Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art

Preface

xvii Preface when one examines clementine hunter’s vast oeuvre, it becomes apparent that while she never learned the familiar language symbols one needs to write words or the syntactic rules used to construct sentences, she did discover a powerful visual vehicle of expression. Her life’s work escapes the confines of the cultural hegemony of her day to reveal a view of plantation life from the point of view of the worker. The accepted history of plantations is largely white-centric. Much is known about the owners of the great farms. Much has been written about their contributions to society, education, and culture. It is also fairly easy to find records showing how many slaves were owned and the dollar value of the enslaved human beings.1 What is overlooked is that just down the road and over the fence from the planter’s mansion, the African and African American community of workers was also a significant part of the story of all successful plantations. Before the end of the Civil War enslaved people were customarily buried in unmarked graves. Their stories, if told at all, were recalled mostly among themselves in oral traditions. While conditions for African Americans improved during Clementine Hunter’s day, the white-centric approach to the history of plantation life remained largely unchanged. Today if one takes a tour of the many plantations across the South, one hears well-intentioned docents tell the stories of the white owners, omitting the critical roles played by the black workers.2 At Melrose, Hunter personally experienced twentieth-century plantation life first as a laborer in the cotton fields and pecan groves and later as a domestic servant in the Big House. In the evenings she returned to her small cabin in the severely underprivileged community of blacks and Creoles. What she heard and saw on both sides of the segregation fence became the inspiration and source of her art. She painted her memories. In doing so, the artist created xviii Preface a visual rhetoric that illuminates the historical shadows of life on a southern plantation. Our search to understand who Hunter was and how she became an artist inevitably led again and again back to her paintings. For more than a decade Tom Whitehead and I tracked down the artist’s story. In Key West, Florida, we met Whitfield Jack, who grew up near Melrose and spent his summers at his grandparents’ Cane River retreat. Jack first met François Mignon and Clementine Hunter when he was a child. When we first visited with Jack, he owned one of Hunter’s most famous early paintings, Bowl of Zinnias, the centerpiece of the 1952 Saturday Gallery show in St. Louis (see Plate 28). Eventually, our search led to Armand Winfield at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As owner of the Saturday Gallery, Winfield and Louisiana photographer Clarence John Laughlin were responsible for the St. Louis exhibition . A few days after the Saturday Gallery show, the paintings were loaned to another St. Louis art venue, resulting in Hunter’s first exhibition to a primarily African American audience. Winfield, who died not long after our visit, helped us piece together missing elements of the important Saturday Gallery story. In lower Manhattan in New York City we were invited into a penthouse gallery inside the private home of one of America’s foremost collectors of Hunter’s art. Likewise, only a few miles from Melrose Plantation Iris Rayford gave us access to an incredible collection of Hunter’s early art that hangs in her Cane River home. Collectors in Shreveport, New Orleans, and Natchitoches allowed us access to their collections. The Ann and Jack Brittain family, long associated with Hunter and Melrose, permitted us to explore and use whatever we needed from their significant collection of Hunter’s art, a collection that spans the artist’s entire painting career. At Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, the curator of the college archives, Carley Robison, revealed to us a “lost” quilt and window shade painting very few people had ever seen. Security reasons do not permit us to thank everyone by name, but without the help of others, we could not have produced the book you hold in your hands. We owe much for the help given to us by everyone at the Watson Memorial Library at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Especially, we would like to thank the Cammie Henry Research Center’s chief archivist, Mary Linn Wernet, who often stopped...