Madge Tennent

Madge Tennent ( Madeline Grace Cook; June 22, 1889 – February 5, 1972) was a British-born American artist known for her monumental oil paintings of Native Hawaiian women. Born in Dulwich, London, raised in Cape Town, and trained at the Académie Julian in Paris under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, she settled in Honolulu in 1923 and devoted the remaining five decades of her career to Hawaiian subjects.

Tennent's signature works are large-scale canvases depicting Hawaiian women in sweeping, architectonic compositions suffused with vibrant color. Drawing on her academic training and the formal innovations of Post-Impressionism, she developed a distinctive style that synthesized European modernist techniques with a deep engagement with Hawaiian culture and people. Her output evolved continuously, from early portraits indebted to Renoir and Cézanne, through the monumental polychromatic oils of the mid-1930s, to the restrained, near-monochrome canvases of the 1940s.

During the 1930s, Tennent exhibited to critical acclaim in London, New York, San Francisco, and Paris, including exhibitions at the Wertheim Gallery in London (1935, 1937) and representation at the 1939 New York World's Fair. At the time of her death, many critics considered her the most important individual contributor to Hawaiian art in the 20th century. Her works are held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among other institutions.

Biography

Early life

Madge Tennent was born Madeline Grace Cook in Dulwich, London, the first of two daughters of Arthur and Agnes Cook. Her father was an architect, seascape painter, and fine craftsman in woodcarving, while her mother owned, edited, and wrote for a weekly magazine titled South African Women in Council. By 1894, the family had settled in Cape Town, where the Cooks took a lively interest in comparative religion and matters of psychic and astrological inquiry. Madge and her sister Violet were raised in this stimulating environment, learning to read and write at an early age. Agnes was an accomplished pianist who taught Madge to play. Her parents' efforts to promote tolerance among various races and creeds left a lasting impression on their elder daughter.

Paris (1902–1906)

Although she had attended an English boarding school and, later, a French convent school in Paris, Madge had little formal general education. Her aptitude for drawing prompted her parents to enroll her at the age of twelve in the Cape Town School of Art, where classes were limited to drawing from casts, still life, and portraiture; within a year, she had mastered and surpassed the curriculum. The family relocated to Paris so that she could pursue more advanced training.

At the Académie Julian, she attracted early attention for her skill and was invited to study under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a prominent artist-educator closely identified with Academic art. In a competition among students from five academies, the thirteen-year-old placed fifth with a full-length charcoal drawing of a nude model.

In 1909, Madge married Bertie Phillips Denham; the marriage ended in divorce by 1914. The two were married on July 25, 1915, and shortly thereafter embarked for New Zealand.

New Zealand and British Samoa (1915–1923)

In New Zealand, Tennent was appointed head instructor at the Government School of Art in Woodville, where the couple lived while Hugh awaited further military orders. On June 11, 1916, she gave birth to Arthur Hugh Cowper Tennent, the first of two sons. This commercial work gave way in the late 1920s to the paintings of Native Hawaiian and multiracial subjects for which she became known. She became closely associated with the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now the Honolulu Museum of Art), where she was a frequent lecturer and participant in group exhibitions from the institution's early years.

By the mid-1930s, Tennent had established an international exhibition career, sending paintings to major shows in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Her 1935 and 1937 exhibitions at the Wertheim Gallery in London brought her critical attention in Europe, and Local Color (1934) was selected to represent Hawaiʻi at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

During the mid-1950s, Tennent suffered the first of several heart attacks, prompting her to shift from large-scale work on canvas to smaller pieces on paper. She was diagnosed with a permanent heart ailment in 1958, and by 1965 she had largely discontinued working and moved into Maunalani Hospital near Mānoa.

Art and style

Tennent's refusal to feel entirely satisfied with her output, even in the face of widespread acclaim,

Working on a smaller scale in the 1950s, Tennent executed a series of portraits featuring Hawaiian aliʻi in oils, prints, and watercolors; she depicted Hawaiian royalty as figures of heroic proportions and serene countenance, conveying what she called "a gentleness that tends to make a predominance of convex lines, only seen in the great art of the world." The Times described her artistic aim as "colour in movement" and judged that, if she had looked at Renoir, "she has looked at him intelligently and adopted only what could be fused with her exotic subject matter", adding that her studies of Hawaiian racial types "remove any suspicion that the style adopted by Mrs. Tennent in her paintings is due to a shirking of drawing". The Daily Mail saw in her work a blend of "the massive feminine forms of the late Renoir, the palette of Gauguin, and the spottily-thick paint of Monticelli". Other reviewers were less persuaded: the Morning Post found her talents "swamped in the lava-like rush of gaudy pigment" while granting her "considerable skill in draughtsmanship", and Apollo, admiring the shimmering quality of her Monet-inflected impasto, regretted occasional lapses in draftsmanship "the more" because "her drawings show that she can draw". Interviewed during the exhibition, Tennent addressed the comparison that would follow her for the rest of her career: "Please don't think I ape Gauguin—there is only one Gauguin!"

