We’ve been talking about the early art contacts you had when you came to Hawai‘i. You did a lot of research for the first mural in painters who had been here, people like Webber1 and Choris. Could you tell me a little bit about your reactions to them and how they interested you?
No, that came a little after. The thing I was talking about was really the studies for that first mural in Bachman Hall. And that had to be done very rapidly. And at the time, I didn’t study certainly Choris the way I studied him later on. So really Miss Titcomb at the Bishop Museum lending me the albums and photographs is one of the main sources. I mentioned those bearded people that I have in that Bachman Hall in the ground floor. That was taken from those photographs. Some are kahunas, and some were fishermen, I think. And the other thing—and you are right there—the library of the Mission Society, when they were not blended with the Historical Society, and Miss Judd—Miss Judd was that very nice person who guided me there—and I saw at the time mostly Arago. I suppose because he was a Frenchman. And I, as I say, Choris was not an influence in any way. Arago was, and he’s a less innocent person as an artist. As a Frenchman, he had a good time inventing. In my book on Choris and Kamehameha, I mentioned, for example, the Arago story on how he drew on the shoulder of Ka‘ahumanu2 a portrait of Kamehameha and immediately some subjects of the queen came and tattooed it on her shoulder. Then I found by other sources that he had been accepted and received by the queen, but that the thing had lasted about twenty minutes, something like that. There’s a similar story about Choris, which of course, is entirely fictitious as far as tattooing on the queen. They had been impressed certainly by seeing tattoos on people, and the stories were born around them. But I think photographs and then the looking at nature, the stories that, for example, May Fraser as a little girl had heard, a lot of the stories about the plants, for example, or the animals in the islands, helped me a lot in the first, in the Bachman Hall again, the first fresco which was done within the first eight weeks of my stay or nine weeks of my stay in Hawai‘i. The warrior which is on the left side on the narrow panel, of the larger scale which balances the woman with the child on her back on the other one—incidentally, the child on her back is Peter, I think—that man has for a bit of a landscape a branch of the hala, the same type of hala that we have here, with the male hala with this white pollenization affair, because May had told me at the time that, which was quite correct, that the women of ancient Hawai‘i used it as an aphrodisiac, and covered themselves with the pollen of the hala, and tried even to give it in some philters and so on to the man they were in love with. So that is the female, if you want, side in the disguise of the plant motif and the soldier representing, of course, the male. There’s a curious footnote, I would say, to my research, is that I went with Juanita Vitousek to Hāna, and I had and I still have the little sketchbook where I made my first drawings of Hawaiians. And before, she cautioned me most of the Hawaiians I met were not Hawaiian, but they were, I think, mostly Filipinos there. There were a family of Filipinos that were remarkably constructed and thin with a certain elegance. And I jumped on them, which was the wrong idea, of course, to make my style of people. It still comes out in that warrior. In fact, I have his name somewhere. He’s part of that Filipino family. But I suppose some Hawaiians must have been thin and long and elegant as that particular warrior was. The other things were really direct, mostly from the basements of the Bishop Museum, because in the Bishop Museum, the good things are in the basement. I don’t know why. You have that photograph of myself for example beating a Hawaiian drum, and that one was a real old Hawaiian drum. And much of my visual result does not come from visual experience. I’m sure that the sounds I made on that drum were not brilliant and certainly not Hawaiian, but the motion, for example, of the arms, the rhythm, the trying to attune the ear to the, what I would call the monochrome, if you want, of a drum sound, were great experiences. And that thing comes out I suppose in the drummers that I have in the fresco. I made a tremendous booboo, and my first sketch was of the different people with the different musical instruments. That is, some with the drum, some with the gourds, some with perhaps the nose flutes, shall we say; that is, an orchestra. It was for myself as a Parisian or, if you want, a fellow who lived in New York, the orchestra had as many different instruments as possible. And I showed the drawing to Mrs. Pukui,3 and she was very nice. Like all Hawaiians, she is not blunt or rough about things. But she said, “Oh, so many instruments playing at the same time. How interesting. I’ve never heard of that, and I’ve never seen it, and I’ve never heard it.” And she came, of course, from a family of drummers. Now, I corrected the thing, and even though the musicians are there, I think only the drummers are playing, and the fellows who are playing with those long and short poles—which is another form of a musical instrument—are waiting in the wings to get in when the drummers have finished. I did not, you could say, I did not know Choris. I knew Arago. I knew Arago, and I still knew him enough to know that he was a little bit of a faker; that he was…well, he was a romantic at the time when he was…that is, a French romantic, in the style of the first half of the nineteenth century. And he dramatized things in such a way that even though some of the details may be true—that is, it’s true that some human-sacrificed people were killed by strangling and so on—the presentation is interesting because what he’s thinking of actually is Delacroix, for example, certain lithographs of Delacroix. And because he illustrated his book with lithographs as a stylistic tail, if you want, to the lithographic work of Delacroix, it’s quite interesting from a Frenchman’s point of view. But it’s a little disturbing from the Hawaiian point of view. I didn’t use those things at all in the fresco. Choris came much later. Choris came later after reading. I think I told you that Huc Luquiens makes a sketchy sketch, we could say, in words of the relation of Choris and Kamehameha. He came to conclusions that seemed to me wrong. So I went to the originals, and that wasn’t the basement of the Bishop Museum; that was the basement of the Academy. And most of the Chorises they have are still in the basement. