Have you ever done something that takes on a life of its own? That’s what happened to Charles M. Cooke and his wife, Anna Rice Cooke.
Both were children of missionaries. In 1882 they built a home on Beretania Street and Ward Avenue, across from Thomas Square.
The Cookes loved art and bought many pieces from one of Honolulu’s leading art importers, Yeun Kwock Fong Inn. Their art collection grew to such an extent that there wasn’t room for both the art and the family in the home. One had to go.
The Cookes moved to Makiki and built Hawaii’s first visual arts museum where their home had been. They endowed it with 4,500 works of art and $25,000 in 1927.
The museum’s permanent collection today holds more than 50,000 pieces that span 5,000 years, with significant holdings in Asian art, American and European painting and decorative arts, Asian textiles and traditional works from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
Last month I sat down with Sam Cooke, the great-grandson of Charles and Anna, to learn the stories behind some of the pieces in their collection. Sam had been chairman of its board for 16 years.
"My great-grandmother Anna Rice Cooke gave the museum its money," Cooke says, "so when she wanted something, she usually got it."
"One of the most famous paintings in the Honolulu Museum of Art is Paul Gauguin’s ‘Two Nudes on a Tahitian Beach.’ It was painted around 1892."
In 1927 "my great-grandmother said there’s a guy down in Tahiti named Paul Gauguin. I think you should buy his painting."
"They said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Cooke. We’d be happy to,’ and for $5,000 they bought the Gauguin. The painting today is valued at $60-70 million. It shows you the foresight she had."
"When we bought it we found Gauguin had painted over an earlier painting. Evidently in that period of time, if a painter created something they didn’t like, they painted over it."
"That’s what happened to this one," Cooke says. "If you look closely, you can see a dog’s leg and prow of a canoe from the painting underneath."
Art collectors call these pentimento paintings. With infrared technology we now know that many works by Picasso, Wyeth, Goya and others have secondary paintings under the surface.
The next story concerns James Michener, who wrote the best-selling book "Hawaii."
"In 1960 he had one of the greatest collections of Japanese woodblock prints in the world — 5,000 pieces in all. Michener had promised to donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City," Cooke says.
The most famous is "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," by the artist Katsushika Hokusai. It was printed around 1833.
"The Great Wave" is an example of ukiyo-e art (literally "floating world,") and was the first of Hokusai’s "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series.
Until I wrote this article, I never even noticed Mount Fuji was in the background. Some of my younger readers may be aware that Quiksilver’s logo is a stylized version of "The Great Wave."
"Michener went to New York to arrange for this gift. He stayed in Long Island and, driving into the city, got lost," Cooke continues. "He asked a New York policeman for directions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art."
The cop was curt. "If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you." Michener was livid. "The old man got madder than hell," Cooke recalls.
"He came back to Hawaii and was living in Kahala. He got in his car and drove to the Academy of Arts and got lost. He saw a Honolulu policeman on a motorcycle and asked for directions.
"The policeman said, ‘Not only can I tell you, I’ll give you a motorcycle escort,’ and because of that, Michener decided to donate his collection of ukiyo-e art to the museum here instead of New York. It really put us on the map. It’s really an extraordinary collection."
The last story is about a valuable piece of art that was hiding in plain sight.
"Years ago Scott Pratt was the chairman of the board of the academy," Cooke says. "Scott, I and Jim Foster, the director of the academy, met at the Bank of Hawaii headquarters downtown to discuss salaries."
"When it was time to discuss Jim’s salary, we asked him to leave the room. Jim goes out and is looking at a painting on the wall. When we were through discussing his salary, he came back in and said, ‘Do you know what’s hanging on the wall outside?’"
It was a work by Thomas Moran called "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone."
"We said, ‘Who’s that?’ He told us he was one of the most prolific early American painters in the West.
Moran’s paintings captured Yellowstone’s beauty and inspired Congress to make it the first national park in 1872.
"This picture was hanging in the offices of the Bank of Hawaii, and nobody knew what it was. So we had it cleaned up, and it’s now in the museum." A dealer values it at several million dollars.
The museum decided to revert to the name under which the institution was chartered in 1922: the Honolulu Museum of Art. "Locals knew us as the Honolulu Academy of Arts, but tourists thought we were a school and stayed away. Museum is more accurate," Cooke says.
J. Carter Brown, director of the U.S. National Gallery of Art from 1969-1992, said the Honolulu Museum of Art is the finest small museum in the United States.
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Bob Sigall is Hawaii’s business historian. Each Friday he tells stories about amazing Hawaii people, places and companies. His "The Companies We Keep 3" book is now available digitally in the Kindle store. Contact him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
