Newcomb exhibit of Durieux works a homecoming

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: May 4, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05am

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If you’re lucky, John Clemmer will walk in right before you’re about to leave. He won’t notice you, which is OK, because you’re not the person with whom he can truly share his stories of Caroline Durieux.

No, his eyes are fixed on Earl Retif, who knew the artist as well as Clemmer. Her stories are part of theirs, and you know you’re privileged to eavesdrop on at least one before walking out the door.

And he shares a classic memory, one that embodies the humor reflected on Newcomb Art Gallery’s walls. Not all of Durieux’s work was meant to be funny. And as pointed out in the exhibit From Society to Socialism: The Art of Caroline Durieux, her artwork wasn’t mean-spirited.

“But you could always see her eyes working when you were with her,” Retif will say earlier. “You knew that someone in the room was going to appear in a later work.”

And did they?

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’d see one show up every once in awhile.”

Which had to be quite often, considering that Retif often visited Durieux in her small home bordering the LSU campus on West Chimes. He started out collecting her work, then ended up helping her organize it.

That was her edict: “I’m the artist, you’re the organizer.”

And lots of the work he organized appears in this exhibit of Durieux’s work, appropriately on the Newcomb College campus. The college was Durieux’s alma mater, a place where she didn’t quite get along with Ellsworth Woodward.

Woodward and older brother William both were artists whose work highly influenced Southern art. Ellsworth headed Newcomb’s art department when Durieux was a student there.

“And he thought art should be serious,” Retif said. “She didn’t see things as he did.”

Take, for instance, Durieux’s 1939 drawing, Art Class.

“Look at it closely,” Retif said, pointing out a character on the far right. “You’ll see all of the girls here are poised to work, but there’s one in the back here that’s hanging back.”