REVISITING CLEMENTINE HUNTER CONTINUED…Installment #3

This is the third installment of the essay I wrote for THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL: PROFILES OF MEMORABLE LOUISIANA WOMEN back in 1984, reprinted for those who have shown an interest in the life and work of the famous Louisiana folk artist, Clementine Hunter.

“After discovering Alberta Kinsey’s brushes and paint and launching her career as a folk artist, Clementine’s clientele broadened from local African-American and white people, who would snatch up her paintings as fast as she painted them, to wealthy patrons who came from other parts of Louisiana to buy her work. Her own appraisal of her painting was a simple “I guess it’ll do.” Clementine began selling her paintings for twenty-five cents each and soon garnered $100 for a picture when the demand for her work accelerated.

By the mid-1950’s, Clementine’s paintings were drawing national attention, and she was completing small pictures at the rate of one every two days. The New Orleans Museum featured her work in the first one-woman showing it had ever sponsored for an African-American person. Look magazine featured a lengthy story about her, and Northwestern State University at Natchitoches held a hometown exhibit of her paintings. Her “marks” began selling throughout the United States and Europe.

Although Clementine’s work never reached a point beyond “it’ll do” for her, she began to acknowledge the attention shown her. She posted a sign in the front yard of her cabin at Melrose Plantation, which read: “50 Cents A Look.” She placed her paintings against a fence at Melrose and sold them alongside watermelons. She also began to complain about the stream of curious white people who veered off Louisiana Highway 1 to Melrose to take a look at her.

In 1976, Clementine’s work received worldwide recognition when her Threshing Pecans painting was chosen as a UNICEF calendar selection. In this painting, the nuts seem to fall from the trees without much help from the pickers.

Clementine remained illiterate and uninterested in learning to read and write. She did not attend any of her exhibitions and refused to leave Natchitoches Parish. “I ain’t interested, I don’t travel,” she said adamantly. Her works have been exhibited in the New York State Historical Society Collection, in the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, and in a travelling exhibit of The Black American Artist, 1750-1950 that visited Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Dallas. Three of her paintings, Sunday Church, The Wedding, and Nativity Scene appeared in Forever Free: An Exhibit of Art by African-American Women, 1862-1980 which was shown in Illinois, Nebraska, Alabama, South Carolina, Maryland,and Indiana during 1980. The Louisiana State Library in Baton Rouge, Louisiana owns a collection of Clementine’s work, as do other parish libraries in her home state. Although the work of some folk artists often flourishes only until the paint dries on their canvasses, Clementine’s paintings continue to fascinate the art world.

Clementine produced flat, two-dimensional images and patterns of bright, vital colors. Her approach was honest and direct, and the paintings have an informal effect. Foreground figures loom smaller than background figures; trees, cotton bales, and figures hover suspended in the air; flowers are often larger than houses. One of her impressionist paintings features patches of colored blocks, interrupted by streaks of other colors. Although Clementine has never flown, she explained this work as Cane River From the Air. She discarded the impressionistic approach to art early because she claimed, “it nearly drove me crazy.”

Clementine understood little about fame. As she was illiterate and had no way to evaluate art and refused to travel to view other art, she remained a purist, undisturbed by competition. When I interviewed her, she was 98 and had completed over 4,000 pictures. She continued to “make her mark” but complained of ill health and sometimes slept until 11 a.m. Visitors often found her “just resting” and looking out at the Cane River flowing slowly by, across the road from her trailer where she lived with her sister Rosa.”

CONTINUATION OF REVISITING CLEMENTINE HUNTER

This is the second installment of a profile of Clementine Hunter, published in my book, THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL: PROFILES OF MEMORABLE LOUISIANA WOMEN, reprinted here for those charter members of the “Peasant Poet Society,” established Jan. 29.  The post followed a dinner table conversation among the charter members about this famous African-American artist. Clementine, of course, is deceased, but the interest in her personality and her colorful folk art has not diminished since she first began “making her mark” over a half century ago. 

