Post #275939 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Jan 1, 2007 5:40 PM

As promised, now that I am home, AND got a new scanner, here is some additional material:

To me, the study of Polynesian pop and Oceanic Art is about going back to the ORIGINS of all art. So, naturally, I am obsessed with the sources that midcentury designers used to create their Poly-pop objects. There were not that many South Sea Art books out in the 50s and early 60s (And NO books with purely Polynesian art, probably one reason why so many MELANESIAN carvings were used in Tiki restaurant decor).
One, "Arts of the South Seas", I am mentioning and showing on page 246/247 of the BOT, another (German) photo book simply entitled "Oceanic Art", published in the States in 1954 by Pantheon Books New York was THE blue print for many pieces carved by Oceanic Arts in Whittier, to grace the walls of such Tiki temples as the Kahiki and the Mai Kai.

I first recognized the menu cover carving on the Aku Aku menu as a PNG Tami spirit mask, such as this:

..and finally a search in my library yielded the definitive source, a German edition of a Hungarian Oceanic Art book:

Now this book came out in Europe in 1960, so the Aku Aku either used that, or the English edition, from a year later (now quite expensive!):
http://www.alibris.com/search/detail.cfm?chunk=25&mtype=&qtopic=Oceanic%20Art&qauth
=Tibor%20Bodrogi&qyear=1960&S=R&bid=8128870685&pbest=&pqtynew=&page=1&matches=1&qsort=r

Not only did they use the photos of the ceremonial ax and the shield on the menu's cover...

...but they also liberally helped themselves to all the line drawings and put them on the in- and outside of the menu,
here just a few of the many examples:

I hope you had as much fun matching images as I did, Happy New Year to all TCers!

PS: I just split up the URL for the Alibris book link, because I hate when the page gets all out of whack because of a lengthy URL, and I don't know how to scrunch them. Just copy and paste it together, if desired.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2007-01-02 11:50 ]