Madge Tennent

Madge Tennent
File:Tennent Portrait.jpg Madge Tennent, 1948
Born	Madeline Grace Cook (1889-06-22)22 June 1889 Dulwich, South London, England
Died	Honolulu, Hawaii
Nationality	British, naturalized American in 1936
Education	Académie Julian, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Julian Ashton
Known for	Printing, drawing, mural, sculpture
Movement	Hawaiian Modernism

Madge Tennent (22 June 1889 – 5 February 1972) was a naturalized American artist, born in England, raised in South Africa, and trained in both France and Australia. She ranks among the most accomplished artists to have worked and lived in Hawaiʻi.

A child prodigy, Tennent spent her formative teenage years in Paris, where she honed her technical mastery under the tutelage of William-Adolphe Bouguereau; simultaneous exposure to the city's leading avant-garde artists, including Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Pablo Picasso, stoked a lifelong experimental proclivity that would inform her own pioneering vision. After living and working as an art educator in South Africa, New Zealand, and British Samoa, Tennent settled in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi with her husband and children in 1923.

Tennent's prolific output spanned drawings, paintings, and sculptures of Polynesian figures. A reverent fascination with Hawaiian women fueled her artistic vision, which by the mid-1930s had crystallized into Tennent's iconic signature style: enormous paintings of voluptuous female figures that synthesized brilliant, swirling hues into a graceful, harmonious composition. These majestic, solid women embody a proud ancestry and endemic serenity that defied the diminutive Tiki culture imagery propagated outside Hawaiʻi.

Biography

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Tennent at her father's house in Streatham, South London, ca. 1910

Early life

Born to Arthur Cook, an architect and landscape painter and his wife, Agnes, a writer. The family moved in 1894 to Cape Town, South Africa, and Madge’s parents’ efforts to promote tolerance among various races and creeds there no doubt left a lasting impression on the young Madge.

Paris (1901-1907)

Madge’s artistic promise prompted her family to forgo their home in Cape Town so that she might study in Paris. There, she studied with William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the leading proponent of academic art. Eventually finances caused her family to move back to South Africa, where sixteen-year-old Madge led a government-sponsored art school.

Return to Capetown and Marriage (1907-1915)

The Cooks were steeped in the cultural life of Paris, but due to financial reverses, they returned to Capteown in 1907. Madge was soon appointed the headmistress in art for several girls' schools in different cities of South Africa and the director of a government art school in Capetown.

By 1913, Madge had established her own art school and resumed her piano recitals. Attending one was Hugh Cowper Tennent, a chartered accountant from New Zealand who was stationed in Capetown with the Natal Light House regiment. One of 11 children born to Robert and Emily Tennent, Hugh courted the 26-year-old Madge for three months following their introduction on 25 July 1915. The two were married and, shortly thereafter, embarked on a six-week excursion to New Zealand.

New Zealand and British Samoa (1915-1923)

Again Madge directed an art school, having been appointed head instructor at the Government School of Art in Woodville, the village where Madge and Hugh lived while he awaited further military orders. On 11 June 1916, she gave birth to Arthur Hugh Cowper Tennent, the first of two sons. When orders came, Hugh was posted to France in support of the allied effort in World War I. Madge relocated to her parents-in-law's home in Invercargill for the duration of Hugh's service abroad.

Hugh returned from France in 1917 with a badly wounded arm. An accountant by trade, he was offered a position as treasurer to the government of British Samoa, which he chose to accept. The Tennents lived in Samoa for six years, during which time Madge was able to indulge a fascination with the native people of Polynesian descent. Madge was able to devote much of her time to drawing charcoal portraits of Samoans.

Arrival in Honolulu (1923)

In 1923, en route to England to enroll their sons in school, the Tennents stopped over in Honolulu. It was to have been a brief stop, but they soon were persuaded by members of the local cultural elite, including poet Don Blanding, to stay on. Madge was immediately taken with the Hawaiian people.

Artistic Evolution & Style

While her husband worked to build his accountancy firm, Tennent supported her family as a portrait artist. With remarkable success, she drew countless child and adult portraits, mainly of Caucasian families. There was little challenge in this, however, and her imagination was already ablaze with the beauty she recognized in the Native Hawaiian and variously multiracial peoples she longed to portray. A book of Gauguin reproductions sparked her impetus to expand upon her study, research, drawing, and painting. With a strong insight into the Polynesian aesthetic, she envisioned Hawaiian kings and queens as "having descended from gods of heroic proportion, intelligent and brave, bearing a strong affinity to the Greeks in their legends and persons." It was this reverent vision of the Hawaiians that she would endeavor to convey to the world.

Stimulated by the pure colour flourishes of van Gogh, the fire and ice of Cézanne, and the opalescent, jeweled, flower-tinted harmonies of Renoir, this experience of experimentation in colour was a joyous one for me, though it was often the reverse for onlookers, many of whom prophesied a dire aesthetic end for me as an artist.

Madge Tennent, Autobiography of an Unarrived Artist, 101.