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them all exhibited. And by measuring and so on, by tracing and putting together, I reconstructed one page, but a very important page of the sketchbook of Choris, the one in which he made his first studies of Kamehameha from life. And I proved, if you…it’s certainly a proof, physical proof, that on that first page, there had been originally that Kamehameha in a red vest which was the original that Huc thought had been lost. And that later on Choris had disguised, if you want, the red vest into the black cloak, which he liked much more because he was looking for Hawaiian, of course, and not English things, utensils or clothes around the king. But that came later. I really was an innocent in a new milieu in that first Bachman Hall thing. I told you the weaknesses there are in it. Perhaps the greatest weakness is that I hadn’t been able to assimilate the landscape to the people. I felt more, knew more, we could say, about the people than I knew about the islands and tied the people and the islands properly. And I think that the landscape was so secondary to the people that I let some of my helpers work on it. May, for example, and there’s a little bird flying there that is entirely by her. She wanted something original of her own, and I told her to put the little bird in there.
So, since that time, you’d see sort of a progress of your knowledge of Hawai‘i as being really more in that balancing and coordination and a very different weight you give to the landscape. But anyway, the balancing and coordination between humans and landscape and a greater weight to the landscape.
Well, I’ve been hearing radio talks. I don’t say that I’ve learned from you because it came a little late for me, but I came to the similar conclusions. That man, the king of the Creation, which we can get, of course, from the Good Book, that is, God gives us the animals and the plants, and the this and the that to do with as we wish—is something that some other cultures have not felt. The sense of mystery, on the contrary, and the sense of being the size we are—that is, if we measure our body—the size we are in a nature that has many other things of a more colossal size, brings a sense of mystery. And also that sense that it’s not always nature that is our servant, but man is, in so many ways, lost in nature. One of the phrases, I think, that recur in some of my plays, is to walk on tiptoe in nature. And that’s the opposite of man the master of our little universe. And it happens that that thing, which I think I was born with, that sense of mystery and walking on tiptoe, which I’ve done all my life, is something that I had not tied up to the Hawaiians. When I tied it up to the Hawaiians, I felt much more brotherly. There was a link there in some of the deepest part of our relationship to nature—both the Hawaiians and myself. When I said that the landscape isn’t as mature, if you want, as the presentation of the people in that early fresco, I’m speaking as a painter. That is, as a painter, I saw that the people had to be in the landscape. I think I mentioned Poussin, for example, and figures in the landscape. It’s very much the attitude of that first fresco. And if you take Leeward, and again as I tell you—I repeat myself because you ask me things always very similar in context—I would say that Leeward could be characterized as nearly figures lost in the landscape. It’s not the little storytelling with figures from Homer, or from the Bible, or from Alexander the Great, that make immediately the landscape an accessory to the action, but people tiptoeing, not that they actually tiptoe in the picture, but small people in an imposing landscape, which is not the classical formula of the painters. And there’s a tremendous difference there, and it tied up in me with something that was there before. Ozenfant used to speak of…his explanation of beauty was what he calls “prefigures,” that is, figures that are in the abstract, that remain in the abstract, but exist in us—a kind of logo or logos, whatever you call that—and that suddenly we see in a physical reflection in nature. And then this to us is beautiful because it existed in us before. And that Hawaiian sense of mystery and tiptoeing, again, is something that was in me. You can call it prefiguration that certainly receives its exterior figuration in Hawai‘i, and as such, I think that my view of the Hawaiians and so on has a certain validity.
I’m thinking of your previous work in landscape. There was in your Mexican things, there were some little vignettes, print vignettes you did of the man sucking the pulque. And then the biggest landscape I remember you doing was the one of the hill that had been cut into to make a road. And you actually wrote a little article about that, why you had painted that landscape. And the article said that you had been interested in the geometry of it; in other words, that cut to make the road had sliced away part of a hill creating a geometric figure. And it had been that that had triggered your interest in doing that particular landscape. In other words, in your art, you do have a very geometric approach. And I was just wondering, has that geometric approach been the way you’ve approached Hawaiian nature, or have you had to go to other approaches in order to express what you see in Hawaiian nature?
