Grateful acknowledgment is made to Furthermore: A Program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund for its generous assistance in publishing this book.

 

The artist Conrad Albrizio lived in the South for over a half century. A native New Yorker, he found that his adopted home of Louisiana provided a rich and provocative atmosphere for his creative spirit. He became a prolific and outstanding producer of the regional art of the 1930s and 1940s as well as a vociferous representative of public mural art into the 1950s and 1960s, long after the general popularity of public art had waned. By 1936, Albrizio completed six fresco panels in the Louisiana capitol and one in the DeRidder, Louisiana post office. For another eighteen years, Albrizio continued his fresco commissions in Louisiana and Alabama, including the Waterman Building frescos in Mobile and the Union Passenger Terminal frescos in New Orleans. In The Frescoes of Conrad Albrizio: Public Murals in the Midcentury South, longtime student of and recognized authority on Albrizio’s work, Carolyn Bercier discusses the frescoes in detail within a chronology of the artist’s life. Bercier provides a well-researched and much-deserved examination of Albrizio’s most enduring accomplishments and their place in southern art of the twentieth century.