Hidden behind layers of plain white paint for decades, Allen Hall’s best-kept secret is finally coming to light. Former University art student and Louisiana native Cheryl Elise Grenier, who has decades of experience restoring true fresco paintings in the heart of Italy’s Renaissance culture, uncovered a small portion of the shrouded treasure about 10 years ago while running some tests as she worked to restore other Allen Hall murals. Finally, everyone is getting a peak at the previously veiled jewels. The product of graduate art student Roy Henderson’s thesis in 1939, a pair of two-story fresco paintings drape the walls of the western stairwell in the former Arts and Sciences Building, with each painting’s subject matter mirroring that of the building’s former label. Colorful images of students distilling sugar, mixing chemicals and staring out of the University’s astronomical observatory flank one wall, representing the sciences. The arts-heavy side shows painting students encircling a nearly nude male, a rendering of an abstract sculpture, and figures of Henderson and his teacher, the University’s first art professor and renowned fresco painter Conrad Albrizio, painting a fresco within the fresco. “It’s a pun,” Grenier said matter-of-factly. “That’s him literally producing graduates of the art school.” Albrizio has his back turned to the viewer, with his brush painting the faces of what looks to be multi-ethnic art students – an oddity in itself since the University did not admit its first black student until A.P. Tureaud in 1953, about 15 years later. A thin waterfall flows from his brush down to a depiction of Henderson himself, which fades into silhouettes of people and a seemingly unfinished black and white painting near the bottom. But it’s all part of an elaborate tribute to Albrizio, Grenier said. Grenier earned two degrees from LSU – a bachelor’s in fine arts and a master of fine arts in art history, but she didn’t want to grow up to teach art history. “She was always artistic, always drawing,” said her mother, Virginia Grenier, who speaks nine languages and works at the University’s International Hospitality Foundation. “We always encouraged anything she was interested in.” Some of Grenier’s local work includes a restoration of the historic Whitney Plantation about 40 miles west of New Orleans, in addition to the Allen Hall projects. “We’re just very proud of her work and what she’s been able to contribute here in Louisiana,” her mother said. A specialist in fresco mural conservation, Grenier originally worked to uncover and restore some of Allen Hall’s other murals in 2001. But in her research, she uncovered clues to other paintings around LSU. Some had vanished. But others, like Henderson’s stairwell thesis, had only been buried. It took 10 years to gather funding for the project, which involved first tearing apart the wall-to-wall staircase before carefully exposing the 70 year-old murals. “Fresco” means “fresh” in Italian, and the millennia-old technique involves painting directly onto wet plaster, so that the painting actually dries into the wall. Grenier uncovers, touches up and restores mostly century-old murals using uniquely blended chemicals to beautify the works without damaging them. “All these frescos in Allen Hall represent a time when we paid more attention to public art,” said Interim Art and Design Dean Ken Carpenter, who has helped keep the project moving since former Dean David Conrath left the school several years ago. “We kept pushing to make sure it didn’t slip through the cracks,” Carpenter said. Grenier lives in the rural town of Vinci, where Leonardo da Vinci was born there about 650 years before the now well-established conservationist helped to restore Florence’s most iconic cathedral – the marble gilded Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, otherwise known as Il Duomo, or The Dome. “Her livelihood is in conservation and she’s in the right place of the world,” said Michael Robinson, senior development director of LSU’s College of Art and Design, who helped organize and recruit funds for the project. “She’s very ‘simpatico,'” Robinson said, using the Italian word for “nice” to allude to her generous work helping both people and animals in need in Italy. After moving to Italy, Grenier earned several additional degrees in the field of conservation and began working as a conservation specialist. Today, she owns her own company, which allows her to travel from Italy to Louisiana about once a year to restore homegrown art. But her passion lies in Italy, where she also teaches conservation and does some fresco painting of her own. “I really like that the young people bring enthusiasm with them,” Grenier said. “They even teach me.” She speaks fluent Italian and has permanent residency in the fresco capital of the world. “The art, the architecture, the food, and the wine of course … are superior to anything else,” she said, with a small Buddha pendant dangling around her neck that she wears for safe travels during her many trans-Atlantic flights. And although her family’s purple and gold connections run deep, her heart has melted into the rolling Tuscany hills, like a fresco into a wall.
—- Contact Ben Wallace at [email protected]