Antiques Roadshow Detours

Adam Monahan:

Tell me what you know about the artist, Clementine Hunter.

Marsha Bemko:

Well, I know I wish I had one of her paintings. I know she lived to be a very old person, and she's really faked a lot.

Adam Monahan:

Why might she be faked a lot?

Marsha Bemko:

It's folk art, and it has an innocent quality to it, a naive quality to it in that it frankly looks like if I sat down with one in front of me, I could copy it and make it good.

Adam Monahan:

I'll be honest, I didn't know my boss at GBH's Antiques Roadshow, Marsha Bemko was such a confident painter. But if she thinks she can paint a Clementine Hunter, surely she can distinguish a real from a fake. So can you see what's on my screen right now?

Marsha Bemko:

Is one of those a Clementine and one of those not?

Adam Monahan:

You guess. Guess what you think.

Marsha Bemko:

Okay, this is fun.

Adam Monahan:

Marsha is looking at two nearly identical paintings. There's not much to differentiate them, but she's got a feeling about which is the real deal.

Marsha Bemko:

I'm going with the top one is real and the bottom one is fake. That's kind of where I go. Are you going to tell me the opposite, Adam?

Adam Monahan:

It's the opposite.

Marsha Bemko:

I just knew it. You know why? Because the church on the top one is too perfect.

Adam Monahan:

This is all very relative. I see the folksy quality, I understand why people might like them, there's a charm to these paintings. But at the same time, they're a little naive, but they're not to the trained eye. They see a difference.

Marsha Bemko:

How can you tell? How do they know, Adam?

Adam Monahan:

I have no idea. But in this episode, an FBI friend of the Roadshow helped answer that question in a tale of funerals, forgeries, and Polaroid photos.

I am Adam Monahan and this is Antiques Roadshow Detours. Today, the case of the folk art forgers. To start with, can I get your name and affiliation?

Wes Cowan:

Yeah. Wes Cowan, vice chair emeritus, Freeman's Hindman Auctions.

Adam Monahan:

That is a great title. We're here to talk about Clementine Hunter, her works, her life. What can you tell me about this artist?

Wes Cowan:

Clementine Hunter is certainly the most famous female artist from the state of Louisiana. She's, like many folk artists, a self-taught artist who painted in a very naive style. But because of the palette that she used and the scenes that she was making, they were very vibrant, they were fun, and they were by and large pictures of plantation life in the 20th century plantation era that doesn't exist anymore.

Adam Monahan:

Hunter's exact birthdate is unknown, but she was born around late December 1886 and she died in 1988 at the ripe old age of 101.

Wes Cowan:

It's estimated that she painted somewhere between five and 10,000 paintings, so she was prolific.

Adam Monahan:

When we were in Baton Rouge, you fully expected Clementine Hunter paintings and certainly a plethora came in. What was that day like and how did you choose these ones, do you think?

Wes Cowan:

Well, as you know, it was 2013, and I started off the show at the folk art table telling my colleagues, "I bet we're going to see Clementine Hunter paintings out the wazoo today." So we started counting and they were like 14 or 15 that we'd seen. Passed on them primarily because of the issues surrounding authenticity of Clementine Hunter paintings.

Adam Monahan:

As mentioned, Hunter's style lends itself to being faked, which can scare Antiques Roadshow appraisers away from wanting to put paintings in front of the cameras. But then some intriguing examples showed up on Wes's table.

Wes Cowan:

And then lo and behold, a guest came in with two paintings that showed Polaroid photographs of Clementine Hunter holding the paintings that she bought. So I thought, boy, if there's ever a story about two genuine Clementine Hunter paintings, here it is.

Adam Monahan:

Of all the Hunter paintings Wes had seen that day, these were the only ones he pitched for filming.

Wes Cowan:

Teska, you win the prize today because you brought in two paintings by a Louisiana artist. And who is this artist?

Teska:

The artist is Clementine Hunter and I have had the joy of owning these paintings for between 30 and 40 years. And...

Wes Cowan:

One was a juke joint, showed people fighting and drinking and just generally having a good time, and then the other one was some sort of religious scene that showed the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus and angels flying.

Adam Monahan:

But what would make Wes want to appraise these two paintings above all the rest he'd seen that day?

Wes Cowan:

The real key, or at least in part to evaluating these were having these Polaroids of Clementine Hunter holding the paintings in her lap. There can be no question that she did these works.

Adam Monahan:

So rock solid provenance, Polaroid photographs of the artist posed with the paintings she surely created. That's got to be worth some money.

Wes Cowan:

I would think that the pair, each in other words, are worth about $2,000 to $2,500 a piece.

Teska:

That's amazing. That's wonderful.

Adam Monahan:

Not too shabby... except there's a problem.

