Was the Weisman a victim of an art scam?

"Saturday Night at the Honky Tonk" by Clementine Hunter (courtesy of Weisman Art Museum)

By Tim Campbell

Last winter the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum got an out-of-the-ordinary visitor -- an FBI agent who took photos of paintings by Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter in the museum's collection.

In March, the FBI told the museum that five of the Weisman's 38 Hunters may be fakes, museum director Lyndel King said Friday.

The FBI is investigating allegations that a Baton Rouge, La., couple -- William Toye, 78, and his wife Beryl Ann, 68 -- have been selling forged paintings to collectors and dealers since the 1970s, according to an Associated Press report.

The Weisman's paintings were a gift from a local collector. None of the works is on display.

King said she has not heard from the FBI since March. "If the FBI can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these are forgeries, we have standard policies for removing works of art from our collection," she told the Star Tribune's Graydon Royce. If the museum had any doubts about the bureau's findings, King said she would likely bring in a Hunter specialist to look at the evidence.

Hunter, who died in 1988 at age 101, taught herself to paint while living in northwest Louisiana's rural Natchitoches Parish, a cradle of African-American/French Creole culture. Her paintings are believed to number in the thousands -- hence, an easier target for forgery. Since her death, paintings that once fetched several hundred dollars now sell for thousands.

The paintings in the Weisman collection were donated by a Twin Cities educator who died in 2000. Here is his story, taken from a piece in the Star Tribune by art writer Doug Hanson when the paintings were exhibited at the Weisman:

HUNTER GATHERER

How a teacher in Anoka befriended a painter in rural Louisiana and spawned an exhibit spanning the career of Clementine Hunter.

By Doug Hanson

He was intrigued by her paintings, in which colorful, childlike images convey a stark vision of life, labor and religion in a rural South that still lingered in a plantation environment. The old Creole woman's wit and quiet dignity also struck him. Back home, Schoephoerster kept thinking about her, "as can happen when you feel you've been in the presence of greatness," he said in an interview last week. Schoephoerster, who suffered from complications of Marfan's syndrome, died last Friday.

In subsequent trips to Louisiana, Schoephoerster not only befriended Hunter and eventually collected 200 of her works; he also arranged and funded the restoration of murals she painted in plantation outbuildings.

Hunter was past 50 when she first began painting in 1939. This maturity channeled itself through a freshly naive and unschooled technique with startling results. Her firm and orderly vision of the world comes out in simple but deft compositions that, despite frequent flashes of humor, contain their own austere realism of attitude.

Most of her pictures are in oil and have a narrow, low foreground, often earth brown, and an equally narrow sky across the top. In between is a large middle ground that, far from suggesting three dimensions, is a virtual wall of color. Against this wall she places her images like vivid refrigerator magnets: people picking cotton or shaking pecans from trees; reverends baptizing children in rivers; funeral and wedding processions, and farm hands slaughtering hogs.

Her people and animals are like toys that would keep their postures if knocked over. The revelers in "Saturday Night at the Honky Tonk," prostrated by drink, still hold their bottles out before them.

Her brushwork is often wide and her forms boxlike. This squared-off design leads Weisman exhibit co-curator Judi Petkau to see Hunter's earlier experience in quilt-making as an influence.

"In quilt-making, she was definitely a folk artist," Petkau said. "But when she took up painting, she was off on her own."

The show includes a quilt made by Hunter, so viewers can consider the question for themselves.

She makes imaginative color choices. In "Funeral (Black People)," she places a church and flower-carrying mourners upon a sky-blue middle ground that seems to bring heaven down to Earth.

"She couldn't always afford paints in the beginning," Schoephoerster said, "so sometimes her colors depended on what tubes she had left."

Urged by friends out to prove the variety of her genius, Hunter went through two years of semi-abstract painting in the early 1960s, of which the show has several interesting examples. But she returned to her old themes and reworked her subjects countless times with subtle variations, often to meet commissions and keep up her income. Hunter's eventual total output of 5,000 paintings has confused the market for her more recent work. But paintings from before 1960 are gaining value, and her first painting recently sold for $100,000.

Schoephoerster's desire to know Hunter's whole story led him to collect her work in all its themes and mediums, right down to flowers on wine bottles. This makes the concise Weisman show a complete overview of her art. The exhibit also marks Schoephoerster's gift of 50 works by Hunter to the museum. Ever the educator, he was pleased that Hunter's paintings will be traveling to schools through the Weisman's cooperation with Young Audiences, a St. Paul outreach program.

Hunter died at age 101 in 1988.