown at his galleries in Dallas and New York, as well as at his New Orleans home base, Arthur Roger Gallery. It was there that Cozad saw the Katrina paintings in 2006 and decided they needed to be shared with a broader audience.
Encompassing roughly 80 percent of Bates’ Katrina works, the Kemper exhibit marks their largest showing to date and is accompanied by a color catalog.
Although Kansas City is both geographically and culturally removed from New Orleans, O’Brien is confident the work will resonate with viewers here.
“It’s a very American story that reflects a tragedy of natural origins exacerbated by the ineptness on the part of government,” she said. “It caused a movement of people across the U.S. in the same way that the Dust Bowl created a massive movement of people.”
A highlight of the exhibit is a pair of monumental triptychs. One of them, “The Storm,” measuring roughly 5 feet high and 21 feet long, is a kind of portrait compendium, presenting a sea of worried and reproachful faces.
Although their eyes are pained and brows are furrowed, Bates also conveys his subjects’ strength and endurance, endowing them with strong, columnar necks and proud erect heads.
Bates came face to face with New Orleans evacuees when some of them relocated to an apartment building in his neighborhood.
“I saw these people in brand new T-shirts with a lot of black and gold,” he recalled. “I talked to some of them.”
It wasn’t until January 2006 that he was finally able to return to New Orleans for a visit. With his dealer, Arthur Roger, a New Orleans native, he toured the city and took photographs.
“It looked like a neutron bomb happened,” he said. “The places were destroyed, the streets were cleared, but nobody was there. Everybody was put on a bus and didn’t know where they were going.”
Bates recorded what he saw in a series of paintings of ruined buildings and flooded streets. Fires rage in the background and cast eerie reflections on the waters in a painting of the Garden District. The focal point of “The Deluge V” is a woman, arms raised in bid for help or deliverance, standing on the flooded stoop of her little gingerbread-style house.
Although Bates has long recorded the region’s fisherman, flora and fauna, the Katrina paintings mark the first time he has focused on an event.
He conceived of the works as history paintings in the tradition of Picasso’s “Guernica,” commemorating the bombed Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, and Theodore Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” inspired by a deadly 1816 shipwreck.
Bates earned his bachelor and master of fine arts from Southern Methodist University, spending time in-between in New York as a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study program in 1976.
His career took off in the 1980s, when he was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth organized a major traveling show of his work.
Although Bates has been showing in New York for 30 years, his commitment to realism and confirmed narrative bent often put him at odds with leading art world trends. He prefers Dallas as a base and feels a strong sense of identification with Southern culture.
In a February article lamenting the New York art world’s inattention to art made from “intense personal necessity,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith gave Bates a thumbs up, remarking, “David Bates is having a perfectly interesting career without any attention from the New York art establishment, thank you very much.”
In June, Bates will return to New Orleans. He has no plans to paint a cycle on the oil spill, although, he said, “Where I go fishing is exactly where the oil rig blew up.”
By ALICE THORSON |
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