Wes Cowan:

Hi.

Sarah Elliot:

How are you? So we just shot a piece on Clementine Hunter this morning with Kathleen Harwood.

Wes Cowan:

Yeah. One of our producers, Sarah Elliott, comes rushing breathlessly out onto the set and I'm saying, "What? What in the world's going on here?" And she says, "We were just at Louisiana State University Museum of Art this afternoon and discovered just because there was a Polaroid photograph accompanying these paintings didn't mean that they were necessarily done by Clementine Hunter."

Adam Monahan:

Even the most convincing evidence can sometimes be deceiving. Sarah learned this lesson firsthand while filming a field segment earlier that day.

Sarah Elliot:

Field segments were maybe three to four minute breaks in the show where we could get out of the convention center with our host and go to a culturally interesting historical place and talk about old stuff. And so we were able to have a discussion taking us through the highs and lows of Clementine Hunter and her prolific, prolific output, which was amazing, was unfortunately also accompanied by a ton of forgeries.

Adam Monahan:

In this field segment, Antiques Road Show appraiser, Kathleen Harwood told us about a forgery scheme that involved photographs. The person behind the scheme was the son of the owner of the estate where Clementine Hunter lived.

Kathleen Harwood:

His wife Juanita painted the fakes in a shed out behind the house and he took the fake pictures to Clementine. He paid her a dollar a piece to hold the painting and he took a photograph of her holding the painting. He then took the photograph and pasted it on the back of the painting, establishing a seemingly ironclad provenance, and then selling it as, of course, a genuine Clementine Hunter.

Adam Monahan:

When Sarah got back to the convention center, she was surprised to find Wes filming an appraisal of two Clementine Hunter paintings complete with photos. She quickly shared what she had just learned out in the field, and Wes updated the guest right away.

Wes Cowan:

Breaking news about this.

Teska:

Oh.

Wes Cowan:

You've got these photographs, these Polaroids of Clementine Hunter holding the paintings, so you need to have them looked at by a Clementine Hunter expert.

Adam Monahan:

As luck would have it, we knew someone who could help. Tom Whitehead, the co-author of the book, Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art. Tom had actually helped us with the field segment we filmed earlier. He even provided one of the alleged photo forgeries for us to compare against an authentic piece. Here's Sarah again.

Sarah Elliot:

He took a look at some high-res photos and he took a look at the receipt from the dealer who he knew, and so he was able to determine that the pieces that Wes had appraised were in fact authentic.

Adam Monahan:

In this particular case, Tom could confidently say the paintings Wes appraised were genuine, but there's another story that takes quite a different turn. After the break, we'll learn how an Antiques Roadshow fan in the FBI worked with Tom to crack the biggest Clementine Hunter forgery case ever.

Tom Whitehead first met artist, Clementine Hunter, around 1965 or 66 when he was an undergraduate at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

Tom Whitehead:

I was a student worker in the TV studio, and there was a lady teaching. And one afternoon as the show ended, 3:15, she said, "I've got to go out to Clementine Hunter's house. Would you like to ride with me?" And I said yes.

Adam Monahan:

Had you heard of Clementine Hunter before then?

Tom Whitehead:

Oh, yeah. Everyone had some knowledge of Clementine. It was not big press, but the press was always local stuff, Louisiana, Baton Rouge or something like that.

Adam Monahan:

And so how's it wind up that you keep going back and what's your relationship with her?

Tom Whitehead:

I started going back out there once a week or two, and I'd take her paint. If she had any paintings, I'd buy them and stuff like that.

Adam Monahan:

Tom bought his first painting from Hunter for just $3. It was a bowl of zinnias. After going away to grad school, Tom came back to teach journalism at his alma mater, and through the decades he kept coming back to visit.

Tom Whitehead:

I just got fascinated with the whole story. An African-American woman, very old, nearly a hundred years old then that was painting pictures. And the interesting part of it was that her paintings were of inside perspective of life on a plantation. Very few people who had spent their life working in the cotton fields or the households or wherever had the opportunity to document what happened. She did.

Adam Monahan:

Hunter spent much of her life living and working at Melrose Plantation, now Melrose on the Cane, near Natchitoches.

Wes Cowan:

Melrose Plantation was sort of an artist colony in the 1930s, and a number of famous African-American painters and white painters were working there. And one day, Clementine Hunter apparently, so the legend goes, picked up some leftover paints and began painting.

Adam Monahan:

Her paintings show all the stages of life around her with titles like The Wedding, Wash Day, Going to Church, and Funeral. Her process was simple.

Tom Whitehead:

She'd take a board, she called it, and she liked solid plain board, paper or cardboard or something, she didn't care for these canvas boards. She would always have a primer on it or paint it with a black, white or some color because she could mark on it and then she would take a pencil and draw it, and then she'd paint it.

