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NEW ORLEANS In the four-block radius where he painted and drank himself into frightening stupors, Noel Rockmore was known by the denizens of the French Quarter as an outrageous Pablo Picasso-like figure who combined the mythological and the real. He produced some 15,000 oil paintings, temperas, collages and sketches over his career and then died in obscurity.

His life was that of an American outsider and a throwback to Europe’s great expressionistic and hedonistic masters.

In the 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a bright young American artist who had a taste for Rembrandt and figurative paintings, with the outlook of an American social realist.

Then, the art world changed: Abstract expressionism typified by the paint throwing of Jackson Pollock became the rave. Rockmore, who admired draftsmanship in painting, detested it.

Rockmore changed: He left his wife and three children, changed his last name and headed to New Orleans in 1959,Cheap Christian Louboutin shoes, where he would eventually get lost to the New York art world.

The story of Noel Montgomery Davis (his real name) is getting a long-overdue audience outside New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art renaissance itself six years after Hurricane Katrina. From now until the end of January, his works are on view at the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia. The retrospective is called “Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore.”

“He was kind of an art hobo,” said Ethyl Ault, interim director of the LaGrange Art Museum.

She said Rockmore was an overlooked genius. “Was it politics? Did he offend people? Why was he so popular in New York when he was younger, and then he leaves, changes his name and then goes on into his fairy tale land?”

The show is based on nearly 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For 25 years, Shirley Marvin, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with the intention of making him famous one day.

But she had forgotten about the collection due to short-term memory loss, her family said. Marvin was one of Rockmore’s most devoted fans. She saw genius in him like many others in New Orleans. The extraordinary collection was gathering dust when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in October 2006, a year after Katrina, to get “a few paintings,” as her mother described it. Instead, they found the units packed with remnants of Rockmore’s life.

In the wake of the collection’s discovery, Rich and his wife, Tee Marvin, have become Rockmore’s biggest impresarios the agents Rockmore famously refused to have throughout his life as he willfully lived on the edge of the art world. He was notorious among art galleries for his temper and fits of outrage. His friends say he suffered emotional problems for much of his life.

The Marvins working with Rockmore’s family and art dealers, collectors and museum curators have begun cataloging his works and promoting him. They estimate he produced about 15,000 pieces of art and conservatively 750 to 1,000 of those are masterpieces.

“At first we thought my mom was crazy,” Rich Marvin said. “When a museum or gallery lines up his top 200 exquisite works, people will be as stunned as we are.”

Rockmore was born in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. He was supertalented. A child prodigy, he played the violin well by age 8. After suffering polio at age 10, he turned to painting. He studied briefly at The Juilliard School and had a studio at the Cooper Union. Family friends included Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.

His 20s were prolific as he painted the bums of the Bowery district, monkeys and elephants in the backstage of the Ringling Brothers Circus and parables of Central Park and Coney Island. He was a social realist, akin to Depression-era American painters such as John Steuart Curry, but these early works contained themes and artistic styles that would stay with him: death, violence, sex, the surreal and the allegorical.

In retrospect, it was the ghoulish and morbid in Rockmore that defined him, making him a kind of American Hieronymus Bosch.

In the 1950s, Rockmore became fed up with the wave of abstract expressionists then taking hold of New York the flat tones and humanless canvases of Willem De Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this period he drank heavily and his wife kicked him out because of his wildness, his daughter, Emilie Heller-Rhys, said.

At age 31, he moved down to New Orleans and began working with Larry Borenstein, an art collector, and Allan Jaffe, a business school graduate and tuba player. In the 1960s, Borenstein employed Rockmore as a kind of resident painter for a new society he’d formed with Jaffe to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz music. The society would become Preservation Hall.

Rockmore was commissioned to paint the old-time musicians. He captured the mood, scent, touch and smoke of New Orleans jazz and its musicians Punch Miller, Percy Humphrey, Louis Nelson, Sweet Emma and Billie and DeDe Pierce, and scores of others.

His output was staggering. He’d become fixated by a subject New Orleans’ Carnival traditions, the frenetic Port of New Orleans, the characters of the French Quarter, alien beings, ancient Egypt, voodoo and mined it artistically.

