Tyree by CJ Cook

Author:CJ Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography of Artist of South Pacific
ISBN: 9780998422411
Publisher: South Pacific Dreams Publishing
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

If Tyree was inspired by any European artist, it was Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Although most will remember Renoir as Claude Monet’s colleague in the impressionist movement, Renoir was an admirer of feminine beauty and the female body. He adored women and wanted them around him. Renoir would paint a plethora of nudes in the latter part of his life. For his nudes he used bright colors and often-impressionistic backgrounds. His clothed women were equally sensual and were dressed in bright white to bring features like their eyes and luminescent skin to life. Renoir said about his nudes that, “When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.” Renoir’s nudes have been widely written about. In his later years, Renoir’s painting was hindered by his severe arthritis. He died of a heart attack in 1919, two years before Ralph Tyree was born.

What was the cultural milieu in which Tyree began his professional art career? Nudity in the Pacific was the norm. It was traditional for the native Tahitian and Hawaiian wahines to be topless, as the drawings of Cook’s artists illustrated in the 1770s. Nudity and open sex were ubiquitous, as all earlier sailors to these islands attested in their diaries. Not for long, however. American missionaries immigrated to Tahiti and the Hawaiian Islands beginning in 1820. Their goals were to convert the natives to Christianity and with that topless ladies (Fig. 6.19) and the hula disappeared. Happily, fifty years later in 1870, King David Kalakaua, the Merrie Monarch of Hawaii, authorized the return of the hula to Hawaiian culture. Topless wahines again appeared in Hawaiian photos after 1890. Tahiti remained a sexually-open society in spite of the Christianity attempts of change influx. During this same time, the 1890s, Gauguin’s paintings of topless Tahitians substantiated the typical dress and sensuality of the Society Islands. Subsequently, Leeteg’s velvet beauties, in the years 1933 to 1953, verified the continued openness of Tahitian culture. In Hawaii, Puritan standards returned from 1910 to the 1950s. Hawaiian postcards of hula girls were no longer topless. Not long after, possibly because of the Tahitian postcard competition (Fig. 6.20), Hawaiian postcards from the 1950s–70s, were, once again,t illustrated photographs of topless beauties on a Hawaiian shoreline. In the 1950s, photographers in Tahiti, in particular Adolphe Sylvain, captured the exquisite beauty of the Tahitian woman’s sensuality and her allure. His photos of nudes and books on this subject made quite a sensation.

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