Up next, a special edition of Art rocks!

The woman who literally wrote the book on Louisiana's premier public artist, Conrad Al Rizzio, is here in our studio.

Carolyn shares the story of the man and his works.

That's next on Art rocks.

Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello, and thank you for being here for Art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

Let's begin by looking at the legacy of New Deal era muralist Conrad Aparicio.

Although born in New York, Alberto's works loom large in Louisiana, largely because of funding provided by the Works Progress Administration during the depression.

Former museum curator and professor Carolyn Berthier has studied Alberto's work exhaustively documenting her findings in her book The Frescoes of Conrad Operation, and she joins me now.

Carolyn, thank you for joining us on Art rocks.

Thank you so much.

I'm glad to be here.

Well, obviously, I was a New Yorker, but he lived and worked in the South for more than 50 years.

What brought him to Louisiana and what kept him here?

That's very interesting.

Brisco was born of Italian immigrant parents and came to New Orleans in 1919 to work as an architectural draftsman on the Hibernia Bank building in New Orleans.

And that's important.

So let's remember that little tidbit that he came to work as an architectural draftsman.

He fell in love with New Orleans and stayed and lived in the French Quarter and got very involved in the Arts and Crafts Club.

Now the arts and crafts club included all sorts of artists, writers, preservationists, and he began to paint.

And he loved to do the Louisiana landscape.

He painted portraits and he really moved from architecture to painting.

And I think that's when his love of painting really, really began in the 19 teens and into the 1920s.

Got you, got you.

So sometime before the depression, before those really hard years hit, he was already here, already established, already a member of the artistic community.

Right.

Right.

Well, Louisiana has always been a a warm place for foreigners to show up and feel like they're at home.

Absolutely, absolutely.

He was a founding member, one of the founding members of the arts and class Crafts Club.

So he was very much entrenched in that artsy, milieu that was active in, in the French Quarter during that time period.

And when we talk about frescoes, what are we really describing?

Can you talk a little bit about he's known as a fresco painter.

What are we talking about when we talk about frescoes?

Fresco is a type of mural.

A mural is just a painting on the wall.

A fresco mural is painting on wet plaster.

And there was actually a chemical bind between the pigment and the wet plaster, where the pigment actually soaks into the wet plaster and becomes an inherent part of the plaster as it dries and it becomes virtually impermeable.

Fresco has been around for millennia.

It goes back to ancient times.

It was popular in the Middle Ages.

It was popular, before that in Greece and Rome.

It had a resurgence in the Renaissance.

It was popular in this country during the 1930s with the WPA works.

So it's been around forever.

It it's not an easy medium to work with, and it's very difficult.

But the drawing card is that it lasts for ever.

And the only way you can get rid of it is taking a chisel and chipping away at it, which explains why it is that this is still around and that legacy exists.

Exactly right.

Exactly.

So many of these works have been in place, visible 60, 70 going on 80 years.

Now they've been the subject of conservation restoration.

Do you think they'll be around for another 60, 78?

They'll be around for millennia.

They'll be around for thousands of years, and they'll be around just.

You can go and see the frescoes of Pompeii.

You can see frescoes in Egypt.

You can see frescoes around the world that have been there for thousands of years.

And you will see our Brazil's frescoes for thousands of years.

Now, do you think they will they continue to be appreciated.

So it's really up to us to decide whether these frescoes remain a part of our public spaces.

Exactly.

Or whether they are allowed to be covered over.

Destroyed.

Right?

Abandoned.

Right.

Do you think we're past that time with our SCA in Louisiana?

I hope not, I hope not.

I think there has been an effort to save some of the Rizzio frescoes and mosaics in buildings that were destroyed, especially after Hurricane Katrina, when many of the buildings were destroyed.

There was an effort to remove the murals and save them.

A good example is the one that's in the Louisiana State Museum here in Baton Rouge.

That mural was removed from a building that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Kept in storage and fortunately, now reposition it in the museum where it will be protected.

So thank goodness someone saw its value.

A real chapter of Louisiana history that we that we can continue to interpret even out of its original name.

Absolutely.

During his time as a professor of art at LSU, he engaged students in, didn't he, in the work to create the frescoes that could still be seen at Allen Hall.

Was that a common part of his working method was to bring other artists or students into the process?

Not really.

He had assistants, but.

And most fresco painters do because, fresco painting is very laborious and you often need someone to lay the fresco, before the painter goes in to actually paint.

What does that mean?

Laying the fresco?

Well, you have to fresco the wall first and lay the wet fresco, and then the painter has to go back and paint a very small portion of the wet fresco with the actual painting, which is called a visual, not a what you do in a a days period of time.

Al Brazier said it was so difficult to lay the heavy fresco that his hand would shake when he went back to paint, so he would have a fresco, person lay the actual fresco on the wall, and then he would go back and paint, spend the rest of the day painting.

But no, he did not use students on a regular basis.