Some of his most cherished and memorable pieces are of the Quarter’s Bohemians, fellow outsiders: Ruthie the Duck Girl; Gypsy Lou; O.M. (standing for “Old Man”); Mike Stark; Johnny White; and Sister Gertrude Morgan.

Yet, his life was pierced by that dark side.

“He was a brilliant artist, and I don’t use those words lightly,” said Stephen Clayton, a New Orleans art collector who did not know Rockmore and does not own any of his works. “He chose to come here, came to the Quarter, climbed in a bottle and never got out.”

From his morning vodka, Rockmore kept going all day, muscling his way through sketches, wall-sized oils, nudes in charcoal, sculptures and mixed media and calling it quits at one of his favorite bars, often The Alpine, within shouting distance of the St. Louis cathedral and his bed.

There are stories of him trashing art galleries and studios. Handcuffing a woman to his stove. Sticking a mummified cat in one of his works. Going on lithium and alcohol binges that left him a wreck. Cursing at tourists viciously. Sitting in streets with his muddy tennis shoes and rumpled clothing, looking like a bum. Drawing on napkins, grocery bags and just about anything else he liked. Sitting in bars, drinking and trying to get women to go to bed with him.

One of Rockmore’s closest friends, Andy Antippas, a former Tulane University poetry professor and art gallery owner, recalled going into Rockmore’s apartment during one of his lithium binges and finding his studio in a state that resembled the home of Charles Manson.

“It was trashed,” said Antippas, who found pages from Playboy magazine littering the floor and feces from his two dogs in the middle of his bed. “He’d obviously been sitting in one place and drinking and painting for hours.”

“Noel was an autodidact of the highest order,” Antippas said. “There was probably no artist more prolific than Noel except perhaps Picasso.”

Antippas is like many Rockmore fans. He believes he was a genius, a master who ranks among the greatest.

In his home on St. Claude Avenue cluttered with books, paintings, decorated human skulls, African masks and paintings galore Antippas stood in front of a large subdued painting hanging on the wall near his desk. He looked at it and said he owned what he believed to be “one of the finest paintings, if not the best, painting in Western civilization, a nude portrait of his father. It’s the only such painting ever done.”

“He couldn’t relate to the real world. He lived in his own world; he was driven by his own work,” said Rita Posselt, a 59-year-old fine art photographer who lived with Rockmore between 1978 and 1984 and frequently posed for him. “He would wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, and in between those hours there was a lot of torment for him.”

“He wanted somebody to recognize his talent, and he wanted important people in the art world, museums and such, to do so, but he didn’t want to jump through hoops and parties to make it happen.”

During his life, and still today, Rockmore was a kind of New Orleans project.

He is woven into the city. Anyone who has stepped into the gloom of Preservation Hall has seen Rockmores they’re the haunting oil paintings of jazz greats on the walls. A Rockmore hangs in Johnny White’s bar. It’s a football scene, a token of appreciation for the bar owner, Johnny White, and typically Rockmore: There are three teams on the field. His paintings hang in the Old Mint, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and on the walls of galleries and homes throughout New Orleans. And who knows where else.

“My feeling was that Noel was the most democratic painter,” Antippas said. “Every waiter, bartender, in the Quarter has a Rockmore. God knows how many Rockmores are hanging on walls throughout the city.”

Rockmore died in 1995 at age 66 of an untreated infection. When he was taken to the hospital, according to friends, he was admitted as a “street person.” According to his friends, he sat up on the gurney and declared, “I’m not a street person, I’m a great artist.”

“I always say that he is America’s Picasso,” said Heller-Rhys, his daughter and an accomplished artist herself, as she stood during a recent visit outside the Skyscraper building, an 18th-century apartment building where Rockmore and many other artists, including Charles Bukowski stayed in the 1970s. “And America has to come to terms with that.”

