WHEN THE PAINTER MET THE CREOLES

Author: By John R. Kemp

Date: SUNDAY, November 30, 1997

Page: G3

Section: Books

Although 19th-century New Orleans was an odd mixture of French, Spanish, Cubans, Sicilians, Irish, Germans, Africans, English, and a list of others, writers over the years have directed most of their attention to the city's large Creole population. Contrary to popular usage outside New Orleans, the word ``creole'' there has nothing to do with race or racial mixtures. It simply means native-born. Today, when white, black, and mixed-race New Orleanians refer to themselves as Creoles, they mean they trace their family pedigrees back to French and Spanish colonial times.

Christopher Benfey's ``Degas in New Orleans'' gives a fresh glimpse at these Creoles in the final decades of the 19th century. It is by no means an exhaustive history. Using the French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas's 1872 visit to New Orleans relatives, Benfey introduces readers to an often tragic Creole world during the city's violent Reconstruction years. He attempts to show what influences the city and its peculiar social structure might have had on Degas's art.

Degas's mother, Celestine Musson Degas, was born in New Orleans, where her extensive family had been prominent since colonial days. After the city's fall to Union troops in the early years of the Civil War, Degas's aunt and female cousins fled to France, where they waited out the war. The artist became very attached to his American family during those years. Shortly after the final surrender, Degas's brother Rene moved to New Orleans and married their cousin Estelle. The rogue later abandoned his wife and children and returned to France with a new lover.

For generations, historians have explained the violence, social struggles, and race relations of New Orleans after the Civil War in political terms. Benfey, however, takes a different tack. Through impressive research, he examines the city's parallel worlds where single families were divided by racial bloodlines. He describes the pervasive 19th-century custom of prominent married Creole white men having second families with ``women of color.'' Children of these liaisons were often sent to France to be educated and for a better life. Some who returned, such as Norbert Rillieux (whose invention of a refining method revolutionized Louisiana's sugar industry), often rose to prominence and wealth. Yet they remained silently apart from their white relations.

Rillieux and Degas, whose grandmother on his mother's side was a Rillieux, were cousins. But Benfey, who teaches American literature at Mount Holyoke College, is incorrect in his claim to be first to publish the Rillieux ``family secret'' that Norbert Rillieux (``a quadroon libre'') was the son of Vincent Rillieux, a prominent white man (and Degas's great-uncle), and Constance Vivant, a woman of color. If this was a Rillieux family secret, it wasn't well kept: The circumstance of Rillieux's birth was published almost a decade ago. To my knowledge, however, Benfey is the first to write about the black-white family connection.

Introducing a cast of characters and events, Benfey sets the stage for his narrative with three questions: ``What was it about this war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city that elicited from Degas some of his finest works? What can his paintings and letters tell us about New Orleans during a pivotal period in Reconstruction Louisiana? And what do we need to know about the intricate weave of New Orleans society -- French and `American,' black and white, native and newly arrived -- to make sense of Degas's sojourn there?''

To answer those questions, Benfey knits together the lives and experiences of Degas and New Orleans writers Kate Chopin (``The Awakening'') and George Washington Cable (``The Grandissimes'' and ``Old Creole Days''). Chopin and Cable, who both went on to successful literary careers, were just beginning to mine the exotic Creole world in the 1870s. Benfey also describes the bloody street battles between Republican-backed Reconstruction troops and unreconstructed local white Democrats. He writes in detail about the ill-fated Unification Movement of 1873, when prominent white Democrats and prosperous blacks (some of whom had been slave-owning free people before the war) tried to restore home rule through compromise.

Benfey gives a good historical account of those troubled times, but he is at his best when telling stories from New Orleans folklore and in his biographical sketches of Rillieux, Chopin, Cable, and Degas's cousin and sister-in-law, Estelle. He recounts the city's most popular 19th-century yarn -- about the sadistic Madame Lalaurie and her French Quarter house, where she tortured slaves chained in her attic. Today, the house is still known as the ``Haunted House'' on Royal Street. What that has to do with Degas is uncertain.

This problem runs throughout the book. Although well written, with insights into the city's Creole and Anglo-American social structure during the 1870s, Benfey's stories, historical overview, and biographies (at least most of them) lack clearly demonstrated connections to Degas or his five-month stay in the city. But after reading his arguments, one could say: Yes, Degas's New Orleans family was prominent in business and rebel politics. Yes, he had ``unspoken of'' black cousins. Yes, Cable, Chopin, and others were inspired by the fading Creole world. But any long-lasting influences they may have had on Degas remain a mystery.

Benfey is on stronger ground in examining the New Orleans influence on two key paintings -- the ultrarealistic ``Cotton Office in New Orleans'' and ``Cotton Merchants in New Orleans,'' with ``its quick handling of gesture and light.'' Benfey quotes Degas's excitement in creating a ``more spontaneous'' and ``better art.'' He says Degas's transition to Impressionism had begun.

Whether or not the reader agrees with all of Benfey's conclusions, ``Degas in New Orleans'' is a thought-provoking and fresh look at a period in New Orleans history that still reverberates today.