Influences of seminal European antecedents conspicuously permeated Tennent's transitional paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as Bathers (1926), Hawaiian Girl (1926), Girl with Apples (1926), and Makuahine (1927). Bright, warm hues endemic to Hawaiʻi fueled Tennent’s enchantment with color., and so she adapted line and form to the appropriately vivid medium of oil. The majestic, explicitly Polynesian women that would figure in Madge Tennent’s iconic imagery surfaced in works such as "Reclining Girl" (1929) and Three Filipino Ladies (1930), each a synthesis of European modernism’s languid, architectonic femininity with Tennent's own racial fixation. Generously applying paint with a palette knife, she avoided sensuousness in the representation of skin texture, instead imbuing the trademark sense of strength and grandeur tinged with fragility apparent in Holoku Ball and Hawaiian Singer (early 1930s). Just as Tennent constructed her wahines layer by layer in paint, she built her canvases to equally monumental proportions; when standard issue could no longer satisfy her vision, she sewed pieces of canvas together to attain the desired size.

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Tennent painting in her Honolulu studio (ca. 1940s)

Increasingly, Tennent portrayed the quintessence of the Hawaiians as a blending of strength and vulnerability, a people “caught in a time warp” between the freedom and joy of the primitive, sensual Hawaiʻi of years past and the repressive, alien ways imposed by colonial forces without. By the mid-1930s, Tennent’s works had evolved into the mammoth oils of majestic Hawaiian women that remain her signature today. She tapped a brilliant, decidedly tropical palette to create Hawaiians Hanging Holoku, Lei Queen Fantasia, and Local Color (1934), depicting native women engaged in lei-making, dancing, and similarly island-specific activities. Hawaiian Bride (1935) marked a turning point in the development of her distinctive style; there, as in the concurrent Girl in Red Dress (ca. 1935) and subsequent Two Lei Sellers (1936), she successfully counterbalanced a more tranquil palette with a painterly intensity a la van Gogh.

Her refusal to feel entirely satisfied with her output, even in the face of widespread acclaim, reflected her conviction that the artists “evolves through conscious effort.” This conscious evolution became strikingly apparent in the early 1940s, whereupon Tennent’s famously vibrant, swirling colors and thick, granular strokes gave way to a subdued monochrome, as in Three Musicians Subdued in Harmony (1940). Thereafter followed paintings in shades of ocean blues and earthy island sepias on linen, such as Hawaiian Three Graces (1941) and Three Hawaiians in a Library (1943), which posed a stark contrast to the polychromatic blaze of her earlier works and evidenced her lasting belief that “every true artist knows that his work must evolve or die […] therefore, the moment he has perfected some type of style of expression peculiar to himself he must move on or he becomes academic.” Working on a smaller scale in the 1950s, for example, Tennent executed a series of portraits featuring Hawaiian alii in oils, prints, and watercolors; she treated Hawaiian royalty as descendants from the gods, possessed of heroic proportions and serene facial features that conveyed “a gentleness that tends to make a predominance of convex lines, only seen in the great art of the world.” Until her death in 1972, Tennent would continuously diversify across media and scale, but never once did she stray from or grow tired of her beloved Hawaiian subjects.

International Recognition

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With son Val and husband Hugh at the Drake Hotel, Chicago (1939)

A renowned art educator as well as painter of modern figurative canvases of Hawaiian subjects, Madge Tennent had a distinguished career based primarily in Hawaii from where she sent paintings to the mainland United States for exhibitions in New York City and Chicago between 1930 and 1939. She was among the first artists to embrace native Hawaiians as a primary subject matter, whom she depicted as large and robust with audacious, swirling forms and colors. Two Sisters of Old Hawaiʻi in the collection of the Hawaii State Art Museum is an example of her large paintings of Hawaiian women. Her influence was increased by her association with the Honolulu Museum of Art in its early days, where she was a frequent lecturer, and where she was included in most of the Academy’s early group shows.

Legacy

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On holiday in California (1939)

Madge Tennent died in Honolulu in on 5 February 1972. Three days later, the senate of the Sixth Legislature of the State of Hawai'i commemorated the artist's vision, accomplishments, and influence:

Better than any other artist to date, Madge Tennent was able to capture and honestly express the subtle charm quiet grace and dignity of the Hawaiian people [...] Madge Tennent, having spent half a century in Hawai'i, leaves behind a rich legacy of art, which shall forever belong to Hawai'i [...] This body solemnly notes the passing of a great artist.

John Dominis Holt, a noted Native Hawaiian scholar and author, remarked that, "Even if the Hawaiians were to vanish as a race, they would live forever in the paintings of Madge Tennent."

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D. C.), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) are among the public collections holding works by Madge Tennent. The single largest intact collection of her works resides at the Isaacs Art Center, which in 2005 was named caretaker of the Tennent Art Foundation.

References

• Department of Education, State of Hawaii, Artists of Hawaii, Honolulu, Department of Education, State of Hawaii, 1985, pp. 7–14.
• Forbes, David W., Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and its People, 1778-1941, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1992, 210-268.
• Forbes, David W., He Makana, The Gertrude Mary Joan Damon Haig Collection of Hawaiian Art, Paintings and Prints, Hawaii State Foundation of Culture and the Arts, 2013, pp. 59–61
• Haar, Francis and Prithwish Neogy, Artists of Hawaii: Nineteen Painters and Sculptors, University of Hawaii Press, 1974, 9-15.
• Morse, Morse (ed.), Honolulu Printmakers, Honolulu, HI, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2003, p. 22, ISBN 0-937426-58-X
• Papanikolas, Theresa and DeSoto Brown, Art Deco Hawai'i, Honolulu, Honolulu Museum of Art, 2014, ISBN 978-0-937426-89-0, p. 126-128
• Sandulli, Justin M., Troubled Paradise: Madge Tennent at a Hawaiian Crossroads, Durham, NC: Duke University, 2016.