Tyree: Artist of the South Pacific

By CJ Cook

Double Gold Medal Winner: The Benjamin Franklin Awards for Best Biography and Best CoverThe World War II US Marine-turned-painter who helped popularize South Pacific and Tiki art and later the plight of endangered speciesRaised in Central California, American artist Ralph Burke Tyree was the most prolific portrait artist of the South Pacific peoples of the twentieth century. After studying art at the California College of the Arts (Oakland), Tyree joined the Marines seven weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He soon shipped off to Samoa.There, Private Tyree was befriended by his Commanding General and became the Marine base's artist. His portrait career began with painting the officers and their loved ones.He began his post-military career by returning to the South Pacific to live in places such as Guam, Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island of Hawaii. He also traveled Palau, Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, and the Solomon Islands over his thirty-year career.Most of his early works were sensual island wahines in island beach and jungle settings. He painted primarily with oil on board but also occasionally on canvas and with pastels. To add depth and texture to his work, mid-career Tyree switched to painting with oil on fine French silk and black velvet. This was in the midst of the 1960's Tiki revolution; many of his nude pieces were displayed in Tiki bars and restaurants. Tyree was likely the most prolific South Pacific and Tiki artist of the twentieth century.In the 1970s, Tyree began painting endangered species to call attention to their limited numbers. He died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven in 1979.Tyree was a dreamer who painted idealized women in idyllic South Pacific landscapes, the faces of wizened island men, and endangered species. His portraiture, whether of humans or animals, captured their quiet, gentle spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: South Pacific Dreams Publishing
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780998422411

Book preview

Preface

I purchased this enchanting South Pacific woman (wahine) by Ralph Burke Tyree in 2008 (Fig. 0.1). I was immediately moved by the depth and beauty of his art and wanted to find out more about the artist. There were only a few paragraphs about this man and his life available in books or online. Minnie’s, a Tiki restaurant in Modesto, California, owned some of his works and had a page on their website dedicated to him. An art collector’s website, Askart.com, states, Ralph Burke Tyree (1921-1979) is well regarded as the most successful protégé of Edgar Leeteg, the Rembrandt of Black Velvet, exceeding his master with his sensuous depictions of scenes and people from the South Seas. (Tyree never met Leeteg.) Sometimes their work was categorized as ‘Tiki Art’ and graced famous haunts such as Trader Vic’s, Kona Inn, Don the Beachcomber, Canlis Restaurant, Pat’s at Punalu’u, and the Tropics. Born in Kentucky, Tyree attended the California College of Arts and Crafts and then, between 1942 and 1946, worked as a public relations artist for the U.S. Marine Corps. Fascinated by the tropical flora and cultures of the South Pacific, Tyree painted extensively in Samoa, Fiji, the Gilbert Islands, and the Marianas.

I was hooked and began collecting his art! But who was the man, the artist, who painted such a beauty? Who was Tyree? As a child, Tyree lived in central California in the small town of Delhi, but traveled a great deal to the islands of the South Pacific with frequent return trips to California. As I acquired more of his art, gradually his story became clear. I bought an oil painting of an owl on velvet painted in 1978. This was in contrast to the beautiful Tyree portraits and nudes done in the 1960s. Finally I was able to buy a couple of his early works, oils on board done in the fifties. Sometimes I found that the back of the painting would have a newspaper article or his promo pamphlet. Slowly I began putting together his story. I was able to gain insight into the man and his art, the adventurer and the Marine.

It is likely he was inspired by the artists of Tahiti: John Webber from Captain James Cook’s third voyage, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Leeteg. Tyree lived on Samoa, Guam, and three different Hawaiian islands. He also lived in California, near Modesto, San Francisco and San Diego. He traveled, photographed, and then painted wahines from Macau (Hong Kong), Koror (Palau), Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Guam, Tahiti, Fiji and Hawaii (Fig. 0.2), as well as California girls with Pacific Rim ancestry. I have been fortunate to have traveled to nearly all these places. I was able to explore, relax and dream in these same exotic South Pacific islands.

An opportune break in my investigation into the life of this man came by way of communication with his family. First I met Marda, his only daughter, and then his wife Margo. Finally I met all of his sons, Jeff, Danny, Greg, Steve, Michael and Marc. Tyree was about my father’s age and his children near my age. The Tyree family has been most helpful in telling his story. Tyree was an amazing man and artist. This is his story and his beautiful art from the South Pacific peoples.

—CJ COOK

Fig. 0.2 Tyree’s travels in the South Pacific (islands visited are in bold)

Introduction

Ralph Burke Tyree was one of the quintessential artists of the American Tiki Culture movement of the 1960s. Tiki Culture celebrated the romance of Polynesian life, as reported by returning WWII veterans and popularized by the writings of James Michener and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific. This blossomed into the South Pacific restaurant of thatched huts, hammocks and mai tais, of coconut palms, hibiscus flowers and scantily clad women.

