Lot 695: Palmer Schoppe (American/Charleston, 1912-2001),

Palmer Schoppe (American/Charleston, 1912-2001), "New Orleans Jazz Musicians and the Muse", oil on canvas, signed and dated "1987" lower right, 96 in. x 96 in., unframed.

Provenance: Commissioned by the Fairmont Hotel, New Orleans, 1987. Note: The Southern California artist Palmer Schoppe was first introduced to the world of jazz musicians, clubs, and Harlem speakeasies, when he studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students¹ League in New York City. During a particularly harsh winter in 1934, he made a road trip south with a group of friends to the low country of South Carolina where he encountered the Gullahs, a remote coastal African American community that retained its own distinct dialect and culture. Schoppe did numerous sketches of the Gullahs, writing "I simply wanted to catch the spirit & feeling of a wonderful people who expressed themselves so beautifully in song and dance." Representing music in his drawings and paintings became a life passion for the artist. Upon returning to California, Schoppe taught drawing at the Walt Disney Studio Training School, the Chouinard Art Institute, The Pasadena Art Center School, and later lectured at UCLA in the Motion Picture and Television Department. In the 1950s, he began to work for the architect Arthur Froelich as a muralist and architectural sculptor. This experience resulted in Schoppe earning numerous mural commissions from hotels, restaurants and casinos. In Las Vegas alone, his murals could be found at the Aladdin Hotel, MGM Grand, Circus-Circus, Sahara Hotel and Caesar¹s Place. In 1987, The Fairmont Hotel in downtown New Orleans commissioned Palmer Schoppe to create two murals of jazz musicians. Schoppe¹s murals complemented the four Art Deco murals in the famed Sazerac Bar by New Orleans artist Paul Ninas that had been commissioned by the Roosevelt Hotel in the 1930s. Working in a modernist figurative style, Schoppe¹s mural of "New Orleans Jazz Musicians" depicts ten jazz musicians and a female singer in the midst of a performance. Set in a club, the musicians have placed a hat center stage to collect tips from the admiring crowd. These murals, along with those for the Colorado Belle Hotel in Nevada, were the final murals of his long and illustrious career. Reference: Severens, Martha R., The Charleston Renaissance, Saraland Press, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1998,pp. 119-121.