Edgar Leeteg

Nobody built a tiki bar around Edgar Leeteg, and he never poured a drink in one. He belongs on this chart because of what hung on the wall. From a house on Moorea he turned out portraits of Polynesian women in oil on black velvet — the velvet doing the work of shadow, so the faces seemed to float out of a dark room at a dark room's own eye level — and for twenty years those canvases travelled back to the mainland in the luggage of sailors, tourists and restaurateurs until they were standard equipment in the American Polynesian bar. If you have a mental image of the wall behind a mid-century tiki banquette, some part of it is his.

He got there by accident and by failure. He was a billboard and sign painter for Foster & Kleiser in Sacramento when the Depression took the work; a friend's offer of movie-theatre lobby jobs put him in the islands around 1930, and by 1933 he had settled in French Polynesia for good, reportedly arriving with brushes, paint carried off from the sign company, and a small inheritance. The velvet came later, and by chance — a shopkeeper wanting rid of some velveteen, and a memory of the religious velvets of his St. Louis childhood. His best work runs from about 1938 to his death. What turned a local curiosity into an industry was a Honolulu gallery owner and ex-submarine sailor named "Aloha" Barney Davis, who tracked him down, became his dealer, and marketed him with the phrase that stuck: the American Gauguin. That epithet is Davis's advertising copy, not a critic's verdict, and it is worth saying plainly — it was the thing that moved the pictures. It worked. By the early 1950s a Leeteg could fetch five figures, and by the 1960s the best of them reportedly reached $20,000.

How the paintings reached the bars is where this project has a stake in him. Bob Brooks of the Seven Seas in Hollywood did it the honest way, buying his Leetegs from the artist himself on trips to Tahiti; genuine ones hung in that room until, by the community record, they came down in the 1950s once the price of a dead man's work went up. Irwin Schuman of the Chi Chi clubs did it the other way, reproducing Hina Rapa across menus, postcards, napkins and serviceware without asking, until the figure had a nickname of its own. Leeteg's own line on it survives in a letter: he had given Chi Chi no permission to reproduce anything of his, and a credit line was more than he expected from a Hollywood gin joint anyway. He was right about the gin joints. He also said his paintings belonged in one rather than a museum, and meant it as a boast.

The complication — and it is the reason he is charted with the credit rather than the halo — is that he was on both sides of that ledger. Of his eight best-known subjects, seven are said to have been copied from photographs taken by other men, uncredited, out of books and magazines; several of the island women he is famous for were painted from pictures made long before he arrived. He was a heavy drinker and a brawler who treated his own scandals as advertising, and he died on February 7, 1953, at forty-eight, thrown from a motorcycle in Papeete after a night at the Les Tropiques resort. Four years later James Michener gave him a chapter and called him, with some care, at least the Remington of the South Seas. The velvets outlived the argument. They are still on the walls of rooms he never saw.