In none of those cases was Toye prosecuted.ĭeaton sifted through each case and, in his words, essentially “reinvestigated” each one. In the mid-1990s, he had been involved in a kerfuffle with the owners of the Louisiana Auction Exchange in Baton Rouge, where he consigned for sale dozens of paintings, including a “Degas” and a “Matisse.” In 1974, he was caught in a New Orleans Police Department sting selling fake Clementine Hunter paintings from a Canal Street business called Dial-A-Date. Charles Avenue in New Orleans had been broken into and several works of art created by him had been stolen or vandalized. In a 1969 newspaper article, he had reported that his apartment on St. Federal law was violated.”ĭeaton learned that William Toye had had several brushes with law enforcement. That’s the kind of work the FBI should be doing, specifically the interstate-commerce aspect. and interstate communications via email and fax,” says Deaton. “There’s an interstate aspect to the case, with paintings being shipped all over the U.S. Nobody wanted to prosecute these ‘piddling’ crimes.” “If it’s folk art that sells for two or three thousand dollars, they don’t care. “Several people tried going to law enforcement, but nobody knew what to do about this,” says Whitehead. After consulting experts who declared the paintings fakes, and failing to get the Toyes to return his money, Fuson had gone to several law-enforcement agencies seeking justice but met with no success. But friends of Hunter, including Whitehead, said they had never heard of the Toyes. The Toyes told Fuson that they had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and were forced to sell paintings they had collected since the 1960s. GOVERNMENT WAS WILLING TO PRESERVE IT AND PROTECT IT.”Īnother buyer was Baton Rouge businessman Don Fuson, who had purchased $30,000 worth of fake Hunters from William and Beryl Toye of Baton Rouge. “THIS INVESTIGATION LEGITIMIZED FOLK ART AND SHOWED THAT THE U.S. “I started reading everything I could find on her.” “I bought Shelby Gilley’s book on Africa House murals and several other books about her,” he said. “I had a big loose-leaf binder with photos of both real and fake paintings.”ĭeaton, who was 37 at the time, got right on it. “We sat at my dining table,” says Whitehead. “I knew he’d do a bang-up job.” The two men drove to Whitehead’s house in Natchitoches to interview him. “I asked Randy to take the case because of his thoroughness,” says Van Hook. Whitehead later learned that Lucky had blacked out the inked notations and sold the fakes to other unsuspecting victims.Īs soon as he got the complaint from Whitehead, Van Hook enlisted Deaton to investigate it. “Clementine’s work always had imperfections.”īefore returning their paintings to Lucky for refunds, Whitehead and his friends took the precaution of initialing and dating the backs of the paintings and photographing them. “We figured out they were fakes when we noticed they were too perfect,” says Whitehead. He and several friends had bought several “Hunter” paintings from Robert “Robbie” Lucky, owner of an antiques shop in Natchitoches. Van Hook, whose office is in Shreveport, had learned of the fakes from Tom Whitehead, a Natchitoches resident who had been friends with Hunter, owns hundreds of her paintings, and wrote two books about her. At first she sold them for a dollar or less, but by the time she died her paintings commanded thousands of dollars when sold by dealers. EACH TIME I WAS OFFERED THE OPPORTUNITY TO VIEW A COLLECTION, I WENT AND HEARD THEIR STORIES.”Ĭlementine depicted scenes familiar to her-weddings, baptisms, cotton picking, fights at a honky tonk. I WANTED TO BE SURE I DID THINGS RIGHT FROM DAY ONE. “I ASKED, ‘WHAT DREW YOU TO THIS ART? WHY DO YOU LOVE IT SO MUCH?’ I TRIED TO GET AS MUCH VALUE AS I COULD OUT OF EACH INTERVIEW, TO BE AS KNOWLEDGEABLE AS I COULD. “That painting of a bowl of zinnias was considered a really big deal.” “All I knew about Clementine Hunter was that friends of my wife’s family had a painting by her,” says Deaton. But he considered himself a complete novice when it came to art-specifically the work of Hunter (1886–1988), whose work was reportedly being copied by forgers who sold them through an antiques dealer in Natchitoches. “They looked fresh, like they were painted yesterday,” he says now. RANDY DEATON (CENTER) DISCUSSES CLEMENTINE HUNTER FORGERIES AT THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGY AND TRAININGĭeaton learned that, around the 1990s, hundreds of Hunter paintings had been offered on the market.
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