Tyree , livre ebook

Ralph Burke Tyree, Circa 1965, Tyree Family

Ralph Burke Tyree, Kulio . 1968, Oil on velvet, 20” x 16”, Author ’ s collection

Copyright ©2017 by CJ Cook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, South Pacific Dreams Publishing.
Published by
South Pacific Dreams Publishing
www.SouthPacificDreamsPublishing.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932274
Hardback ISBN 978-0-9984224-0-4
Ebook ISBN 978-0-9984224-1-1
Interior book design by Claudine Mansour Design
Printed in Korea by Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, Kentucky
This book is dedicated to the US Marines who fought and died in the islands of the South Pacific during World War II.

Ralph Burke Tyree, Sleeping Nude on Rocks with Green Sarong . Circa 1956, 19” x 15”, Oil on board, Private collection
Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 SENSUAL SOUTH PACIFIC
Chapter 2 ATHLETE, ADVENTURER, ARTIST
Chapter 3 PRIVATE TYREE, MARINE AND ARTIST
Chapter 4 U.S. MARINE CORPS ARTISTS OF WORLD WAR II
Chapter 5 MARGO AND LOVE LETTERS FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC
Chapter 6 ISLAND GIRLS, AU NATURALE
Chapter 7 EXOTIC BEAUTIES ON BLACK VELVET
Chapter 8 TIKI BARS AND OTHER BLACK VELVET ARTISTS
Chapter 9 TYREE ’ S METHODS AND MODELS
Chapter 10 ENDANGERED BEASTS: BOARD VERSUS VELVET
Chapter 11 TYREE ’ S LEGACY: HIS WIFE, CHILDREN AND ART
Sources
Timeline
Acknowledgments
Fig. 0.1 Ralph Burke Tyree, Native Girl from Palau . 1974, Oil on velvet, 18” x 14”, Author ’ s collection
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 C OOK

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