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Online:

http://www.rightwaywrongway.com/

http://www.lagrangeartmuseum.org/

The vacancy left by Milan Vukmirovic’s departure at Trussardi has been filled—and not a moment too soon. The Italian label announced officially today that Umit Benan, whose menswear has been a highlight of Milan men’s fashion week, will design both men’s and women’s collections for the house as its “fashion consultant,” beginning with the Spring ‘12 menswear show on June 19. Before launching his own line in 2009, the Turkish/German designer worked at Marc Jacobs, under Sophie Théallet at François Nars’ Motu Tane label, and with Rifat Ozbek at Pollini. He’ll continue to produce his eponymous collection. For a hint of what’s to come for the Spring ‘12 Umit Benan line, see our menswear preview.

Photo: Courtesy of Umit Benan

Behold a line that was made for this site: the Target and Hollywoodintuition line hitting stores this Sunday! Priced between $2.99 to $29.99!!!!!

Purchase Info: Available at Target stores nationwide

It’s everything you need to get your inner Paris Hilton, Amanda Bynes and all of those other Hollywood hotties who shop at Jaye’s store, Intuition, on!

And you can shop and shop and still have some money left over to re-hydrate. Synchronize your timepieces because I am sure this will start to fly off the shelves.

“It” bags with flava, small leather goods in bright colors that look luxe, oversized eyewear the size of dishplates – which I love and adore – stackable, peace and love bangles and stretch bracelets, tie-dyed headbands…it’s endless.

Check out some of your favorite stars wearing cocktail dresses!

Richards gave it the daytime treatment with nude sandals and Bailon added an evening clutch! Mostly, I love the PRICE! $168! You can also carry this into fall, as hot pink is the big seller. Add black opaque or sexy sheer tights, black gladiator heels and a blazer and you’ve definitely got it all going without breaking the bank. Purchase Info: Buy it here.

Sometimes you need the perfect 24/7 summer dress that works for all occasions: weddings, cocktails, date night, brunch, tea parties, bachelorette parties and everything else. I think we found it! And it’s a celebrity HIT. With its sweetheart neckline, oversized waist bow and mini-dress fit, this figure flattering silhouette is perfect. Denise Richards and Adrienne Bailon both wore this French Connection Flash cotton dress!

Photos: Giuseppe Cacace / Getty Images (Simons); Julien M. Hekimian / Getty Images (Pilati)

After an International Herald Tribune article yesterday suggested Raf Simons would replace Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent, the French label released a statement today that said the rumors are “unfounded.” YSL also confirmed Pilati is hard at work on the upcoming YSL runway show. WWD notes, however, that it is understood that the designer’s contract with the house ends in March 2012 and he has yet to sign a renewal.

In April, Prism eyewear designer Anna Laub added swimwear to her repertoire. After a summer of living in her bathing suit, the self-confessed beach girl’s cool, relaxed vibe has carried over to her upcoming Spring 2012 collection. “It’s minimal, laid-back, and sexy, with some punchy attitude,” says Laub of the new line. Credit for that punch goes to Uschi Obermaier, the 1970’s German model who had a fling with Keith Richards. “I found lots of great images from the seventies of Uschi Obermaier that had this mood.” Of the colors—burgundy, antique gold, and burnt orange, Laub explains, “I was inspired by Guy Bourdin and the sketches of Egon Schiele.” We expect the dark green one-piece will fly off the shelves at Opening Ceremony. On that note: Laub has created limited-edition Prism espadrilles for the shop’s FNO fiesta. As for her nerdy-chic eyewear, expect to see her trendsetting clients, Alexa Chung included, sporting the zebra-horn Antwerp frame sometime soon.
—Kristin Studeman

Photo: Courtesy of Prism

Available in sizes 6-12. Get them now at sears.com.

PHOTOS: The best style finds from the issue

Now the pressing question is, which one came first?

With that said, I was surfing the Sears.com website and did a double take: The fabulous stripper-inspired, Mary Jane pump replica is on the site for a mere $61.95! Plus, the Bordello Shoes by Pleaser USA style is called…wait for it..Teeze!

Fashion trends come and go, but one thing that’s timeless is the red-soled Christian Louboutin Daffodil pump, as seen on celebs like Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Hudson. But at $995 a pair, one can only dream.

PHOTOS: 11 spring style essentials

By Sasha Charnin Morrison for Us Weekly. To read more of the Recessionista blog, click here.

