Noel Rockmore: Preservation Hall Portraits

Noel Montgomery Davis was born in New York City in 1928 to Floyd Davis, an illustrator and Gladys Rockmore Davis, a painter.  Although a child prodigy on the violin, Rockmore had an affinity for the visual arts and was largely self-taught, beginning to paint at the age of seven.  After much difficulty in school, Rockmore graduated in 1947 and began painting full time.  His earliest works are from New York and Mexico, where he traveled in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  After gaining a major patron, and participating in group exhibitions at illustrious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Rockmore traveled to New Orleans for the first time and began painting the French Quarter and its inhabitants.

In 1959, Noel Davis legally changed his name to his mother’s maiden name, Rockmore.  This time period also marked a shift toward Rockmore’s mature style, in which he accepted he “need only to record what actually existed to convey the moods he wished to express in his art.”  This manner of painting led to the somberness of the Preservation Hall series, begun in 1963, in which Rockmore created over 300 oil portraits and over 500 acrylic works of jazz musicians, often posed in muted colors and solemn poses.  E.L. “Larry” Borenstein, an art dealer who is considered the “father” of Preservation Hall, commissioned the series to document the musicians who performed nightly in the club.  Rockmore set up a studio above Preservation Hall where he would paint portraits of the musicians who visited him during the day.  At night, Rockmore would be in the audience and would paint quick portrait sketches that conveyed much of the energy present in the room.  The series was featured in a book published by the LSU Press in 1968.