Her 1937 return to the Wertheim Gallery prompted a widely cited review by Eric Newton in the London Evening Standard:

One can see from the exhibition of Miss [sic] Tennent's work at the Wertheim Gallery in Burlington Gardens that it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to draw and paint with careful and literal accuracy and leave it at that. She has the equipment of an exceptionally gifted student, and to prove it she includes one or two drawings of heads done with an academic though masterly touch which gives one no more than the physical features of her sitters. But, luckily, she feels that art has other things to do than hold mirrors up to Nature. It is plain that Honolulu, where she has been working, has set her imagination on fire, and her later paintings are symbolic rather than representational. Vivid prismatic colour and a gargantuan sense of form are the dominant features of her later style. These paintings of native women, not so much massive as fantastically rotund, clad in voluminous draperies of almost painfully intense colour, give one a sense of tropical exuberance. Her exuberance is not confined to paint. In the drawings of this later phase she still seeks to express volume rather than outline. Her art could be described as an experiment in amplitude.

The wider press response was divided, with several reviewers praising Tennent's draftsmanship while balking at the color and scale of the large oils. Jan Gordon, writing in The Observer, described her as painting "Hawaiian scenes with immense gusto" and singled out her pencil drawings as evidence of a "deliberately selective" attitude toward paint. The critic for Apollo conceded that "she can draw" but judged that her "overwhelming love for passionate colour" was carried "too far", and a reviewer for Artist found in her drawings "draughtsmanship of a very high order indeed" while complaining that in the oils she seemed "to go artistically berserk". The most hostile notice came from Gillian Burke in the Dublin Saturday Herald, who pronounced the earlier, more naturalistic Hawaiian work "far superior" to the recent monumental canvases, whose massive figures she dismissed as "crude, gross monsters".

Legacy

Three days after Tennent's death, the Hawaiʻi State Senate adopted Senate Resolution No. 67, commemorating the artist's vision, accomplishments, and influence:

IN HONOR OF THE LATE MADGE TENNENT WHEREAS, Madge Tennent, one of Hawaii's most important artists, died on February 5, 1972 in the 82nd year of her long and eventful life; and WHEREAS, better than any other artist to date, Madge Tennent was able to capture and honestly express in her many paintings and drawings the subtle charm and quiet grace and dignity of the Hawaiian people; and WHEREAS, Madge Tennent was also a warm and generous person, who gave often and generously of her works to friends and to charity; and WHEREAS, Madge Tennent, having spent a half century in Hawaii, leaves behind a rich legacy of art, which shall forever belong to Hawaii; now, therefore, BE IT RESOLVED by the Senate of the Sixth Legislature of the State of Hawaii, Regular Session of 1972, that this body solemnly notes the passing of a great artist and person, Madge Tennent, and expresses its deepest sympathy and condolences to her family.

Fellow island artist Isami Doi wrote that Tennent died "still, twenty years ahead of all of us." "Even if the Hawaiians were to vanish as a race, they would live forever in the paintings of Madge Tennent," remarked the Native Hawaiian scholar and author John Dominis Holt. In an extended appreciation, Holt wrote: "No other artist in Hawaiʻi has so consistently and eloquently painted, sketched, and drawn the Hawaiian Woman as has Tennent. In the physical form of a larger Hawaiian woman, she established the basis upon which to build a lasting, universal aesthetic statement. She gave her life effort and her great talent to the elaboration of this vision."

In 2005, Tennent was named one of the 100 most influential contributors to the city of Honolulu. Her large-scale oils on canvas and board have reportedly sold for over $1 million at auction.

Posthumous exhibitions

Tennent's Hawaiian Pattern (1927) was featured in Encounters with Paradise, a seminal survey of Hawaiʻi art mounted at the Honolulu Museum of Art in 1992. In September 2016, the Isaacs Art Center mounted a sweeping retrospective spanning over 40 works from five decades of the artist's career. Titled Rhythm in the Round: The Modernism of Madge Tennent, it was the largest public exhibition of her work since 1976.

Collections

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 institutions holding works by Tennent. Two Sisters of Old Hawaiʻi, in the collection of the Hawaii State Art Museum, is a characteristic example of her monumental paintings of Hawaiian women. The single largest intact collection of her works resides at the Isaacs Art Center, which in 2005 became caretaker of the Tennent Art Foundation collection.