“Clementine Hunter had been curious about the artists and writers who had been coming to Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, from the time she was hired to be chief cook at the Big House on the old plantation during the early 1900’s. As a young girl she had stitched paper cutouts on cloth to make wall decorations, and later made quilts and created rag dolls. She was meticulous about her sewing and wanted everything she created to be perfect.

When Alberta Kinsey, an artist who visited Melrose Plantation often during the 1940’s, departed Melrose one day, leaving behind several of her brushes and a few tubes of oil paint, she did not envision that the nearly sixty-year old African-American woman would pick them up and begin a career as the African-American “Grandma Moses of the South.” Clementine found the art supplies. took them to another guest, art critic Francois Mignon, saying: “Mister Francois, I betcha’ I could mark a picture if I set my mind to it.” Mignon agreed with her and quickly tore a tattered linen window shade from the window, giving it to Clementine to “mark.” The following morning at 5 a.m., Clementine knocked at Mignon’s door and presented him with an oil painting of a plantation baptism scene – a queue of African-Americans dressed in white gowns who were being led to the river by African-American preachers grandly dressed in red robes. The execution of this painting was childlike, even crude, but colors were brilliantly blended, and a kind of intuitive good form overshadowed the artist’s lack of perspective. Mignon had discovered an artist who possessed “the inner vision which set her painting apart as a work of art,” as Edward Steichen, a famous photographer, later described Clementine’s work.

Clementine began to work on any blank scrap she could find on the plantation – cardboard box tops, wood scraps, wrapping paper, brown paper bags, and materials Mignon provided for her to “mark her pictures.” During the day she continued to work at the Big House as a cook, walking back and forth to the cabin on Melrose grounds where she lived with her husband Emanuel who was bedridden. At night after a few hours’ sleep, she would arise, light a kerosene lamp, and paint until sunrise. She often told her husband that as soon as she had lighted the lamp, “a whole lot of things start goin’ across my mind and before I know it, I’m getting’ ‘em down on paper.” The paintings that appeared were records of African-American plantation life which could not have been told as well in prose. She painted work scenes such as cotton picking, washing clothes, and threshing pecans, and more playful scenes such as watermelon-eating and fishing. After painting several hundred scenes, Clementine’s work began to improve remarkably in style.

Clementine painted cotton pickers working in the hot summer sun wearing big hats and walking in rows, one above the other, background figures looming larger than those in the foreground. Her portrayal of this scene came solely from her “inner vision.” “I just paint what comes to my head,” she said. “Don’t know one tell me what to paint. I can’t do that. And I don’t paint what everyone has already painted. I want to paint something like nobody has!” The cotton-picking scene was also an evocation of her past when, as a child, she picked 250 pounds of cotton a day alongside her father (who could pick 390 pounds).  Clementine said that she loved picking cotton better than anything she ever did; she even ran away from school to be allowed to work alongside her family in the fields. In her rendering of “Pecan Threshing,” Clementine painted her impressions of a cold winter morning when workers brought a small wood-burning stove into the groves. The painting shows an old woman cooking biscuits and coffee for the pickers, a child carrying coffee cups and a strange, make-believe bird Clementine called the “gooster,” a hybrid creature which is a cross between a goose and a rooster.

Perhaps one of her most famous paintings is “Saturday Night at the Honky Tonk,” which depicts the drinking, romancing fighting, and killing of the Saturday night drinking groups. The red honky-tonk is shown from the outside, and a window fan which fascinated Clementine dominates the scene. The painting records a series of events – lovemaking, murdering, and indifferent drinking take place all at once. Time telescopes in the painting. A bullet streaks toward a victim who has already fallen dead. Someone rushes to an old-fashioned telephone to call a doctor who has already started out on his call.

