Hunter, Clementine (1886–1988)

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Hunter, Clementine (1886–1988)

African-American folk artist. Born Clementine Reuben near Cloutierville, Louisiana, in December 1886; died near Natchitoches, Louisiana, on January 1, 1988; daughter of Janvier (John) Reuben and Antoinette (Adams) Reuben; briefly attended Catholic elementary school; married Charles Dupree (died 1914); married Emanuel Hunter, in 1924 (died 1944); children: (first marriage) two; (second marriage) five.

Often referred to as "the black Grandma Moses ," Clementine Hunter was self-taught and began painting late in life. She lived most of her life in a small cabin in Natchitoches, Louisiana, far removed from the urban galleries that sold her paintings for hundreds of dollars. Hunter's only indulgence was an upgrade to a house trailer in the 1980s, and the purchase of a nice coffin and mausoleum space.

Hunter was born on a cotton plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana, in 1886. She attended a local Catholic elementary school only briefly and remained illiterate her entire life. Her family eventually moved to Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, where Hunter worked in the fields. She was married twice, first to Charles Dupree, with whom she had two children, and then to Emanuel Hunter, with whom she had five. In the late 1920s, Hunter moved into the plantation house to take up full-time domestic duties. At the time, the mistress of Melrose Plantation was Carmelite "Cammie" Garrett Henry , whose wide-ranging interests included collecting art.

In 1939, a Frenchman named François Mignon took up residence at the plantation as the curator of Henry's collection. Hunter, then in her 50s, approached Mignon one evening with some discarded paint she had found, and told him she thought she could make a picture of her own if she set her mind to it. He produced an old window shade on which she painted her first picture. Impressed, Mignon continued to supply her with rag-bag supplies—cardboard boxes, paper bags, scraps of wood, and eventually some canvases—anything on which she could work. Hunter became a master at stretching what little oil paint she could muster, often thinning it so much that her some of her finished works resembled watercolors.

Second to Mignon as Hunter's patron was James Register, a writer, artist, and teacher at the University of Oklahoma. After visiting Melrose in the early 1940s, he began sending Hunter cash and art supplies, and in 1944, he secured her a Julius Rosenwald Foundation grant. Both he and Mignon promoted her work, which began to attract attention during the 1950s. Labeled a primitive, Hunter had her earliest solo exhibitions in 1955, at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art), and at Northwestern State College, where she was not allowed to view the exhibit with the white patrons but had to slip in after the gallery was closed.

Hunter claimed that she liked to paint from memory and dreams rather than life, and her work is characterized by a flat, representational quality devoid of much detail. Her paintings, which numbered in the thousands, can be categorized into three subject groups: everyday life, religious, and a miscellaneous series of experimental paintings executed in the 1960s. The bold, colorful paintings of the first group comprise the greatest body of the artist's work and portray simple plantation life, with people cooking, doing laundry, tending children, playing games, and participating in festive occasions like weddings, baptisms, and funerals. In this group as well are the African House Murals, a series of nine large plywood panels that were installed in the African House, built on the plantation grounds in 1800. Depicting plantation life along the Cane River, the murals, along with others painted for Chana House and Yucca House, two other buildings at Melrose, were "commissioned" by Mignon, and are considered some of the artist's most important works. The second category of paintings, the religious works, include scenes of the Nativity, the Flight to Egypt, and the Crucifixion, in which Hunter depicts almost all of the figures as black. The work Cotton Crucifixion, one of the few paintings that Hunter named, is considered the most provocative of this group. In it, Jesus is portrayed as black, while the thieves are white. At the foot of the cross, black field hands drag large sacks through rows of cotton.

The third group of paintings, the miscellaneous series, represent a departure from the artist's usual work. Created between 1962 and 1963, they comprise an "abstract" series that was influenced by James Register, who permanently settled in Natchitoches in 1962. In an effort to broaden Hunter's scope and test her talent, Register prepared a group of collages from colored advertisements in old magazines and presented them to Hunter to see what they would inspire. "Sometimes the montage would be so difficult, being only a series of color patterns," he explained, "the outlines would have to be traced on the board for her." The resulting 100 or so paintings, with names (probably provided by Register) like Moon Bird, Chanticleer, Alice in Wonderland, Uncle Tom, and Porte Bouquet, are uncharacteristic in their bright color and patterns, and although Hunter gladly gave up the experiment after two years, it influenced her later work, especially her flower paintings.

During her lifetime, Clementine Hunter had over two dozen solo exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the United States, most of which she never attended. Seldom involved with the sale of her work, she continued to practically give away her paintings to her neighbors for six dollars apiece. The artist worked up until just weeks before her death. In December 1987, she took to her bed; she died on January 1, 1988, at age 101.

Hunter's work now resides in numerous permanent collections, including those of the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Louisiana State Museum.