Okay, so the leather is synthetic and does not feature a signature red sole, but it looks darn close. There are racier models in colors like red, gold, and sequins — there’s even a flame appliqued pump available. So, if you want to reach impossible heights, here’s your chance to emulate Jennifer, Kim, and the whole Kardashian clan!

—Matthew Schneier

French-born, Tokyo-based designer Julien David shows a full ready-to-wear collection during the Paris week, but his business began with the printed silk twill scarves that are still a major part of every one of his collections. (For his first runway show, he even used them to disguise the models’ faces.) David is a fabric obsessive to rate with the best of them, developing his own textiles with a mill in Ichinomiya, and accordingly the journey from silkworm to store shelf is a fascinating one. It’s that process that David and Philip Andelman (better known in some corners as the newlywed husband of Sarah from Colette) document in a new short film, debuting exclusively on Style.com. “We wanted to make a movie documenting the process and the different steps involved in the printing of our scarves,” David says. “We went to Yamagata and Kanagawa prefecture in Japan to shoot the movie during three days to try to film all the people who have been working on our scarves for the past four years.” (They’re spliced with footage of skateboarding moves, whose circular motions both inspired the designer’s work and mimic the printers’ motions.) It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a prefecture to print your foulard.

Buy Zuma’s Mickey Mouse Tee here.

Kingston and Zuma Rossdale are pretty stylin’.

By Sasha Charnin Morrison for UsMagazine.com. To read more of the Recessionista blog, click here.

Buy Kingston’s camouflage cargo shorts here.

Helps when mom Gwen Stefani and dad Gavin Rossdale are all that and a bag of chips. Stefani has dressed both her little men in cool kids clothes from Old Navy: the camo shorts and the Mickey tee! So chic, so attainable and hello, so affordable!

If at first it seemed perverse of Kate and Laura Mulleavy to turn their backs on the Renaissance glories of Florence in favor of an abandoned, dilapidated clothing store as the venue for the Rodarte presentation at Pitti, their decision made sense once you entered the labyrinthine space that producer Alex de Betak had customized for them with neon tubing and a huge ancient, cracked mirror. “We wanted to link the environment to what we do,” said Kate. True, the space artfully embodied Rodarte’s hermetic, sui generis personality.

Rather than Renaissance aesthetics, the Mulleavys focused on Renaissance ascetics, in particular the meditative state of heightened spirituality induced by the Fra Angelico frescoes on the walls of the monks’ cells under the Convent of San Marco. Every nook was intended to evoke those cells, in which the Rodarte gowns were suspended like serene distillations of the artist’s faded, dusty colors and delicate draperies. And a spiritual serenity was, in fact, the impression that lingered longest, perhaps because, in the past, the Mulleavys have made such an art of insinuating the barely suppressed violence of the physical world into their work.

The ten gowns were structured around a single blueprint: a sculpted torso, a long columnar skirt falling straight to the ground. The silhouette was familiar from classical art. Although Kate insisted that Hollywood couture has never been a reference for them, there was also something of the stately elegance of Adrian in this work, with an overlay of the kind of arcane, dreamlike flourishes that characterize Rodarte. A silk dress in vivid lapis blue was draped in lavender silk satin, its skirt a panel of electric blue sequins. Another dress, in dusty blue, was cross-draped with pink silk, like a couture version of Diana the Huntress. A halter-necked gown in white silk featured a torrent of white and red ruffles splitting open down its front. Hidden among the folds: molded Easter lilies, studded with pearls and crystals. The most spectacularly overwrought piece was composed of a cocoon of coppery lamé crisscrossed with huge scimitarlike feathers painted gold that floated over a skirt of white down. The whole ensemble was topped by a gold sunburst crown, one of the sculptural metal details inspired by Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

Such an outfit was a reminder that all ten of these pieces are destined for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection, rather than the bodies of living, breathing women. The significance of that wasn’t lost on Kate Mulleavy. She was free-associating about Carl Sagan making a record of the sounds of Earth and firing it off into space, where others would wonder at it in much the same way that she and Laura had spent five days marveling at Florentine glories that were hundreds of years in the making. In five centuries, will people be standing in front of Rodarte dresses in a similar state of transport? Pitti says yes.

Click here to see the full ten-piece collection >

—Tim Blanks

Photo: Courtesy of Rodarte