When I talk about Al Breezy as fresco works, I generally do not talk about Allen Hall, because that is not by the hand of Valparaiso.

Allen Hall was done by Al Breezy as students and that was done as a project for his students to learn the technique of fresco.

I'm sure he was there directing them and showing them different techniques and helping them along, but they were done by a number of different students.

All of those students wrote a written thesis to go along with those with those paintings and those thesis works are written and in the LSU library.

But Allen Hall used to be the Fine arts building, so that's why those frescoes are located there.

But they are by the hand of student artists.

Many of those students go on to have have noticeable art careers of their own.

Almost all of them did that.

Really.

And did any of them work in the same medium?

I think they worked in fresco that you know, Allen Hall was done roughly in the mid 1930s.

They worked in fresco while it was popular in the United States in the 1930s.

And then by 1940, fresco had kind of run its popularity in America.

And, American artists were moving past that American realism style and moving on to more abstract styles.

Which fresco was really not suited for.

So those artists went on to do other things.

But yes, most of them picking fresh professional artists.

It's really interesting.

It's fascinating.

Any names that we would know?

Probably not most of them.

Many of them moved into, got married, or moved to different places, and some moved to Texas, California, different parts of the United States.

Mark elsewhere.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, sure.

His paintings do tell some powerful stories, don't they?

Can you share a favorite, something that particularly speaks to you or has particular relevance, you think, to the to the environment that we experience it?

One thing that really struck me about Conrad breezier is, you know, even the artists during the WPA years, a lot of them would start with fresco, but they abandoned it very quickly because it was difficult.

And then they would do mural paintings, which is just a painting on a wall, or they would do a painting on the canvas and the canvas would be attached to the wall, but they sort of abandoned the technique of painting and fresco because it's difficult and the technique is limiting.

Al Briscoe remained faithful to fresco.

I mean, did not waver.

And not only did he not waver from this very difficult and ancient technique, and he did fresco exactly as it had been done in ancient times, exactly as it had been done in the Renaissance, exactly as it had been done throughout history.

He continued to do fresco into the 1940s, into the 1950s, and really kept, if you will, selling that that fresco technique and was convinced that this was the way to go, that public art was the way to go, and this is what we needed, or our walls.

It amazed me that that he was able to sell that technique and and, use that medium for so many years past its general popularity.

One of my favorite cycles is the Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans, which is the history of Louisiana.

It is in enormously complicated.

He spent two years researching the history of Louisiana and putting together the story of the history of Louisiana from the very beginning, the exploration of the land by the French, Spanish and English, and the inclusion of the Native Americans and the Africans that came to this area.

And his niece told me that he even went so far as to count the number of figures, so that he represented all of those different races and different cultures evenly, so that all of those different people would be represented.

The amount of work that he put into that.

I went to New York a number of times, met with his relatives who had his his sketches and drawings and thumbnail sketches, and the copious amounts of paper and drawings that went with all of these programs was unbelievable.

Now, the reason that so many of these works did find their way into public spaces in Louisiana was as a result of the funding that came through the Works Progress Administration program.

Is that correct?

No, no.

Okay.

Can you tell me how those pieces.

It was it up to was it up to our Briscoe to sell his concept to the, say, the Union Passenger Terminal when he was said about that?

Was it up to him to go in and sell that piece to the organization?

The WPA had long dissipated.

By the end of the 30s, the WPA was gone, and all of the multiple departments of the Works Progress Administration were gone.

These other projects were.

And I looked very hard to try to find who exactly he approached and how this was done.

The reason I said, hang on to that piece of information about our bridge, being trained as an architect, I think most of these were sold to the architect of the project.

Because Al Brazo was basically an architect and he could speak the speak and he could understand how these paintings worked with the building structure, and he could talk to the architect about how they would fit with the design of the building.

Do you think that his work then influenced the not only the facade or the decoration on the buildings, but the buildings themselves?

I think so, and I think the reason he continued to do this mural scale was because he was comfortable with that scale.

He was comfortable with the building.

He was comfortable with putting a large painting in a building.

He was comfortable with using a mosaic in a building.

This was this was where he did his best work.

I think his easel works were great in the 1920s and 30s.

I, I think his mural work was where he really did his best work.

Now, your book focuses particularly on his work with fresco.

He is known for and created some mosaics as well.

It's another extraordinarily durable form of art.

Why did you choose to focus particularly on the fresco?

More so than the murals a Time and money.

I would love to think that I would live long enough to do a volume on the mosaics.

I don't know that I will, because the the amount of time and the money that it took to do the frescoes.

I don't know if I can do that again with the mosaics.

He spent many years retraining himself to learn the art of mosaic murals, and I think that was because he realized that mosaic murals fit better with modern architecture.

As time went on, fresco murals were not working as well with modern architecture by the 1950s, and he realized that mosaic murals were going to be a better bet.

