"Clown" by Caroline Durieux (LA, 1896-1989), original lithograph, pencil signed and titled, inscribed "edition of 10", dimesion - 10 15/16" x 13 7/8"
 
Caroline Wogan Durieux is best known for her satirical, often pessimistic depictions of people and events. She was born into a large Creole family in New Orleans just before the turn of the twentieth-century. In 1913, Durieux enrolled at Newcomb College in New Orleans and studied with Ellsworth Woodward. Upon completion of her studies at Newcomb in 1917, she obtained a scholarship to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She acquired a great deal of training at both schools, but she did not meet success until after she moved to Mexico City in 1926. In Mexico she befriended Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. Durieux shared Rivera's leftist and egalitarian views, if not his outright communist principles. With biting social satire, she took aim at the privileged, the arrogant, and the mendacious, but also made light of the idiosyncrasies of everyday people. Durieux returned to New Orleans in 1936; two years later, she went to work for the WPA Louisiana Writer's Project. She began teaching painting at Newcomb College in 1939, at the same time serving as director of the regional office of the Federal Art Project. With support from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Durieux organized exhibitions of modern art in Latin America. In 1942, she joined the faculty at Louisiana State University and remained for twenty-one years. Durieux concentrated increasingly on printmaking, experimenting with radioactive inks, aided by faculty in the Department of Nuclear Science. She also revived a nineteenth-century process of printing on transparent surfaces in collaboration with LSU biochemists.