If I remember correctly the tourists loved to buy the paintings of jazz musicians done by Rockmore. Borenstein had a good thing going with selling this splashy commerical art.
Some of these paintings are still on the walls of Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
One or two paintings reminded me of the San Francisco art gallery that sold the pictures of the little girls and boys with big eyes crying. In the sense that they were done expressly for the tourist trade.
In 1969 there was a gallery in North Beach in San Fran that sold Walter Keane paintings and nothing else. Read in the article below that it turned out his wife Margaret did most (if not all)of the paintings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Keane
I see an effort is underway to try and promote Rockmore. I don't think they will get very far. Only 646 people have looked at the video shown above.
Read my posts about Walter Anderson of Ocean Springs, Mississippi to see what a real genius was doing at the same time. Click on the name Walter Anderson in the Label box below.
After Bellocq's death in 1949, two New Orleans antiques dealers, Larry Borenstein and Al Rose, found Bellocq's glass-plate negatives in his desk drawer and purchased them. When noted photographer Lee Friedlander saw these glass negatives in 1966 he bought them and printed them for the world to see.
Video above is Sweet Emma Barrett performing at Preservation Hall. She was also known as Sweet Emma The Bell Gal. If you watch the video you will see why.
Here is a link to a good article about 3 important men who kept Jazz Alive in New Orleans. Al Rose who wrote about Storyville and Larry Borenstein who started Preservation Hall in 1961. Somebody had to do it and he did. When Borenstein died he owned about half of the French Quarter. In 1965-1966 I used to see him sitting in his art gallery on Bourbon Street. He had found an artist who painted large canvases of Jazz musicians. The tourists loved them and bought them like the were French donuts or beignets.
Larry Borenstein is also the guy who found the glass negatives of E.J. Bellocq the famous photographer of Storyville. Borenstein sold them to Lee Friedlander who had them published in book form. The pictures also appear in Al Roses' book STORYVILLE published by The University of Alabama Press. The pictures inspired the movie PRETTY BABY starring Brooke Shields.
Here is some information on E.J. Bellocq. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Bellocq
And here is the article on Al Rose and Bill Russell and Larry Borenstein. http://www.rexrose.com/alrose.htm
You can see many more of the photographs of E.J. Bellocq here: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/B/bellocq/bellocq.html
Click on all the pictures to enlarge them.
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