Dueling Photographers:
George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe
Profiles in Gay Courage Vol. 2
by
Jack Fritscher, PhD
How to Quote from this Material
Preface
THE PASSIONATE FEW
Emancipating New Orleans Sun King,
George Dureau, from the Mapplethorpe Eclipse
“And it is by the passionate few that the renown of genius is kept alive from one generation to another. These few are always at work. They are always rediscovering genius. Their curiosity and enthusiasm are exhaustless, so that there is little chance of genius being ignored. And, moreover, they are always working either for or against the verdicts of the majority. The majority can make a reputation, but it is too careless to maintain it. If, by accident, the passionate few agree with the majority in a particular instance, they will frequently remind the majority that such and such a reputation has been made, and the majority will idly concur.”
— Arnold Bennet, “Literary Taste: How to Form It,” 1909
Toward the 2030 Centennial
of the Birth of George Dureau
In the Rashomon of stories around George Dureau, I tip my hat to the Passionate Few who have had the pleasure of knowing George far better and longer than I who met him in April 1991 to shoot what he directed as his seminal video interview “for posterity” on his Dauphine Street balcony talking about his career and that of Robert Mapplethorpe whose double mentor he was in both photography and race relationships.
For too long the Mapplethorpe shadow has eclipsed George who, like Robert, was also a genius in a class and city of his own. In the way Stephen Sondheim spun a musical out of a painting to illuminate the other George, Georges Seurat, limning his A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the time has come to spin new art, thinking, and scholarship out of the storyboard painting, photography, and sculpture of George Dureau.
This book is a mandate of sorts because both George and my 1970s lover Robert asked me to write about them. For over forty years, I’ve told their stories in essays and books and onscreen documentaries recalling the way they were before their lives became legends that became myth. George passed at 83, and I, now 84, sorting my archives, simply wish to add my recorded conversations with George and my eyewitness observations about him to the sodality and solidarity of relatives, friends, critics, scholars, filmmakers, and art lovers who have championed him for so long.
George made everyone he met feel like a longtime friend.
To know George was to have a heartfelt platonic affair with him that endures to this moment.
“I’m capable,” George told me, “of carrying on affairs with everybody on earth at the same time. Not successfully, but energetically. My life and my work are identical. There’s a lot of warmth and passion, and a lot of dinners and candles in my life.”
In 1994, George contributed his lovely 1979 photograph of a healthy Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of my Mapplethorpe memoir which has its own Dureau chapter.
I cherish the last time my husband Mark Hemry and I were together with George in this life. It was Paris, May 3, 1996. We were strolling the Grande Allée path of the Tuileries on a sunny afternoon in the park with George. With our video camera filming, and George, vivacious and laughing, we were on our way toward the Maison Européenne de la Photographie where that night in the gay Marais at 5-7 rue de Fourcy, George was to be honored and our two video documentaries, Dureau Vérité: Life, Camera, Canvas and Dureau in Studio, were to be received into the permanent collection.
A dozen of his photos and one of his paintings hang, like a shrine to a New Orleans saint, in our living room where his lively spirit abides.
While George voices his authentic opinions and speaks for himself in my video documentation and telephone transcripts, may I say, out of respect for the Rashomon of other voices, stories, and opinions, that my efforts at scholarship, and my assertions, which I hope are compatible with others, are my own as are any errors in my book written to honor George.
Working as an academic gay historian since 1965, I have the greatest respect for the diverse efforts of the Passionate Few in New Orleans so long dedicated to keeping George’s life, work, and legend alive. My thanks underscores my appreciation of the eyewitnesses who have written and spoken about, filmed, and cared for George so that my effort here can quote and assemble their voices together to organize existing information to offer research support to a new generation creating Dureau essays, biographies, films, and scholarship in the run-up to his hundredth birthday in 2030.
My particular appreciation to Don Dureau, Arthur Roger, Jonathan Webb, Jarret Lofstead, Michael Alago, Jim Marks, Edward Lucie-Smith, and especially George himself for the hours of his oral history transcribed here as he requested “for posterity.”
Jack Fritscher, PhD
San Francisco
May 2024