New Orleans Museum of Art: A Case Study in Building a Collection

How NOMA, starting with no art, cultivated the locals to build a unique, sizzling place: Part 1.

‘L aissez les bon temps rouler,” I hummed as my plane landed in New Orleans. I found good times in New Orleans in my own egghead, teetotaling, church-mouse way, mostly going to museums. I think the Big Easy must have sighed, if not sobbed, in disappointment. Little raw material in me. Jazz is good, but Chopin’s better, and I go to bed early. My clubbing days are not only gone but never happened.

Each day I was out and about by seven, 7 a.m. that is, having the French Quarter to myself, except for the small army hosing the streets and sidewalks from the last night’s debauch. I think the French Quarter is charming, the wrought-iron balconies fabulous, and I saw it all at its freshest. Oh, yes, and then there’s the Voodoo Museum. Irresistible. As Methodist as I am, I keep a list of people who’ve done me dirt – it’s so long and varied that it’s got its own Excel spreadsheet. Voodoo, I discovered, chagrined, in New Orleans, is a religion, and a religion of peace. Where have I heard that before? And “a religion of peace” is not my idea of voodoo.

Ah, I soon learned, the loophole. It’s a religion in which adherents pray to make others better. Some people are so rotten they can be “made better” only by getting hit by a streetcar. Better still a bus. Streetcars are too slow. A flaming, sizzling meteorite’s better. I’ll drink to that. Or pray for that. Or stick pins in dolls for that.

But that’s next week’s story. Few visitors to New Orleans, famous for sin set to jazz, and voodoo by the bayou, head straight to the World War II Museum, but the culture does prize diversity, and I’m an identity group of one. Next was the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). I like the museum. It’s got a good collection and nice galleries. It’s a case study, too. It opened in 1911, not an eternity ago, with no art, raising a good question. How do you build a museum from scratch?

I’ll write two stories about the museum. Today’s looks at how the building, a lovely Beaux-Arts pile that’s been elegantly expanded, and how the collection developed, and what’s in it today. On Saturday, I’ll write about its exhibition program, the flood following Katrina, and its current bumps and brawls over race.

The museum opened with no collection, not even a haul of bric-a-brac, horse pictures, and portraits accumulated over years. There was no long-standing arts society of old ladies and aesthetes. It was called the Isaac Delgado Museum after its biggest funder, a rich sugar broker. Delgado plunked $150,000 on the table for culture. An art museum it was. It was called the Delgado until 1971.

Its original and, still, main building is a good-looking Beaux-Arts pile designed by Lebenbaum and Marx, a Chicago firm. Samuel Marx, the architect, said it “was inspired by the Greek but modified to give a subtropical appearance,” and it does.

The museum’s in the big, commodious City Park, so it’s among the breed called garden museums located not in the dense city center but among oak trees and glades, and linking the enjoyment of art with nature and relaxation. It’s got a whiff of the hothouse of its closest ancestor, the Petit Trianon at Versailles, which was built to face a botanical garden and to house Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, two of Louis XV’s mistresses.

Marx, from Chicago, might have mixed “subtropical” with “French.” As showplace Beaux-Arts buildings go, it’s not exactly low-slung like a plantation house but lower slung. We don’t ascend to it. Like a plantation house, or a French château, it’s in a park, about three miles from the city, and at the end of a tree-lined avenue. The porch is wide and open. The Great Hall, the big space beyond the entrance, is open and airy, too. New Orleans, I learned on my last visit, in August 1986, is indeed in the tropics. A lifelong New Englander, I’d never experienced such heat and humidity. The roof ornaments crest in a nervous, overwrought way that seemed exotic to me. While I was in New Orleans, I sensed Bette Davis’s Jezebel and Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois everywhere. Heat can be enervating but it can also drive people to distraction, mischief, madness, and woe.

Circulation and cream-colored limestone cool things off. As in most Beaux-Arts museums, galleries surround the Great Hall. It’s very pretty. Visiting the exceptionally comfortable galleries, I looked for things that made the museum distinctly New Orleans. I saw lots of them, giving it a sense of place. Overall, though, it’s an encyclopedic museum covering lots of bases. Its home in a park seems to finesse New Orleans, after all, an eccentric place unlike any other in the country.

When Delgado made his gift of money to build the museum, New Orleans had never had one. At the time, there were only two art museums in the South: Telfair in Savannah and the Birmingham Museum of Art. Though gifts to NOMA came in abundance over time, the museum and its counterparts in the South missed the Old Master buying opportunities that the Gilded Age presented to museums such the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Met in NYC, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just a generation or so older. In 1910 and through the 1940s, New Orleans was a big port city but, like most of the South, inward-looking.

