“hibiscus in your dark hair”: Mary Swanzy in American Samoa, 1924

Abstract

In 1924, after spending six months in Honolulu, the Dublin-born artist Mary Swanzy travelled to American Samoa. There for three months, the artist created a body of work “unique” in Irish art history. Rationalized as explorations in the decorative effect of light on colour, these artworks have been used to legitimize Swanzy’s canonical value as a modernist artist: American Samoa was and continues to be viewed through the lens of an implicit, universalizing gaze of “European vision.”

In this article, I focus on that which—from this “European vision”—has been overlooked or unseen: tensions between modes of imagining the “South Seas” as represented in Swanzy’s finished paintings and the modernizing, colonizing forces of Euro-American industrialization represented in her sketches. By deploying a “double vision”, Swanzy’s artworks are explored as visual and material examples of colonial and Samoan modernity. Framed by questions specific to Swanzy, I argue that her representations of American Samoa were informed by historically, socially, and nationally specific cultural and colonial processes, and her identities as white, Irish, and a working artist. In contrasting her sketches and finished, exhibited paintings, what emerges is the artist’s—previously invisible—labour to transform indigenous peoples and culture from American Samoa into forms of modern professional output, exhibited in Paris in 1925.

However, these works never sold, remaining in her London home until the 1970s. Rather than viewing these artworks as a failure or unique in the Irish context, I close by arguing that they are deeply complex sites of clashing cultures of modernity. Adding context – looking through a “double vision” – exposes the ambiguities of Samoan life in American Samoa. By highlighting the sketches and the contexts of Samoan modernity, Swanzy painted landscapes are revealed as sites of Euro-American colonial modernity and its resistance.