Museum Muses

For this new series, local Louisiana creative types—chefs, artists, politicos, and entrepreneurs—are invited to the LSU Museum of Art to choose a work of art from its vault that both inspires them and somehow speaks to the work they do in the state.

When Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne arrived at the LSU Museum of Art, he immediately confessed being somewhat intimidated by his surroundings.

A lot of my experiences in museums have consisted of me being basically overwhelmed. I am not a connoisseur or aficionado or expert on art, and I don’t have a visually artistic bone in my body. I would never find my drawings up on the wall at school, let’s just put it that way. But in my job, I have really come to realize that museums are all about preserving culture and celebrating creativity, which, frankly, is something that is often missing in government.

When I asked Dardenne about the first time he recalls being really captivated by a work of art, he immediately conjured a chance encounter with American landscape painter Thomas Cole’s famous four-part painting Voyage of Life at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It was in New York—there’s an artist named Thomas Cole, is that right? I was in college and I was in one of the big museums there, and there were four Thomas Cole paintings that depicted someone’s entire lifespan—four incredible paintings of someone’s entire life journey. I remember coming right home and looking him up because I had never heard of him and had never seen his paintings before. I still remember those paintings like it was yesterday.

Dardenne looked through the museum’s vault and chose After a Storm, Lake Maurepas, an 1886 landscape painting by Louisiana landscape painter Joseph Rusling Meeker. Jay confessed that he is usually more drawn to artworks full of action and intrigue, but couldn’t take his eyes off this swampy scene.

Usually I am drawn to scenes with more going on—more action, more heroes. But this one, I think it really represents what Louisiana actually looks like. There’s just a serenity to it. Looking at this painting, you actually feel like you are in a Louisiana swamp. Louisiana is really unlike any other place—a lot of places have a story to tell, ours just happens to be better. I mean, that was a campaign line from my run for lieutenant governor, but it’s also actually what I’ve done, is work to tell Louisiana’s story.