So the collection’s idiosyncratic and very good. It’s well into its second century — a critical mass of directors and curators, with their own specific tastes, have come and gone. The collection’s grown mostly through gifts of art from local collectors. I rarely look at collections of this kind as cursed by narrowness or provincialism. I’m almost always delighted. Homebody collectors are eccentric. Many are passionate. Some are very rich. Most buy nice things, very nice, often niche things.

Like many city museums outside the Northeast, New Orleans did well by the Samuel Kress H. Foundation, which, in 1961, dispersed Kress’s Old Masters collection to dozens of museums that had never had the money or expertise to buy historic European art. The Old Masters were then seen as foundational to a good local museum. The fare at NOMA is not earth-shattering but a good representation of Italian art from the 14th to the 18th centuries. There’s a brilliant portrait by Lorenzo Lotto and a Carlo Dolci modello of The Vision of St. Louis of Toulouse from the 1670s. New Orleans is America’s Frenchiest city, so it’s got a happy home.

I always look at credit lines for pictures I like since they tell not only who gave what, but when the museum was buying what. They show the taste and priorities of curators, directors, and trustees over time. Credit lines for acquisitions also tell me how much money the museum had for acquisitions at a point in time and, often, when it ran out of money, donors, or a will to buy. There’s little appetite for the Old Masters today in any but specialized Old Masters museums, but, until around 2000, that’s where provincial civic museums spent their biggest bucks.

And very traditional but very nice things the New Orleans museum bought. François Boucher’s The Surprise, from 1730, which the museum bought in 1984, is a crowd-pleaser. It’s a rococo assignation picture with a cat — and very French. In 1940, NOMA bought Charles Joseph Natoire’s Toilet of Psyche, a big rococo nudie, with money left to it by a local judge who died in 1938 at 90 and who might have been either appalled or aroused, but I doubt he was much of a Puritan. There’s a grand portrait of Marie Antoinette by Vigée-Le Brun, her favorite portraitist, bought in 1985 for $500,000, a small fortune, a Vanloo, a Greuze, a Claude, and a Largillière, all purchased and, at the time, what trustees, curators, and the locals sought to make their museum highbrow, which meant respectable and edifying.

I like offbeat, risky, and idiosyncratic more than most, and, since this is New Orleans, wanted to see it. A few months ago, I wrote about Marinus van Reymerswaele, the Flemish artist who specialized in lawyers, accountants, and bill collectors. The museum bought a nice example in 1970. A big Heemskerck, Apollo and His Muses, from the 1550s, bought in 1982, might as well be a Mardi Gras painting. Otto Marseus van Schrieck’s Serpents and Insects, from 1650, is a rare “sottobosco,” a scene of creepy-crawlies living, dying, and feasting on the forest floor. It’s a different kind of life on the bayou, and it came as a gift from a local. I love it.

When the museum had the chance to buy a great Degas, it went for it. The Portrait of Estelle Musson Degas, from 1872, is probably the museum’s best French painting and makes eminent sense since Degas’s uncle and his family lived in New Orleans and his mother was born there. Degas visited his uncle in 1872 and painted 15 portraits. Estelle was both Degas’s first cousin and his sister-in-law since she married his brother. She was nearly blind, so arranging flowers gives a bit of pathos to the big, not-quite-finished painting. She arranged flowers by touch and smell.

Degas isn’t an Impressionist and, in 1872, the first Impressionist salon was two years in the future, so this dazzling display of dabbles is different and mysterious. It has presence. The museum raised the money to buy it by public subscription in 1965, a sign of how precious the city’s French heritage is to its people but also how much the museum was loved. Po-boy breakfasts, a 24-hour telethon, canisters for dimes and nickels everywhere, the tag “Bring Estelle Back,” and a front-page appeal by the local newspaper made raising the money not just a museum project but a civic one.

I sometimes cringe when a collector tells me, “I’m leaving my art to the Tiny Town Museum of Art because I grew up there” or, “That’s where granddad made his bundle.” Sometimes the museum in Tiny Town is clueless on what to do with the art, putting it in storage for eternity. More often than not, though, the museum hits the jackpot and knows it, local visitors have new sources of civic pride and edification, and tourists like me find delightful surprises. I was floored, and happy about it, to see so many first-class bequests of art from Victor Kiam, not fils but père. The art’s great, but the name stopped me.

