Edgar Leeteg - Rise To Popularity

Rise To Popularity

Leeteg's best work was done between the years 1933 and 1953. He lived in Cook's Bay, Tahiti, using the dark skinned women of the island as his models. His main subject was beautiful Polynesian women, and he painted them amidst their background, their culture and their history. The eroticism, colour and detail of these paintings made him famous.

Leeteg's popularity soared following a fortunate meeting with Honolulu art gallery owner Barney Davis, who became his patron. It was with Davis' help that Leeteg built his great Villa Velour estate in Moorea. Davis worked as Leeteg's agent and they had a fruitful and profitable relationship together. His paintings were popular in bars in America and Polynesia.

Davis branded Leeteg the 'American Gauguin', and soon Leeteg's paintings were being sold for thousands of dollars. Fame as an artist is something he never expected saying, "My paintings belong in a gin mill, not a museum. If this modern crap is art, then just call my paintings beautiful. Don't call them art." James Michener called him "... at least the Remington of the South Seas."

Photographs of Leeteg are few, but Michener described him as "short, not more than five feet three, with a round face and sparse black hair. The mouth is ample, the lower jaw juts forward slightly, the nose is large. His eyes are a steely blue." He writes that he suffered from elephantiasis but that it was controlled with the drug Hetrazan. He had illegitimate children and hung out at Tahiti's famous bar Quinn's Tahitian Hut and was a friend of James Norman Hall who lived in Papeete.

Edgar Leeteg died in 1953 in a motorcycle crash in Papeete at the age of 49. He had been suffering from a strain of venereal disease resistant to antibiotics. A close friend of his was reported by a Frenchwoman living in Punaauia to have released this information to the people of the islands with the advice that their women stay away from him. He was buried in Papeete in the family crypt of American friend Lew Hirshon. His mother Bertha was too ill to travel from Moorea to Tahiti for the funeral.

As was the case with other popular artists such as Tretchikoff, Leeteg was never accepted by the art establishment. He had to fight to have his paintings allowed into the US as "fine art" rather than as a "craft" which had a much higher rate of import duty. Of his eight most popular subjects, seven were copied from photographs by other men. This caused many plagiarism disputes but at that time copyright had to be registered to be protected, and few photographers went to the trouble and expense of submitting their work to the copyright office. One of those subjects was a famous painting The Head of Christ by Warner Sallman. This work was protected and he was forced to stop painting his copies publicly but continued to do so clandestinely on request. After his death, Leeteg's paintings rose in value to as much as $20,000 in the early 1960s but have subsequently declined in value considerably. Nevertheless, he has continued to have his ardent admirers.