Mignon commissioned Clementine to paint murals on the walls of Ghana House on the grounds of Melrose. She quickly depicted an Ethiopian “Christ on the Cross,” at the base of which cotton is being brought in from surrounding fields. She began to paint other religious scenes believing that “the good Lord helped me make pictures – no person did it.” Her Nativity painting showed the manger in a Louisiana cotton field, across which African-American wise men travelled, bringing gifts of gourds and vegetables to an African-American Mary and a lively African-American baby Jesus. Angels with pointed heads swirl in the sky overhead. For Mignon, Clementine later painted a 4’x16’ mural in the African House, a Melrose outbuilding designed after houses found in the African Congo. The scenes, painted over a period of three years, depict day-to-day domestic life at Melrose – weddings, baptisms, funerals, church meetings, etc. When Melrose Plantation became a national landmark, Clementine’s mural became a permanent exhibit at the plantation.

According to records at the Roman Catholic Church in Cloutierville, Louisiana, Clementine Hunter was born in 1885, and records indicate that she was baptized in March of that year. She was the eldest of seven children born to John and Mary Antoinette Adams Ruben. Her paternal grandfather was an Irish horse trader married to a woman of Indian and African-American lineage named “Me-Me.” Her maternal grandmother, Idole Adams, was a slave who was brought to Louisiana from Virginia. As a member of a Creole family, Clementine was originally named Clemence and was called “Teba.” Her mother tongue was French, and she did not become fluent in English until her second marriage to Emanuel Hunter.  Her first marriage, at age sixteen, was to Charlie Dupree by whom she bore three children. After the death of Dupree, Clementine married Emanuel Hunter and had two more children. She was born at Hidden Hill Plantation, which Harriet Beecher Stowe had used as a setting for her famous novel, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. The plantation owner, Robert McAlpin, was the model for the cruel overseer in Stowe’s novel. Hidden Hill, now Little Eva Plantation, lies in the flat Cane River country near Natchitoches. Clementine later moved with her parents to Melrose Plantation, and her memory of the world seems to have begun with the cotton fields and pecan groves surrounding the plantation.

Clementine loved the cotton fields and despised school. “I just run off from those nuns at school every time they would send me. My mama kept sending me back. But all I wanted to do was pick cotton,” she once said. “I finally run away so many times my mama gave up and let me pick cotton.” Later, she compared painting with picking cotton. “Paintin,” she said, “is a lot harder than pickin’ cotton. Cotton’s right there for you to pull off the stalk, but to paint, you got to sweat yo’ mind.”

Eventually, Clementine was brought into the Big House as a part-time cook and maid. She was taught to cook elaborate cuisine by her grandmother. When asked the kind of meals she prepared for Miss Cammie Henry, mistress of Melrose Plantation, Clementine told her interviewers, “hard things. You know, peas, okra, and beans.” It was difficult for reporters to discern if she was talking “tongue in cheek,” or if at the age of almost 100, she had some notion that peas and beans are hard in consistency, rather than foods that are difficult to prepare. The cookbook, MELROSE PLANTATION COOKBOOK, which she illustrated for Francois Mignon, features some of Clementine’s gourmet recipes that are far more difficult to prepare than peas and beans – Game Soup, Piquante Sauce, Parsnip Fritter and Rice Blanc Mange.

Note: The third installment about Clementine Hunter will be published in a subsequent blog. Again, the photograph is by permission of B.A. Cohen for THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL. 

REVISITING CLEMENTINE HUNTER

Last Friday night following the poetry reading at A&E Gallery with Darrell Bourque, Poet Laureate of Louisiana, and Bonny McDonald, a vivacious gypsy poet performer, Margaret and Jeff Simon treated us to a late dinner at Clementine’s Restaurant on Main Street. The poetry reading, critiqued by many people in the audience as “magical,” had created a natural high for the three of us because we had connected so well with each other and the audience.  I was proud to be in “The Berry,” as people call New Iberia, participating in an inspiring poetry event.