Victor Kiam fils was a TV star in the 1980s via the slogan “I liked it so much I bought the company.” The company was Remington, which the entrepreneur Kiam bought in 1979; the object of affection an electric razor; the spokesman Kiam himself. When I was a potentate in Connecticut politics, I tried to entice him to run for governor. He lived in Stamford. By the mid-’80s, Kiam’s Remington ads were on TV all the time. I didn’t know he was from New Orleans, but he grew up there, and I knew nothing about his father, who was a collector with a keen, good eye for Modernism but also for African art. Kiam père himself left New Orleans for New York but left his art to his hometown. It’s a curator’s dream, including good things by Picasso, Pollock, and Miro, and a superb collection of African art.

Fortuitously, the museum had hired Bill Fagaly in 1966 to consult with it on building a collection of African art as a means to appeal to the big African-American cohort in New Orleans and the region. Fagaly was an intrepid young, new Ph.D. He learned about Kiam’s collection and his roots to New Orleans, cultivated him, got the collection, and worked for NOMA as a curator for 50 years. He died this past summer. A single collection and a single curator, working in a midsize museum without a million curatorial mouths to feed can do fantastic things. The New Orleans museum has been a hub for the study of African art for years, certainly from the time when the art of a continent that now has more than a billion people wasn’t even considered art but artifact.

I wouldn’t call this art an eccentricity. I would call a very fine Latter-Schlesinger collection of miniature portraits an eccentricity. Harry and Anna Latter were New Orleans art lovers whose passion was miniatures, which I love, too, and their collection came to the museum in the late 1970s as a gift from their daughter, a trustee.

These precious little things, mostly watercolor on ivory, are displayed in a nice American and British gallery next to a big Copley portrait. Yes, in New Orleans they’re counterintuitive, but that’s fine. There’s a Holbein miniature from 1520, a very rare thing, and a Hilliard miniature of James I as well as miniatures of people we don’t know. They’re a cross between formal portraiture and jewelry, and lovely for their fineness and intimacy.

An eccentricity, too, was one of two things I remember about the museum from my last visit there in 1986. One is the Degas portrait. The other was a great collection of Fabergé eggs that isn’t there anymore, and that’s too bad. It was the Fabergé collection of Matilda Geddings Gray, a very rich, under-the-radar philanthropist from Lake Charles, La., who collected Fabergé eggs. In 1949, when Britain approached a rationing-induced famine, she sent 175,000 pounds of rice there. She made many such unusual gifts. She died in 1971 and left her Fabergé to a foundation she established. The foundation gave it to the New Orleans museum as a long-term loan. There I saw it, and it’s splendid. They yanked it, I think after Hurricane Katrina, and sent it on a long-term loan to the Met. It looks nice there, but it is a drop in the bucket art-wise and lives among a million other things. The Met needs to send it back to New Orleans.

The decorative-arts galleries are fantastic. They were just renovated and sizzle.

About 10,000 pieces of glass, silver, furniture, and ceramics compose a quarter of NOMA’s overall collection. It owns the encyclopedic, 3,000-object glass collection of Melvin Billups, a New York collector whose wife was from New Orleans. The new galleries show depth in Victorian excess in furniture and in luscious French porcelain in the “Old Paris” pattern, a rage in the South. Exuberance, after all, is a New Orleans style. Newcomb College in New Orleans was a pottery center in the early 20th century. It’s Arts and Crafts, so it’s a reform style, with each piece handmade and emphasizing experimental glazes, but moss-covered trees and tropical flowers are a specialty.

I loved the small show on works in aluminum from the permanent collection, supported by a fund dedicated to rotating the museum’s great decorative arts.

The museum has acquisitions money dedicated to buying decorative arts, too.

I thought the galleries were fun, exciting, expansive, and coherent.

For my story on Saturday, I’ll start with the museum’s wonderful and largely recent photography collection. Above all else, I loved the museum’s focus over decades on acquisitions. New Orleans wasn’t a hub for art collectors, but collectors, small in numbers and focused, were there, and the museum was entrepreneurial in reaching collectors who once lived there. In the ’70s through the ’90s, it actively raised money for acquisitions endowments.  Now, it has about a million dollars a year to spend.

When I was a director, I raised money for a renovation and addition and spent a ton of time on exhibitions and catalogues, but I was old-fashioned in that the thing I loved the most was acquiring art. The building’ is important, and I had a distinguished one that needed more space and a gut rehab, and exhibitions build scholarship. I focused on building audiences and providing a comfortable visitor experience. To me, the art that came to the collection was the thing that lasted.