Tom Whitehead: Clementine Hunter Biographer

When Tom Whitehead met Clementine Hunter in 1966, he was an undergraduate at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Invited by the supervisor of his student job to accompany her to Melrose Plantation along Cane River, Whitehead rode along.

“We first stopped at Clementine’s small cabin located across the road from Melrose,” he writes. “I met the artist and bought my first painting for three dollars, a bowl of zinnias. Then we drove around to Melrose and visited François [Mignon] on the porch of Yucca House. Little could I have imagined how the events of that simple afternoon trip would shape the next forty years of my life.”

By the time Whitehead met her, Hunter had achieved some fame for her art. She began painting in her early fifties after picking up discarded tubes of oils left behind at Melrose, where she worked as a domestic. At night, after going home from the “Big House,” she “marked” pictures of familiar plantation scenes.

In a new book from LSU Press, Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art, Whitehead and coauthor Art Shiver uncover new details about Hunter and explore the relationships that helped bring the “outsider” artist to the attention of museums, galleries, and collectors.

Whitehead, a native of Baton Rouge, graduated from NSU in 1967. At Boston University, he earned a master’s degree in public relations and communications. In 1969, he returned to NSU to teach. He retired in 1999 but remains a consultant on special projects to the university president.

“For me Clementine’s story is more than pictures on boards,” he writes in the book. “It is the story of the most remarkable person I ever met. . . . She was not educated, she never traveled, she never had an art lesson, but Clementine Hunter taught me much. I learned from her that intelligence, wit, and talent arise sometimes from the least likely among us.”

The granddaughter of slaves, Hunter was born around Christmas 1886 and led a hardscrabble life, picking cotton on local plantations with her family. Around 1900, they moved to Melrose and began to work in its fields—an event that would prove fortuitous for both Hunter and the world of folk art.

Carmelite Garrett Henry, known as “Miss Cammie,” owned Melrose, a working plantation producing cotton and pecans. Hunter eventually left the fields to work as a housekeeper and cook. Her creativity was already manifest. “She had a talent for sewing,” says Whitehead. “She made fringe for draperies, and she made quilts.”

Henry turned Melrose into an artists’ colony, welcoming writers and painters to the house and its outbuildings. One regular visitor was Alberta Kinsey, an Ohio native who moved to New Orleans and made impressionistic paintings of French Quarter scenes. Writer Lyle Saxon lived there while writing Children of Strangers, his only work of fiction.

Kinsey gave Hunter discarded tubes of paint, and Saxon encouraged her work, but the most important influence on Hunter was François Mignon, who lived in the outbuilding he dubbed Yucca House from the early 1940s until the plantation was sold in 1969.

Mignon, who wrote a local column called “Plantation Memo” (later published in book form), encouraged Hunter’s painting, purchased supplies for her, suggested subject matter, and tirelessly promoted her work.

It was Mignon who came up with the idea that Hunter should paint murals to decorate the walls of African House, an unusual structure that dates to about 1830. On wooden panels, Hunter depicted a wedding, a baptism, a funeral, spring planting, wash day, pecan harvesting, and a honky tonk. The Big House, Yucca House, and African House are all there, as is the artist herself—not painting but serving coffee to Saxon as he reads the newspaper. Executed in seven weeks in 1955, the murals are considered her chef d’oeuvre.

Mignon portrayed himself as a Frenchman who had studied at the Sorbonne before moving to New York City. In fact, the authors discovered, he was born Frank Mineah in Cortland, New York, in 1899. When he arrived in the Cane River area in 1939, he reinvented himself.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Whitehead and Shiver found more than seventeen thousand pages of journal entries and six thousand pages of correspondence that Mignon had left to the university. They photocopied every page that mentioned Hunter and used them to document details of her life. They had thought she began painting in 1942, but Mignon’s papers said differently. “In December 1939 he wrote about her painting in his journal,” says Whitehead.

After Mignon died in 1980, others stepped up to help Hunter. Mildred Hart Bailey taped hours of interviews with the artist that included information about her ancestors, her childhood, and her sparse education. Writer James Register influenced her to experiment with abstract painting. Ann Brittain supplied the artist with materials and bought hundreds of her works.

Whitehead visited Hunter weekly, and they formed such a close bond that she referred to him as her “white son.” (Twice widowed, she had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood.)

Hunter, who produced at least five thousand paintings, was working almost until she died on January 1, 1988, at the age of 101. Whitehead was on safari in Mombasa, Kenya, when he got the news. He returned to Natchitoches too late for her funeral.

On that cold January day, St. Augustine Catholic Church was packed with two hundred friends and admirers. Hunter was laid to rest in a mausoleum vault in the church cemetery, next to her old friend François Mignon.

Whitehead’s home, which overlooks Lake Sibley, is filled with Hunter’s work. Every room bursts with not just paintings but snuff and wine bottles, plastic milk jugs, and wooden shingles decorated by Hunter. He also owns one of her palettes.

Furnished with a Victorian parlor set that once belonged to Lyle Saxon, Whitehead’s office holds more paintings, including “Frenchie Goes to Heaven,” which commemorates her deceased son, and “Clementine Gets an Unlisted Number,” which depicts workers installing telephone lines at her house at Melrose.

Hunter was considered a “memory painter” because she executed scenes of cotton picking and wash days from memory. But Whitehead recalls watching as she painted from life a vase of three spider lilies. He bought the painting on the spot; it occupies a place of honor in his office.

Beginning in 2006, Whitehead used his expertise on Hunter to help the FBI identify three persons accused of executing and selling forgeries of her work. William and Beryl Toye were indicted for creating fakes with her signature, and Robert Lucky Jr. was indicted for selling their work. All three pled guilty. The now elderly Toyes were sentenced to confinement at a Baton Rouge nursing home. Lucky was sentenced to twenty-five months in federal prison. That saga will be examined in CNBC’s “Crime Inc. #8: Art for the Taking,” to air on September 13.

Nearly twenty-five years after her death, Hunter still generates interest. A “modest retrospective” of her work will be on view at the LSU Museum of Art from September 8, 2012, through March 31, 2013. While helping select items for that exhibit, Whitehead (who loaned several items from his collection) was amazed to discover that “Baton Rouge has the greatest concentration of important Hunter paintings.

“Some of the best Hunters in the world are in Baton Rouge,” he says “One painting of a doctor treating a patient was given by Lyle Saxon to state librarian Essae Culver. She donated it to the State Library, where it was in storage for years. The LSU exhibit is the first time it will be seen in public. The Baton Rouge public library has a major collection of Clementine’s abstract paintings at the Scotlandville branch. The Louisiana Art and Science Museum owns seventy pieces. Thirty are miniatures, two by four inches, that I had never seen before. It’s a fabulous small collection.”

Whitehead says new discoveries are constantly cropping up. Recently, while appraising the Hunter collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art, he discovered a chevron quilt made by Hunter. “I knew it existed because it appears in a photograph of Clementine taken by Clarence John Laughlin in 1952,” says Whitehead. “But until now I had no idea where it was.”

One of the more exciting developments is Zinnias, an opera about the artist directed by Robert Wilson, which will debut at Montclair State University in New Jersey next January. About thirty Natchitoches residents will fly up for opening night. Hunter’s friend and biographer plans to be there, front and center. Declares Whitehead, “I wouldn’t miss it!”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. Click HERE For Laney’s story on the Clementine Hunter forgery case.