Well, if I, if I knew more, about certain forms of geometry, which are not the ones I learned in school, I’m sure that I would call them geometric. That is, it looks like I was trying to show off with that idea of the post-Euclidean geometry when I speak of the movements of the sea, of the octopus and so on. But I’m quite serious about it. I didn’t understand, but I had in front of me confrontations with those things that exist, not on a plane, but on a plane we could say in motion. And that is a research to which I understand nothing, but that other people, very great scientists, geometricians, and so on, have worked out on in my lifetime, and just looking at it as an artist, it knocked out totally my own sort of geometry, which after all is solid, as Euclid called it, and can be reproduced, for example, in wooden models or stone models. And it will remain forever certainly for me as geometry a great mystery, but I know that some people have worked on those things logically. The result for me, as I said, is too complicated to understand by reason, but of course, esthetically, an important knowledge that there is logic in those apparently, well, motions that I speak of. I’ve repeated myself a little too much on the octopus and all those things. But it’s quite true. It’s something else. So I haven’t been able, for example, to find in the Hawaiian scene the things that I admired in Uccello, the things that I admired in, shall we say, Roman palaces and so on. And it’s interesting that the hut, the native hut—in Fiji, I’ve seen more of them than in Hawai‘i—but refuses to use those right angles and refuses to use those constructions that suggest solidity. It’s a little story, maybe to the side, but those abodes, if you want, of natives are not supposed to be solid and to last forever. When Martin was doing his movie in Fiji, for example, and he was doing that scene of the death of the chief, he complained that the light inside the…it was a house. By Fijian, well, standards, Melanesian standards, it was a large house. He complained that the light wasn’t good enough, that he couldn’t do the things, and still it had to be done in an interior. And the man who owned the house very politely had the house sawn in two so that there would be light coming in and he could photograph the thing. So when we think, of course, of the sea part of the culture of the Polynesians and the Melanesians, it’s easy to see the motions and the eternal transformations, but the land has very much a similar thing, and the architecture, as long as you’re studying architecture those days, has also the same, call it a quality or a defect. Anyhow, it’s not something that is to stay. It’s something of the moment. It is transient, as transient as shall we say a wave in the ocean.
Could I just ask one more thing? I’m interested in this whole idea of basing a composition on lines of motion. In the Leeward fresco, there’s kind of a spiraling upward, or corkscrewing upward of the columns of coral. And then there’s a sort of up and down spiraling of the swimming figures. And then, up above, on the top level, you have the decending of the penis-like hala roots and then the raising of the stone, the image stone, and the raising of the prayer. Is that one of the ways that you did that mural? that sort of set of corresponding, interlocking, and contrasting motions?
Well, I think if you compare—in the terms that we are speaking—about Bachman Hall, which represents my first eight weeks in Hawai‘i, and Leeward College, it represents an experience of twenty-five years. I think it’s very clear that I have learned more about Hawai‘i than I knew when I did Bachman Hall, and it’s along the lines that we have discussed. I must say that I can look at it a little bit from the outside. That is, as you know, I cling to my early knowledge. People could say that there is a battle within me between my geometry—Uccello and whatnot—and those things that I don’t know as geometry, but simply as art-means of, we could call, perpetual motion. But it’s not bad for an artist to have things in him that cannot get together, and maybe it is what makes him work.
Thank you very much, Papa.
John Webber (1751–1793) was the official artist on Captain Cook’s third and final voyage to the Pacific, 1776–80. Webber’s role was to create a visual record of this historic voyage of discovery, and as the first European artist to make contact with Hawai‘i (1778), his drawings and watercolors had a lasting impact on the West’s conception of Hawai‘i and its people.
Queen Ka‘ahumanu (1777?–1832) was a chiefess and favored wife of King Kamehameha I (1753?–1819), who united the Hawaiian Islands. At Kamehameha’s death, Ka‘ahumanu became kuhina nui, or first minister, sharing power with his son, Liholiho, the new king.
Mary Kawena Wiggin Pukui (1895–1986) was a noted kumu, or source of expert knowledge, on Hawaiian culture, language, and lore. Pukui first collaborated with academics in the field of Hawaiian studies (such as anthropologist Martha Warren Beckwith) in the early 1920s and in 1937 became a translator for the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. Among her many significant writings were the co-authored Hawaiian-English dictionaries (1943, 1957, 1964, 1971), Place Names of Hawai‘i (1974), and Hawaiian Grammar (1979).