Cook and Harned’s biography of an artistic pioneer offers glimpses into old Hollywood, Hawaii, and the original method for coloring photographs.

Before the invention of color photography, Edithe Beutler was among the artists who would painstakingly paint over black-and-white images to give them vibrancy and life (“she transformed the images into a different kind of artwork, and she did so with talent, delicacy, and intuition”). Inspired by this methodical and highly artistic process, the authors trace the life of the colorist responsible for striking images of the South Pacific. With little to go on, they have been able to largely reconstruct the life of Beutler (known as “Lovey” to her family). She was born in California in 1892; Beutler’s failed first marriage to a charismatic magician would leave her divorced with two children to support, struggling to find work in San Francisco. It was in this period that she pioneered working as a colorist, opening her first studio and eventually moving on to Hollywood, where she worked with First National Pictures as her daughter Sally simultaneously found fame as a silent film star. Changing times and a tumultuous relationship with her glamorous daughter would lead Edithe to begin working with Kodak and relocate to Honolulu, where she collaborated with Hawaii’s premier photographer, Frank Warren. The authors have intelligently arranged Beutler’s arresting images on the pages, highlighting the depth and beauty of her techniques. The chapters are enriched by fascinating details from the silent film era, a bygone Honolulu, and exotic travels across the world. Many of these textual details come from Beutler’s celebrity daughter or her eccentric husbands rather than Beutler herself. Despite the ample discussions of her technique and the authors’ clear admiration for Beutler as an early 20th-century female artist and entrepreneur (she opened her own color art shop after Warren’s death), she too often feels overshadowed by her daughter Sally, failing to stand out on the page like the wonderful images she created.  

While the text may lack focus, this biography captures a visionary artist’s eye for color.

Cook profiles American artist and kitsch icon Edgar Leeteg, prolific painter of Polynesian subjects on black velvet.

Edgar Leeteg was born in 1904 in East St. Louis and later lived in Arkansas and California. Though his father was a butcher (a heart attack felled him when Edgar was young), several of his forebears were artists. Leeteg felt a strong pull toward portraiture, though his art school training ended rather abruptly when the randy student made a pass at a female teacher. In the depths of the Depression, while working as a sign painter in Sacramento, Leeteg took a trip to Tahiti and was dazzled by the island paradise, which was full of paintable scenery, booze, and alluring native women. Leeteg relocated, taking his widowed mother Bertha with him. He carved out a living in Tahiti painting on black velvet, a medium that fascinated him. Weathering occasional WWII shortages of black-velvet material, Leeteg painted many luminous nudes and portraits. These found their way to international buyers via a number of supporters, including drinking buddies (there were lots of drinking buddies) and one busy agent. Leeteg had numerous affairs with his models; at least two bore him children, but more serious relationships failed to survive Bertha’s criticism or Leeteg’s promiscuity, drunkenness, and irascible spells (not helped by his increasingly poor health). The painter’s marketable notoriety as a tempestuous latter-day Gauguin was firmly cemented when Leeteg died in 1953 in an alcohol-fueled island motor-vehicle accident.

Though black-velvet art is largely dismissed as kitsch (except by Tiki culture adherents), Leeteg (like tattooing immortals Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy) remains a fascinating figure in exotic image-making. Leteeg himself, who was prone to venting in letters to newspapers about the fickle art world, seemed to hold no delusions of genius. But he was insulted by accusations that his enormous output was assisted by camera-obscura devices or airbrushes; the work was all proudly, painstakingly painted freehand, in primitive conditions (even if Leeteg shamelessly painted imitations of published pictures with little or no payouts made to or permissions sought from the photographers). This book (which goes on quite a few oddball tangents, such as a consideration of the 1990s pop song “Black Velvet”) gives readers a nostalgic, illustrated look at Edgar Leeteg in his time, evoking the iconic Tahitian dance bar, Quinn’s; servicemen on leave; and the Hollywood Polynesian-themed clubs and restaurants that vied for the honor of hanging titillating Leetegs on their walls. Of the man himself, even the authors seem put off by the “Arkansas redneck” qualities of a guy who seemed not particularly enlightened about Indigenous people and who, when soused, attacked random strangers in the street who he deemed “communists.” But the main villain role falls to Leeteg’s ever-present mother, Bertha, a stern-looking figure of whom few witnesses speak kindly. Of course, Bertha never really gets a chance to speak for herself—and her son left such glowingly indulgent eye-candy artwork behind for fans.

No retro man-cave grotto will be complete without the work of Edgar Leeteg—and this lush biography.

A collection of paintings centers on endangered animals.

During World War II, Ralph Burke Tyree was deployed to Samoa, an island in the South Pacific, and he became enchanted with its “idyllic beauty.” In fact, he loved it so much he moved his family there for years, later taking up residence on Guam and Hawaii (Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island). Beginning in the late 1960s, he turned his attention to flora, especially passion flowers, magnolias, and hibiscuses. In the last 10 years of his life—he died in 1979—his preoccupation was the depiction of animals, “celebrating creatures big and small, common and endangered, and local and foreign.” His principal focus was endangered or threatened animal populations—he made a concerted effort not just to capture their feral beauty, but also to raise public awareness about their vulnerability. Cook and Paige Herbert (the artist’s granddaughter) reproduce in this gorgeous assemblage of vividly colored works dozens of Tyree’s paintings from the last decade of his life. The authors include an edifying running commentary that not only discusses the paintings themselves and Tyree’s evolving artistic techniques, but also the animals depicted and the extent to which their populations are imperiled. And while Tyree’s stunning portrayals of animals are the book’s primary emphasis, the authors feature an impressive variety of works beyond that category, including portraits of people and depictions of plants and flowers. The heart of the volume is the paintings themselves, which are startlingly vibrant—saturated colors take on a striking depth and texture when Tyree paints with oil on French silk black velvet. A foreword is contributed by the artist’s daughter, Marda Tyree Herbert, who furnishes a loving tribute to her father’s devotion to his work and his “creative genius.” The authors’ mastery of the subject is magisterial—this book is a remarkable feat of artistic scholarship. For those who are already familiar with Tyree’s massive body of work as well as those who have never heard of him, this volume is a visually arresting portal into his mature paintings.

A beautiful art book filled with rigorously researched commentary.