Clementine Hunter at Artspace
Originally uploaded by trudeau.
Here's a wry article by Fred Conrad from the NY Times Home & Garden section: "I live very formally,” says Joan Rivers when the subject of decorating disasters comes up. “My apartment is very 18th-century French and English formal. I have finger bowls at dinner. Marie Antoinette and I could have been friends.”
This is why Ms. Rivers’s passion, the paintings of the folk artist Clementine Hunter, has created what she sees as a disaster. Brightly colored (or as Ms. Rivers describes them, a mixture of African art and Grandma Moses on acid), they depict slavery-era scenes of cotton picking, slave burials and weddings, and do not work at all with the gilded columns and ornate objets (for instance, a huge crystal bowl once owned by Czar Nicholas II) of Ms. Rivers’s Fifth Avenue duplex. Worse, Ms. Rivers cannot stop buying them.
How did Ms. Rivers get hooked on Southern primitive? “I was playing Natchitoches, way down in the South — this goes back to the ’80s — and somebody asked, do you want to meet this primitive artist named Clementine Hunter. She was 101 then, an old, old, old lady who painted these insane primitives, almost three dimensional. I think the first painting was slaves carrying cotton. I brought it home and Vincent Price, who was a great art collector, said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”
The cost?
“I gave her $35 and a meat pie.”
Ms. Rivers now owns six Clementine Hunters, for which she estimates she’s spent $12,000. This is not a lot of money for a woman whose jewelry, often sold on QVC, has, according to her spokeswoman, grossed half a billion dollars since its inception. The problem is, there is nowhere for the paintings to go. When Ms. Rivers puts them up in her very modern jewelry-business office, the president of the company just as quickly takes them down. Her own apartment is, of course, out of the question. “My decorator threw a fit and just said, ‘Where? Where? Where?’ ” Ms. Rivers said. “ ‘Next to the Coromandel screen? I don’t think so.’ ”
Hmpf *shakes head*. I think we have the same problem at our house.
3 comments:
Oh pleeezzeee... for the last time: Art doesn't have to match your furniture... or wall color... or rug... or anything else.
You know, every time I hear one of these stories about Ms. Hunter being paid for her work with a jug of wine or a meat pie, the person telling the story seems to expect me to pat them on the back for getting such a good deal. The reality is, they ripped someone off who didn't know how to value her own work, and it's a lot more sad than funny.
I couldn't agree more, Chris.
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