So he goes to Mexico, he goes back to Italy, he learns the art of mosaic murals, and he starts doing mosaic murals.

And I do agree that some of those are stunning, stunning.

And that that is another book.

That is another book.

Yeah.

So, it, you know, I would like someone else to take the banner and, and do that book because it is certainly those murals are certainly worthy.

Students of art would certainly be able to appreciate the the technique that's inherent in his work.

But what do you think, from the point of view of the general public?

Do we take away from his work, understand about our history and our heritage, that we have to thank him for?

I think most people are aware of his art.

We always appreciate the things that we know the most about, and one reason that I did the book was to educate people about this artist and about his work, because the more we know about it, the more we will appreciate the work.

I've had so many people say, who did that work in the Union Passenger terminal?

You know, I was sitting in there when I was a little kid.

I used to go to take the bus, but I wonder, I always wondered who did that.

Well, let's find out.

But let's make it common knowledge who did that and learn a little bit more about it.

Because everyone seems to have seen it at one time or another, but nobody knows about it.

So there is such a dearth of information about southern artists.

There is a big gap when you look at the overall artists across the United States, there's a great deal of information about artists in the northeast, a great deal of information about the artists on the West Coast.

But southern artist with our extraordinary rich culture and heritage, not so much.

So it was very important to me to find an artist about which there was little written, and to add to this vast knowledge that I think we need to build about our our southern art history.

When you look at more recently active artists, artists that came after him, can you see his influences?

Do you feel and if so, where would you see those influences showing up?

I think, you know, right now there's a big resurgence in public art.

I think there are many more artists that realize the value of public art and the credibility of public art.

Public art is is not always just scribbles on a wall there.

There are some very expressive and very beautiful works of public art.

So, you know, we need to be judicious and look at those, those works and realize that many of them are works of art, and we need to judge them just as we would judge a work of art in a museum.

And let's don't be fooled that just because it's in a museum, it's good, but because it's on a wall by an unknown artist, it's not so good because a lot of times it is, is it was.

Our ratios are political.

Was there any part of that that was political in its message or in its nature?

The one that comes to mind is it was a commission.

So I don't know that it was necessarily our breezy those voice.

Because don't forget, he was an artist that almost always worked on commission, was the one that was done.

And new Iberia was done in 1940 about the corrupt politics in the state of Louisiana.

Does it survive?

Yes.

It's still there.

It is unfortunately covered by a curtain, and they don't readily show it.

But it's there.

It exists.

That's fascinating.

Yes.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it represents Alvarez.

Is, feelings.

But it he did it on commission as he did almost all of his work.

Now, there's some interesting work by Briscoe in the state capitol and the Capitol Annex as well, aren't there?

Yeah.

Can you talk a little about what makes those so significant, aside from, of course, them being in such a prominent public building?

What else stands out to you about that?

His first fresco assignment in the South was the fresco six fresco panels in Huey Long's new state Capitol, and only one is left.

And it's very difficult to get to see that one.

I have not been able to see it.

When I started this research decades ago, the word was all six were destroyed, died, and then when they were doing some, renovation on the state capitol, they found one behind the wall.

So when when I did this, all that you see in the book are the sketches which are in the possession of the LSU Museum of Art.

But now one of the actual frescoes is in existence.

But it's not easy to see as it's used to be in the courtroom now, in the governor's press room, I believe.

Interesting.

Any prospect, do you think, for it ever seeing the light of day again?

Well, I hope so.

It's there.

It's exposed.

It's it's it's just it's very protected.

And you can't go look at it.

Yeah.

Understood.

And so it's a fascinating, tantalizing glimpse for another day.

But that was kind of the beginning.

You know that was his his first opportunity.

From there he did the gap Dylan X and what what time period are we talking about?

From the early 1930s.

And then he did a WPA work in De Ridder, Louisiana.

Charming little, fresco in director, Louisiana, a typical WPA post office mural.

Then through those connections, he, did another WPA mural in Alabama, a post office, and in Shreveport.

Two he was active, wasn't it?

Did a huge cycle at the state fair.

Exhibits building tree fort.

All of these were just through connections.

The WPA worked in such a way that once you kind of got your foot in the door with the WPA, they took people that they knew and had worked with before, and, often use them again.

You tended to keep getting on.

Yeah.

Very.

Yeah.

Well, Carolyn Bernstein, thank you so much for taking the time to come and fill us in on this really fundamentally important aspect of Louisiana's art history.

Thank you.

It's a real pleasure to talk with you.

And congratulations on the book.

Thank you so much.

Before we wrap up this segment, we'd like to thank the photographers Dave Humphries, Brad Smith, Brian Lewis, Eddie Perez, Jim Zeiss, Chad Riley and Jackson Hill, all of whom were kind enough to let us use their work.

Accomplished artists from near and far to showcasing work in communities near you.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits coming soon to museums and galleries in your neck of the woods.

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