Tyree’s love of the South Pacific began with his WWII posting to Samoa, as a Marine. There his artistic talent was quickly recognized and he was spared the front line, asked instead to paint portraits of his officers, their women at home and uplifting murals in the mess hall. This posting would change the course of his life. It launched him as a serious artist and was the beginning of his life-long love affair with the South Pacific, with its lush tropical environments and ethnically diverse people.

In 1952, after returning home to California, marrying, and beginning a family, Tyree moved back to the Pacific, settling initially on Guam. The advertising poster for his budding art business read: Portraits, Landscapes, Nudes. Tyree was very much a working artist, available for commissions, exploring new mediums, and seeking new markets. In the 1940s, he painted oil-on-board portraits of his WWII officers and their wives. In the 1950s, he continued to paint with oil on board, but explored the local subjects, frequently sensuous, idealized women in their equally sensuous environment. In the 1960s, he experimented with a new medium—black velvet—inventing ways to exploit its silky texture and mysterious depth.

Tyree came into his own financially with the Tiki Culture movement, finding, in the bars of Tiki restaurants, a lucrative market for his female nudes against exotic Pacific island settings. He is perhaps best known for these black velvet paintings of nudes, but his range of subject matter was much broader —including male portraits and endangered animals—and his interest in the composition of the painting as a whole reached far beyond the mere depiction of a provocative woman. In fact, his women were rarely provocative.

Tyree came of age as an artist in the throes of World War II. The era demanded pin-up girls, epitomized by Esquire Magazine’s Vargas Girl, images that were shipped free to troops to boost morale. They decorated Quonset hut walls and were painted on the noses of airplanes for good luck. The pin-up girl is blatantly sexual and flirtatious, gazing directly into the eyes of the viewer, coyly displaying shapely legs and revealing titillating cleavage or a bit of breast escaping from diaphanous clothing. The Vargas Girl offers an invitation. War is an elemental time. It reduces man to his basics: life, death, sex.

Despite this wartime environment, Tyree resisted the cheap, objectification of women. While his models’ nude bodies are shapely ideals and perfectly rendered with photographic realism—not the blockish, stylized bodies of Paul Gauguin’s South Pacific beauties—they are not stamped-out templates. They are each unique individuals, and their often-contemplative expressions invite us in, not as an invitation to sex but as an invitation to know someone, an invitation into their souls; quite the opposite of the shallow, coy glance of the pin-up girl.

Tyree’s women are shown emerging from their voluptuous, South Seas landscape, a world of large-leafed plants, hothouse flowers and frothy surf. The model and the setting are of equal value (unlike the women of some later black-velvet, Tiki artists for whom the woman was the sole point). Tyree’s paintings offer an opportunity to immerse oneself in the welcoming warmth of the South Pacific, depicting it as a place exuding tranquility; a grounded place where man lives unselfconsciously as part of nature.

Nudity has a long history in Western art dating back to the Greeks. But even then, when Praxiteles carved his 4th-century sculpture Capitoline Venus (handed down to us in a Roman copy) or later when Botticelli painted his Birth of Venus in 1484, the subjects attempt to modestly cover their breasts and genital areas with their hands, thereby drawing attention to their sexuality. In contrast, Tyree’s models are unselfconsciously exposed, putting the viewer at ease. The question of whether they’re indecent is never posed. It’s just how it is—a representation of life in a culture where female nudity is not the loaded topic that it often is in the Western world.

In black velvet Tyree found a medium that could support the richness of mahogany skin tones and oil black hair that he found in his subjects. He experimented for years with ways to use the nap to enhance the fabric’s three dimensionality, settling on a laborious process of painting it in layers from the back of the fabric to the surface in stages. The result was a stunning Rembrandt-like highlighting of his subject, who seems to emerge out of inky depths. This is best seen in portraits such as his 1968 painting of an old man, Makekau (Fig. 9.22), or his Mercedes Portrait (Fig. 9.17) and Samoan Boy (Fig. 7.28), both painted in 1978. These three, representing subjects of different ages and genders, share a far-sighted, wistfulness in their eyes, an expression that often appears in his portraits. It makes one wonder whether Tyree anticipated an end to an island culture that he cherished.

Tyree was a master at capturing the tactile, sensuous nature of a place and its people, through his use of the medium of black velvet and his ability to paint light. He created paintings that were as unselfconsciously exotic as his subjects. Tyree depicted a world that was tranquil and ancient while simultaneously very much alive. Rather than inviting the viewer to be the voyeur, Tyree’s work invites the viewer to settle in, to meet his friends and feel a place that became a vital part of his life. This wealth of work presents a welcome antidote to the fast-paced, over stimulation of twenty-first century life; a chance to reconnect to nature and the body.

— AMY RAGSDALE,

Author of Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil

TYREE

Fig. 1.1 Ralph Burke Tyree, Wild Wahine. 1952, Oil on board, 36 x 24, Private collection

CHAPTER 1

Sensual South Pacific