Gail Feigenbaum, the museum’s curator of painting, says there’s no way to be sure if Degas’s art “would have looked the same if he hadn’t come here,” but she’s convinced that “the New Orleans visual experience carried over to its aesthetics”. .” Some critics have suggested that the colors of New Orleans had a lasting impact on Degas, and the city’s influence has been found in the works he completed years after his return to France. As the 20th century approaches With its end, New Orleans prepares to embrace Degas again, authorities expect a traffic jam of monstrous proportions when “Degas and New Orleans: A French Impressionist in America” ​​opens on May 1.

That coincides with the final weekend of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, an event that annually draws tens of thousands of people to the Crescent City. The exhibition will run until August 1. 29, providing an attraction during the summer months when tourism wanes. The centerpiece of the exhibit will be Degas’ famous canvas “A Cotton Office in New Orleans,” a scene in which his uncle, two brothers and several cousins ​​served as models for dark-suited cotton joggers. It became the first 19th-century impressionist painting purchased by a French museum, and the work will be on loan from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Pau, France. Before landing the cotton office painting, New Orleans had to compete with Atlanta, which currently hosts a major exhibition of French Impressionists. “We felt like we had to get it,” says Feigenbaum. “It was an important job for us.”

Over the last month, the couriers have been bringing other priceless Degas works from France, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Bahamas, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts submitted three works, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University sent a companion piece to the cotton office painting. One work that will once again be on public view is “The Nurse (La Garde-Malade)”, a gouache depicting a vigil in a sick person’s room. It has been locked in a private vault and has not been seen for almost 40 years. In addition, relatives of the artist have contributed other artifacts. New Orleans was the home of his mother, Celestine Musson Degas, and several Musson family descendants still live here. Feigenbaum had just one year to assemble the collection after the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism requested a special event tied to the Louisiana-France celebration. Generally, it takes four years to develop this type of project. “We view maybe only a dozen works, something really intimate,” she says. But museums and private collectors responded quickly and generously because New Orleans represented a special place for Degas. When the artist met his two brothers here, the city was still under occupation by federal troops after the Civil War.

Though Reconstruction and pestilence ate away at the city’s joie de vivre, Degas experienced the exoticism in New Orleans that made Paris seem almost mundane. Against the backdrop of a mighty river, the Mississippi, and rich foliage, Degas was introduced to a world of southern customs, racial passions, and pagan revelry. He discovered “free men of color”-Creoles with African blood-among his cousins ​​in New Orleans, even as other relatives of his, future members of the notorious White League, plotted a violent insurrection against Yankee forces. There were duels under the oaks of City Park, and dysfunction ruled the American Degas family. Her brother René married a first cousin and then left her to elope with another New Orleans mermaid. It was the stuff of a 19th century soap opera. In his 1997 book, “Degas in New Orleans,” Christopher Benfey wrote: “The trip to New Orleans marked a turning point in Degas’s career…Distracted and stuck in his profession upon arrival, he left town with a new sense of direction and resolution. He also took with him, in his folder and in his mind, several unforgettable images of New Orleans life.” His uncle’s house, where Degas stayed, still stands on the Esplanade, a boulevard that connects the French Quarter and City Park. The house is within walking distance of the city’s venerable thoroughbred track, the fairgrounds. Racehorses were a favorite subject for Degas. “We can only assume that he went to the fairgrounds,” says Feigenbaum. “We’ve tried, but we can’t link the racing photos of him to New Orleans.”

However, the city was clearly the source of another of the artist’s obsessions. Degas was fascinated by his first cousin, Estelle, the young widow of a Confederate soldier. “One cannot look at her without thinking that in front of that head of hers are the eyes of a dying man,” Degas once wrote. Later, when she went blind, Estelle became the scorned girlfriend of Degas’ brother. Her sorrowful visage is depicted in several works, including a portrait in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art that local citizens brought home through a public subscription campaign 30 years ago. Degas sailed back to France after Mardi Gras in 1873 and never returned. But he kept sketches and memorabilia from New Orleans. Years later, when his contemporary Paul Gauguin considered the South Seas as the setting for his art, Degas recommended New Orleans instead. Sure, the South Sea Islands were strange, Degas said, but New Orleans stood out as one of the world’s most exotic places.