art
Baton Rouge and the Visual Arts The city’s architecture and museums provide a host of cultural options By John R. Kemp
B
aton Rouge owes its start to the visual arts — a painted pole decorated with fish bones. The story goes something like this: In 1699 the French Canadian explorers Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and his younger brother Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, led an expedition to the lower Mississippi River to establish France’s claim to the territory. While exploring the area that would later become Baton Rouge, they noticed a tall, red pole standing high on a bluff. Inquiring among the local Native Americans, the explorers learned that the pole marked the boundary between Houmas and Bayagoula hunting grounds. Eventually, the area became known as “Baton Rouge,” French for red stick. In modern art parlance, Baton Rouge began as an abstract conceptual installation piece — a painted red pole with applied fish bones. Over the next 100-plus years, Baton Rouge muddled along as it passed from the French to the British and then to the Spanish. For a brief period in 1810, the town was part of the independent Republic of West Florida before being annexed by the United States later that same year. In 1846 the state legislature decided to move the capital from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. This relocation launched the city’s first public art program. The state hired New York architect James Dakin to design a new capitol building. Rather than copy the then-favored dome-style design in Washington, D.C., Dakin’s plan called for a massive neo-Gothic building, which he described as “castellated Gothic,” to be perched high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. It
32 | Louisiana Life march/april 2017
was an age when public aesthetics were as important as function. Constructed between 1847 and 1852, the Old State Capitol with its crenulated parapets, massive cast-iron interior spiral staircase, stained glass rooftop skylight, and faux-bois woodwork is still an architectural masterpiece. Not everyone was happy with Dakin’s castle, now home to the Louisiana Museum
of Political History. Mark Twain, writing in his 1883 book “Life on the Mississippi,” described the landmark as a “pathetic... whitewashed castle” an “architectural falsehood” that should be dynamited. Nevertheless, the building dominated the Baton Rouge skyline until 1932 when Huey Long decided to build a new capitol to portray the glories of Louisiana history, art, industry and himself. The architects
old state capitol photos by Sheldon Anderson, Courtesy Louisiana Secretary of State