Honolulu Art Deco exhibit shows off six never-displayed island pieces

Think of Art Deco and you may conjure up the pink flamingos of Florida’s South Beach, but the colorful, sometimes gaudy style also made its way to Hawaii as a new display in Honolulu shows.

Works featuring familiar scenes such as native women dancing in unison and men emerging from outrigger canoes are spotlighted in the Art Deco Hawaii exhibit at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Front and center in the exhibit: six murals that feature island culture and are being shown for the first time in Hawaii.

The works were commissioned in 1940 for the Matson shipping line, which ferried passengers between California and Hawaii. Eugene Savage created these vivid oil paintings.

But with the onset of World War II, the works were warehoused. They didn’t reappear until 1948, when the art graced menu covers aboard the luxury liners.

The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 11, also includes paintings and sculpture by artists such as Don Blanding, Marguerite Blasingame, Isamu Noguchi, Lawrence Pelton and Lloyd Sexton.

“Beginning in the 1920s and lasting through the Second World War, Art Deco…manifested itself in Honolulu and its environs as a schematized visual language based on the natural beauty and fabled past of the islands,” curator Theresa Papanikolas said in a statement. “It was driven by an iconography of place that was developed and perpetuated to serve specific cultural, political and commercial ends.”

The Honolulu Museum of Art also showcases works by Gauguin, Monet, Picasso, van Gogh and Warhol.

The museum at 900 S. Beretania St. in Honolulu is open Tuesdays through Sundays. Adult admission is $10. Those 17 and younger are admitted free.

Info: Honolulu Museum of Art, (808) 532-8700.

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