Adam Monahan:

How long would it take her to paint it?

Tom Whitehead:

Well, interesting story. Somebody was here with a film crew and they wanted her to just paint a picture. Well, she took the board, she marked it, she got the paint out and painted it in about a half hour, 45 minutes. So it didn't take a lot of contemplation to paint some of these things.

Adam Monahan:

She was like the original Bob Ross.

Tom Whitehead:

Yes, I guess, yes.

Adam Monahan:

Clementine began selling her paintings right out of her house in the 1940s. By the 1970s, the wider world started to take notice of her talent.

Wes Cowan:

Galleries started showing her work and her paintings started to climb in value to a few hundred dollars. Today, they sell in the two, three thousand dollar range to as much as I think her record is $85,000 for one of her works.

Adam Monahan:

And then in the mid 2000s, Clementine Hunter expert, Tom Whitehead noticed something odd.

Tom Whitehead:

Robby Lucky you had a shop here in Natchitoches and the shop sold antiques, and they also sold art, Clementine Hunter art. If anybody wanted to buy Clementine, I'd just say, "Go to Robby Lucky he has some." I did not do any research on his source of paintings, but people go there and buy paintings. Well, over time we became a little suspicious is that some paintings that she did, like a wake or birthing a baby were very rarely painted, but all of a sudden people were saying, "I really want a birthing a baby," a doctor wanted one. Well, lo and behold, in a month or two, there was a... and she'd been dead for 10 years. Finally, we decided there was something wrong. And the next problem we had was finding anybody to do anything about it.

Adam Monahan:

The U.S attorney's office was willing do something about it, and they made a call to a guy named Randy.

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

My full name is Randolph J. Deaton IV, I go by Randy, and I'm employed as a special agent with the Federal Bureau Investigation. So I got a call one day from Alec Van Hook, who is an assistant U.S attorney in Shreveport, Louisiana. And he said, "Randy, I've got a case for you." And he says, "The reason why I'm choosing you to work this case and investigate is because you're the only person I know that watches Antiques Roadshow."

Adam Monahan:

There you have it, watching Antiques Roadshow might get you a great work assignment. When was the first time you ever heard of Clementine Hunter?

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, had a really good friend. And her family, the friend's family, their prized possession was a Clementine Hunter zinnias painting that the family just absolutely loved.

Adam Monahan:

And what were your thoughts?

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

Certainly folk art is not for everyone. It's not fine art, but to someone from the rural south as myself and a lover of Louisiana history, I know what it signifies, I know the life of the artist and where she was from. And her artwork tells a much bigger story than what you just see in front of you with paint.

Adam Monahan:

And so what was the case that was being brought up and who had... I know it had been a problem in the area for a while.

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

Clementine Hunter forgeries have been around at least since the early 1970s. And certainly anytime an artist becomes popular and the demand for their work increases and the prices go up too, you're going to see foragers come out the woodwork. That's just common knowledge. But unlike other cases you probably see involving art forgeries, these other cases may deal with 1, 2, 10, maybe a dozen forgeries, the Clementine Hunter forgery case that I investigated for the FBI dealt with hundreds and dozens upon dozens of victims.

Adam Monahan:

The victims all knew where they had purchased the paintings, from a dealer named Robby Lucky, but the big question was who had actually painted these forgeries?

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

And then finally, someone bought a forgery directly from Mr. Toy. It was shown to a couple of gentlemen, and that's when the light bulb went off.

Adam Monahan:

They had a name, William Toy. That name was familiar to Clementine Hunter expert, Tom Whitehead.

Tom Whitehead:

We had heard about Mr. Toy being arrested way back earlier for forging Clementines in New Orleans, but he had moved to Baton Rouge and he was out of our radar. But then we found out that Robby Lucky found Mr. Toy or Mr. Toy found Robby Lucky, one or the other, and it was a combination made in heaven, somebody to sell the fakes and he painted them.

Adam Monahan:

From there, the FBI agent, Randy, set out to build his case, interviewing victims and examining paintings. Tom remembers when they investigated the home of the alleged forger, William Toy, and his wife and co-conspirator Beryl.

Tom Whitehead:

One day, I was sitting in my office here and a phone rang, and it was the FBI agent, Randy Deaton. He says, "Guess what I'm doing?" I said, "How would I know what you're doing?" He says, "I'm herding cats." I said, "Herding cats?" He says, "Yes. We just raided the Toy home and it's full of cats. They had all these feral cats in the house and they had to do something with cats." And they had animal control there, they had all the kinds of people trying to catch cats.