 As we sat around the table at Clementine’s and when our excitement had abated, the conversation turned to Clementine Hunter (now deceased).  Darrell, who owns several of the paintings rendered by this famous African-American artist who lived near Natchitoches, Louisiana, asked me about the essay I wrote about her in THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL, Memorable Louisiana Women. I told Darrell that the book was out of print, so we began to trade anecdotes about Clementine, including the one I told about interviewing Clementine and the retort she made to my question, “Why did you paint that pig so big in the foreground of one of your pictures?” She just looked at me and said proudly, “Because it’s MY pig!”

This morning as I recalled the late night conversation at Clementine’s Restaurant, I thought about publishing parts of the essay about Clementine Hunter for those readers who have never read THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL. I’ll publish it in installments, including the introductory interview I had with Clementine one summer day in 1983. Here’s the introduction to the essay derived from the interview:

“She’ll talk to you if you just drive up, but if you telephone her, she gets too excited and probably won’t see you,” Ann Hillis, caretaker of Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, advised me when I told her I wanted to interview the artist Clementine Hunter for a book I was writing. Even that surprise attack on Clementine almost proved to be futile.

From Melrose Plantation, a friend and I travelled north on a narrow blacktop road along the eastern side of the Cane River and made a left turn onto a clay road pocked with holes, finally arriving at a trailer across the road from Cane River where Clementine lives. She was sitting on a screen porch attached to the trailer, looking out cautiously. Next to the trailer at the end of the road was her daughter’s house, a white frame structure. A fence blocked the end of the dirt road to cars, but an opening allowed passage to a tall, newly-constructed slide which young people were using to splash into the Cane River. As we stopped in front of the trailer, cars carrying white teenagers parked behind us. The teenagers got out and ran toward the river, oblivious of the famous African-American artist sitting on the porch (who was mutually ignoring them). Red pigs crossed the dirt road from a mud hole out of sight behind Clementine’s daughter’s house. They slid under a gate and sauntered to their pen on the river side of the road.

I recognized Clementine from pictures I had seen of her wearing the heavy black wig. At first she balked at being interviewed. I hadn’t anticipated that response. All the articles I had read about her had indicated that she was an open person, ready to talk about her picture stories. I walked up to the fence surrounding her trailer, peered over the aluminum gate, and rested my hands on the top. “I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “I want to put you in a book about famous Louisiana women.” She retorted, “I don’t know that I want to be in it.” I just stood there, leaning on the gate in the sun, until she finally said, “Well, come on in.” I fumbled with the latch as the end of the chain encircling the gates post several minutes before she sent her great-granddaughter, a young girl about eight or nine years old, to usher me indoors.

Clementine agreed to talk to me if I “would pay her something,” because she had been ill and she “got tired when she talked very long.” We sat in lawn chairs facing one another like combatants, and I shuffled my feet on the bare concrete floor of the porch, sensing that she wished people wouldn’t impose themselves and their idea of fame on her, asking questions she was tired of answering. She granted me a thirty-minute audience and sat, inscrutable as a Buddha, two gold eye teeth gleaming in the front of her mouth in an irregular smile and her ebony eyes snapping at me. She wore a red print apron over a blue dress with yellow flowers, an expensive-looking cotton dress which contrasted sharply with my faded Levis. Her legs were encased in long black socks and were as thin as a Louisiana heron’s. I glanced at the plastic flowers and plaster ceramic figurines of animals on a shelf in a far corner while she eyed me and my friend who had come with me, carefully turning her canvasses toward the side of a table so we couldn’t see her drawings. There was no evidence of wealth in her environment, although I had learned that she got $500 for her paintings and sold them as fast as she could find strength to paint them.

When I left, after paying for her effort, I felt a little embarrassed, but later decided that Clementine had been real. She didn’t regard her work as anything that possessed particular meaning. She was as unsophisticated as her paintings and, probably, would never vest art or thought or people with much meaning. Happenings were happenings, imaginings were imaginings, art was “just something that comes into my head, then I sit down and make my mark.”

This is just the introduction to the original essay, and several more blogs about Clementine will appear this week. The photograph was published by permission of B.A. Cohen, photographer, Natchez, Louisiana, and appears in THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL.