Pareo, A Print Odyssey: Part II
This is taken from the essay “Pareo Print Narrative” — part of the RISD Museum’s collection along with samples of this print. Please read Part I first.
A Slight Detour
During my research I stumbled across a clipping crammed in an old shoe box. It’s from a 1974 Esquire Magazine article “The Problem of Chu Chu Malave.” The woman on the left is my mother. In this odd masquerade a Jewish woman from NYC, presents here as Latina, is dressed in some type of exotic “Tahitian” romper with a tiare flower behind her ear. My mother posed for this because the art director, Jean-Paul Goude, was a family friend. He also happened to be French. Tahitian “otherness” reverberates in the 20th century French imagination. It was uncanny to find my own mother implicated in all this (et tu, mama?). But I do recall my mother didn't like this photograph. She did it as a favor.
A Single Image Changes Everything
So I was about to give up on this print until I found a postcard by Max Bopp DuPont circa 1907.
Bopp DuPont was a French national, son of a painter, and came to Tahiti in around 1905. In the 1920s he was a silent era cinematographer in Hollywood and invented a color film process. He spent the rest of his life, as far as I can tell, mostly in Tahiti
In my opinion, his photographs have a very different feeling than other European photographers in Tahiti at the time. Most of them were creating exotic pin ups for the European market. But this image does not feel that way. This woman is not wearing a “wrapper” and does not have an “unwrappable” air about her (see part I for colonial history of these images). This is a portrait of someone specific.
Even the caption is odd - "MANUREVA" ou l'oiseau qui part, or the bird that leaves”- Manu is Tahitian for bird and reva is the act of leaving or travel. It was applied to sea birds like the albatross. Now it's Tahitian for airplane. Are we to infer that she is going to leave the islands? What does this mean? And, like my mother, did she also pose for this photograph as a favor?
I was taken both with the photograph and the print in it. I began to try and find another example of this particular pareo print to see the full repeat. Covid was raging. I was staying isolate looking at postcards from the turn of the previous century. It took me six months to find it again.
In a Bopp DuPont postcard from 1908 the full repeat is visible on the woman third from left. During my research process I realized photographers had a grouping of “prop” pareos they liked and would use them in many of their photographs to represent “authentic” Tahitian dress.
Between these prop pareos and the photo of my mother, I began to think I might be dreaming.
A Quick Note on Bopp DuPont
Bopp DuPont, unlike Gathier, chose not to photograph his female subjects topless or in a state of undress. His work appears to be more documentary than erotica as seen in “Four Tahitien.”
Bopp DuPont’s relationship with Tahiti and his representation of place made this particular print appealing to work with.
Max Bopp DuPont “Four Tahitien” (1949) Through research I can identify three people in this photo: Alfred and Betty Taputuarai and FNU Tavana. Information gleaned from Tahiti Autrefois Facebook group. I mention this to try and place these real people in a real photograph and not have them stand in for some kind of exotic archetype. I am sad that I can’t do that for all the images I use in this essay.
The Development of our Pareo Print
Once I found a full version of the repeat in the Bopp DuPont postcards I sketched it out and brought it into Adobe Illustrator. I wanted to develop an all over repeat but keep the simplicity of those early banded repeats. However, no matter how many times I worked with the shape it just didn't feel right.
I decided to take another look at the origin of these prints. Honolulu based artist John Friend mentioned that often goods were picked up en route to trade and didn't necessarily come from the ship’s point of origin but instead from a stop along the way. For instance a ship might start in France but make a stop in China to pick up some things.
In a new spate of online research I found Lan Yinhua Bu (蓝印花布), an indigo dyed adire fabric from China. It uses a soy bean paste starch and paper stencil resist technique. One source said giant piles of paper stencils were cut to make the repeats. I imagined stacks of identical shapes that were glued to the fabric to create the resist. Later I would realize I was totally wrong. They use thick paper stencils that have shapes punched through (shapes are dyed, ground is resist) and not individual shapes laid on the fabric (shapes are resist, ground is dyed).
Example of Lan Yinhua Bu fabrics being made. Photo Trueblue.
When I took another look at my flower shape I realized it was perfectly sized for scissors. I also saw the flowerbud stems change length, as if someone cut the ends off individually to fit into the rotation of the flower. So I took out a pair of scissors and reworked the shape as cut paper.
It resolved the print.
This approach, through remaking an object, is the way people crafted before literacy.
It's brilliantly described in Zilboorg’s Knitting for Anarchists:
“[Knitting] did not spread across great distances by knitters traveling to far places, but by their artifacts traveling along trade routes. I envision a tenth century trader bringing a knitted stocking from Byzantium home to the North country (Finland or the Baltic states) where women, always makers of clothes, would pick it apart and figure out how to do it…The Middle Eastern sock would have been made from the toe to top. The Northern sock is made in the other direction , just as it would have been taken apart from the top down.”
In this case the scissors were the key. And from that I have my theory as to how it was made. Although it would be logical the pareo print in the Bopp DuPont photo is French, my feeling is this is some type of resist fabric. My cut out technique made the print “feel” right.
So whether it was a shape adhered to a European silkscreen, or a Chinese or Indonesian batik, I’m sure the shape was made using a type of cut out rather than painted onto the screen or the fabric surface.
Once the shape came together I easily completed the all over repeat.
The dots in the repeat are meant to look like a lei.
The print is flexible and stands up to multiple colorways but is not successful in a small scale. We instinctively know what scale a scissor can cut in. When the graphic breaks this rule the print falls apart.
This is my most heavily researched print to date with a two year development during the first two years of covid. The pandemic allowed me the time to develop a more serious and thoughtful print development process. It is important to understand and respect its history.
Dale Hope, who is expert in these and had a hand in developing Duke's Pareu, told me it was “a very fine, excellent pareu” which I took as success.
Sources
Boym, Svetlana “Nostalgia” Atlas of Transformation, Odehnal, Martin, tranzit, 2011.
Cheung, Alexis “The Pareu, Uncovered.” 2018. Halekulani Living. July 5, 2018.
Gordon Cumming, C. F. (Constance Frederica). A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-war. William Blackwood and Sons, 1882. Accessed through the Internet Archive.
Gurley, Madison. 2015. The Myth of Tahiti: Breaking Colonial Confines and Finding the Subaltern Voice through a Revival of Traditional Art Forms. University of Colorado, Boulder.
Hamm, Catharine “Alfred Shaheen’s Influence beyond the Hawaiian Shirt.” Los Angeles Times. October 21, 2012.
Hope, Dale. The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. Patagonia Works, 2016.
Jones, Laura “The Pareu.” Artistic Heritage in a Changing Pacific. John, Philip, and Roger G Rose. Honolulu (Ill.): University Of Hawaii Press, Cop. 1993.
O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting:Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993
Traxler, Rika. Clothing the Un-clothed: The Evolution of Dance Costumes in Tahiti and Rarotonga. California State University, Northridge. December 2011.
Zilboorg, Anna. Knitting for Anarchists. Unicorn Books. January 2002
Photo Sources
“Max Du Pont, A. S. C. Off to Tahiti For Long Rest” American Cinematographer 4 no. 11 ( February 1924 ): 22. “Vitacolor is Born” American Cinematographer 9 no.6 (September 1928): 17. ”Roster” American Cinematographer 32 no. 1 (January 1951): 24 Bopp du Pont photo archive, Bibliothèque universitaire de l'Université de la Polynésie française
Houles, Pierre “The Problem of Chu Chu Malave.” Esquire Magazine (February 1974): 75.
Young girl from Rimatara Island. Drawing by E. Ronjat, based on a photograph 1885. Les Belles Tahitiennes - Pure Caste.1906 Tahitian family, illustration from 'Tahiti', published in London, 1882 Portrait de trois Marquisiennes Photo: Arthur Ekström 1886 Mediatheque Historique de Polynesie
Tahiti Autrefois Facebook Group