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

They were probably upwards of 20 cats in the house. That became significant later on because Jamie Martin, who's now with Sotheby's, he had a company called Orion Analytical at the time, and he found that I think it was 20 forgeries that I had sent to Jamie, he found cat hair embedded in all 20 forgeries or questionable works, and cat hair embedded in the paint. The paint dried, the cat hair was sticking out of the paint. So Jamie Martin could conclude that these paintings were painted in an environment that was heavy with cat hair.

Adam Monahan:

And Clementine Hunter, not a known indoor cat owner?

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

Not that I know of.

Adam Monahan:

Okay. What types of things were in their home besides the cat hair?

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

Jamie Martin, I know, concluded that some of the questionable works that had been sent to him, they were cut from the boards that were found at the Toy home. I don't think Clementine Hunter was staying at the Toy house and using Mr. Toy's table saw in his back shed to cut boards so she could paint on them. And so you had that type of evidence. You had a lot of document evidence to show that these were just made up stories about where these paintings came from. We had digital evidence. There was an old computer tower that was seized from the Toy home where either Mr. Toy or Mrs. Toy had typed up kind of like an appraisal letter that was dated back in late 1960s, and it was like the same type of letter that had been put out there to induce some of the sales that had been typed on an old typewriter. But they were just making a new version of it, I guess, because Mr. Toy had painted new fakes, new forgeries.

Adam Monahan:

The evidence was overwhelming, and everyone pled guilty. William Toy and his wife Beryl pled to conspiring to defraud Clementine Hunter collectors, and Robert Lucky pled to mail fraud. Lucky was sentenced to 25 months in federal prison, three years supervised release, and 200 hours of community service. The Toys were each sentenced to two years of probation, and they were ordered to pay more than $400,000 in restitution. Clementine Hunter died decades before this case, but FBI agent Randy Deaton says she still weighed in on the matter.

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

I found out they actually loaded up all the forgeries that they had acquired from the victims back in the 1970s, plus apparently some that they acquired directly from Mr. Toy's home, and also when he was arrested during the sting operation. And they brought out all those forgeries and showed them to Clementine Hunter, and she went through all of them and said, "No, I didn't create this. Not by my hand," every one of them, except for one. And I don't know if they meant to do this or not, but they had one painting that the NOPD had obtained from one of the early victims back then that she did not buy that one from William Toy, but they seized it anyway. They brought it up to Natchitoches with the other 20 or so. That was the only one that Clementine Hunter pointed out as this is by my hand.

Adam Monahan:

Wow.

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

I thought that was super special. I don't know if it was done on purpose. If it was done on purpose, that's a heck of a trick, and I'll keep that in my mental toolbox of investigative tricks of the trade.

Adam Monahan:

That's amazing. Well, I want to thank you, Randy, and I really am happy that your Antiques Roadshow fandom brought you to this case, and luckily I get to talk to you today because of that.

Randolph J. Deaton IV:

Thank you, Adam, for this opportunity.

Adam Monahan:

For author, Tom Whitehead, the guy who called the FBI, this case really mattered, not just for Clementine Hunter and her legacy, but for the art world in general.

Tom Whitehead:

It shows how the government, the FBI, took interest in something very small. It wasn't Monets or Degas, it was folk art, and they really set a precedent of protecting that genre of work.

Adam Monahan:

Nice. And you are hoping that going forward we'll only be able to have real Clementine Hunters out there in museums and institutions and on our show?

Tom Whitehead:

Exactly. Anytime we see one, we encourage them to write on the back of this is a fake. If it's a fake and we tell you it's a fake, write on this is a fake on it.

Adam Monahan:

Oh, that'd be a great idea. It turns out that's Marsha's plan too. She is still very confident in her ability to fake a Hunter, but she's not out to fool anyone.

Marsha Bemko:

You know, if I were going to copy Clementine Hunter's style, I would just sign my name at the bottom.

Adam Monahan:

Perfect.

Marsha Bemko:

I did it, and I'm a copycat.

Adam Monahan:

That is what you should do. Instead of spending the thousands and thousands of dollars on this Marsh, you should paint one and then just put your name.

Marsha Bemko:

Exactly. Then I'll have one of my own. It's not authentic, it has my name on it, nobody will want it but me, but okay.

Adam Monahan:

I'll tell you what. If you paint one, paint two, and I'll give you a hundred dollars for the second one.

Marsha Bemko:

Okay.

Theme Song:

I know, love is not a walk in the park, it's a once in a century storm.

Adam Monahan:

Antiques Roadshow Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Galen Beebe, edited and mixed by Tyler Morissette. Our assistant producer is Sarah Roach. Our senior producer is Ian Koss, and Devin Maverick-Robbins is the managing producer of podcasts for GBH. Marsha Bemko is the executive producer of Antiques Roadshow Detours, and I'm your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm By Will Dailey from the album National Throat. Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.