Four Minutes On...

How Fables Matter in Today's Louisiana

By Darius Spieth, Professor of Art History. Excerpt from Mythologies Louisianaises, reprinted with permission of the curator Jonathan Mayers.

As a literary genre, fables occupy a unique position in the poetic history of French-speaking lands. They owe this importance primarily to Jean de la Fontaine, who, during the seventeenth century, became the first to systematically collect accounts about the hidden life of animals and of nature. A contemporary of Louis XIV’s “classical age,” La Fontaine, of course, derived his inspiration from authors of antiquity, such as Aesop, but in reality the range of source materials for his Fables was much larger and easily transcended France itself. As it is well known, La Fontaine’s Fables subsequently became a pillar of teaching and pedagogy for generations of pupils trained in the French language. They continue to play this didactic role to the present day.

But let us not be fooled: fables are much more than tales for children; to say the least, they are not written exclusively for them. They recount the essential truths of adult life in a way that speaks to the imagination and the power of dreams. They are at the same time rational, funny, intuitive, and fantastic. When studied from a cultural perspective, they are both universal and timeless; they constantly redefine the coordinates of time and space

in which they exist. This mutability bestows them with the power of rejuvenation and the ability to speak to us from the perspective of the current situation. This is the case of contemporary creative activity in Louisiana, which is represented here through a selection of works by writers, poets, painters, photographers and printmakers.

Among the great topics represented in this visual and literary meeting of minds, one stands out: that of nature and her hidden mysteries. The spirits of the swamps and the bayous, such as the “Loup Garou”, the “Swamp Witch”, the “Feux Follets” and their relationship with the humans with whom they share their grounds, are a central interest of our creators. But sometimes it is the revenge of nature on humans and ecological disasters that attract artists, such as in the paintings by Jonathan Mayers. Nostalgia for the past and death are never far in Louisiana, as evident in pictures by Elise Toups. After all, the cemeteries of New Orleans are as much an attraction for visitors as is Bourbon Street. The panorama is further enriched by the fascination with voodoo and popular traditions such as Mardi Gras and its fabulous parades (Herb Roe) or the

Surely this is contemporary art, but one that is laced with a significant dose of neo-romanticism. There is no place for abstraction of conceptual art. Painting can reclaim an important place, but not for its own sake, but as figurative work specific to local culture, in which fables become the preferred means to convey the message. Even the photographs and poetry of Randi Willett seem to send us back to an antebellum nineteenth century – the “belle époque” of the Deep South – rather than to the current world. It requires courage to celebrate the characteristics of a specific locale, a strategy which was condescended upon for so long by the avant-garde aesthetics and its doctrines.

It is the great accomplishment of artists, writers, and poets to muster the courage to return to narrative content, to allegories, to fables, and to bring the task of a specific sensitivity for a dialogue with the unique cultural situation in Louisiana and its close links to the francophone tradition.

A specialist in modernism, Darius A. Spieth focuses his scholarship on the interrelationships between art, intellectual history, and economics. Major monographs include Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art (Brill, 2018) and Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians (University of Delaware Press, 2007), which explores the Masonic contexts for the revived Isis cult in Napoleonic France. Spieth is subject editor for Art Markets, Law and Economics for the Grove Dictionary of Art (Oxford University Press), a printed version of which is forthcoming as Grove Guide to Art Markets. He has written or contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs on subjects ranging from Prints from the Serenissima: Connoisseurship and the Graphic Arts in Eighteenth-Century Venice (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, 2002) to Ancient Egypt’s Mysteries and Freemasonry (Kestner Museum, Hanover, Germany, 2017). Recent research projects include a study on the tacit complicity between the canons of art history and art markets across time, and the “roman cosmopolite” (“cosmopolitan novel”) as a mirror of the French art scene between the two World Wars. Spieth is the San Diego Alumni Association Chapter Alumni Professor.