Art Lost & Found

MD enjoyed buying storage lockers whose owners had defaulted on payments. He bought one in the early 2000s in San Diego and stuffed boxes of books and papers into his own storage locker here in Santa Barbara. Newly retired, he had the time to sort through boxes of paperwork. In one old box he found a diary and the sketch book of a renowned Hawaiian artist, Madge Tennent (1889-1972), and has framed four of the sketches. What do I know about finding lost art, he asks?

I know you find art in the strangest places, and once you do, it is almost impossible to trace how the artist “lost” their own work. Unless an artist has known since putting pen to paper at 10 years old that she/he was going to change the face of art history, artists typically do not establish their own archives or catalogue their works. That is left to family members later, if they are lucky. And artworks DO show up in odd places. One of the tests of a true connoisseur is this question: “If you walk into a dirty garage in a rundown house, would you recognize the Kandinsky leaning against the wall?” 

Madge Tennent’s work in oil sells for between a million and a hundred thousand dollars. Her small watercolor line-drawing portraits, such as the four framed by MN, sell for $1,000 to $2,500 each. Not sure what the sketchbook would bring, but Bonham’s Auctions is a leader in sales of works by Hawaiian artists, and MN should take photos of all for an auction estimate: he does not have to sell…

Tennent was a free spirit before women were allowed to be. Born in England to progressive parents who welcomed all religions and races, her family moved to South Africa: when Tennent exhibited precocious artistic talent at 12, the family moved to Paris so she could study art at the Académie Julian under famed William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Returning to South Africa, she met a soldier from New Zealand, married, and on the way to London stopped in Hawaii in 1923. She never left. 

She discovered the beauty of the islands and the people, and although she had made her living painting portraits of upper middle-class people like herself, she began to paint the ‘wāhine’ of Hawaii. With each portrait her canvases grew larger and her palette more colorful; she eschewed the brush for the boldness of the palette knife. She fell in love with people of Polynesian heritage, writing “the women are a perpetual and queenly benediction from an island possessing the most beautiful people of the world.” 

The world discovered Tennent’s work in the 1930s. She had shown at the Honolulu Museum of Art but her work was more broadly exposed when she showed her Hawaiian-themed works in New York City, in Chicago, and in Europe from 1930-1939.

Until the time of her first heart attack in the mid 1950s, whence MD’s portraits originate (they are signed and dated: two from 1955 and two from 1956) her work was huge and bold. After her illnesses she concentrated on small intimate sketches. Some of these were portrayals of Hawaiian Royalty, personages she considered to be descended from gods. Her charcoal portrait sketch of the beautiful Princess Kaiulani sold for over $1,000.

From 1955 to 1965 she struggled with heart ailments. Ultimately, she made a permanent move into Maunalani Hospital, where she died in 1972.

MD did not know the name of the former owner of the storage locker where he found Tennent’s work, nor did he know Tennent’s son Arthur Cowper Tennent, who established the Tennent Art Foundation in the mid 1970s. MD remembers the storage locker contained fine Persian rugs and some other items he sold, but he doesn’t remember any other works of art. This leads me to believe that the owner of that storage locker was not a collector of art, but a friend of the Tennent family, someone with whom Madge would entrust a sketch book. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1914, but my research indicates that first husband Bertie Phillips Denham was an English journalist (and not a San Diegan). Her second husband died in Hawaii in 1967.

In 2005 her son Arthur gave 30 oils and 40 works on paper to the Hawaii Preparatory Academy, establishing the largest collection of other works outside of the collection of Tennent’s teenage friend Donald Angus, who owned at least 53 drawings. And now MD has discovered he owns many more than the four he framed!

Art is found where you LEAST expect it.