LEETEG

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.