Va-Va-Velvet

Black velvet is funky Elvis and Jesus portraits leaning against cracked walls outside a mercado de artesanos in Tijuana. Or Brigitte Bardot--nude against a plush void--hanging in the living room of a southwest Texas trailer.

Black velvet is border-town chic. Historians ignore it. Writers mock it. Collectors won’t collect it.

Respected museums won’t dignify it with a comment, and even bad ones turn it back at the door.

The most comprehensive book on velvet painting calls it the “art we love to hate.” A better description might be: the art that just won’t die.

For just as velvet seemed secure on the fringe of popular culture, it again threatens to invade the mainstream--as top-notch kitsch or as a critic-tweaking medium for daredevil artists.

“Velvet is verboten, and that is one of the reasons I wanted to use it,” said Peter Alexander, a respected Los Angeles artist who recently began transferring erotic images from movies onto white velvet. “When I started using velvet [in 1973], what I was saying is, ‘I [am] good enough to beat the bad taste.’ ”

His most seen black velvet work--an “underseascape”--covers a wall at Rebecca’s Restaurant in Venice.

When a well-known artist such as Alexander uses the fabric, it brings to mind a word unfamiliar to the velvet lexicon: respect.

“Black velvet has a sound that is fairly loud, and it will always have that. It’s this incredibly deep space--a vacuum,” he said.

Viva velvet? Maybe.

Restless Stirrings

Some recent dispatches from the velvet revolution:

* El Paso: Although velvet paintings have all but disappeared from the American streetscape, a Texan known as “the King of Velvet” reaps profits from cheap velvets painted in Juarez, Mexico, where, along with Tijuana, most of North America’s inexpensive black velvet art is churned out.

* New Orleans: The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals debates the cultural significance of a velvet Elvis versus the late rocker’s trademark image.

* Huntington Beach: Two velvet aficionados plot a plush coup--a gallery show devoted to black velvet’s only “master,” the late Edgar Leeteg, father of contemporary velvet art.

* Laguna Beach: Hungry sea lions get $2,000 in herring thanks to a tongue-in-cheek “Oil on Velvet” auction. A velvet Elvis sells for $300.

* Seattle: Concert promoter David Price seeks backers for his Museum of Velvet Painting.

“Kitsch is the movement of the turn of the millennium,” he declared. “It seems to be actually legitimate now instead of being scoffed at or ridiculed.”

Ridicule aside, there are good reasons not to paint on velvet.

The pile soaks up colors so effectively that one mistake can ruin a whole picture. Most paints tend to glue the pile together--giving it a thick, garish look that makes velvet art best seen in darkened rooms or, even better, with a black light.

“Black velvet has problems,” said Don Severson, a Hawaiian antiques dealer who has some post-World War II velvets by Leeteg and Marine battle painter Burke Tyree for sale at his Honolulu shop. “It tends to fade in sunlight. Bugs attack it. It’s a temporary medium.”

That may be why it wasn’t widely used historically. Renaissance painters are said to have dabbled with velvet, but the beginnings of velvet painting are reduced to hearsay. The story goes that it was always cheap, shortcut art--a fast way to make cheap tapestries (no weaving) and battle banners.

In Victorian-era England and America, girls were taught “theorem painting,” stenciling still-life fruits and vegetables on black velvet. It was hard work, and the end results were rarely pretty, but the old paintings are gaining popularity in antiques circles and are the only velvet works readily accepted in folk art museums.

“It’s not fine art,” said Anne Fabbri, director of the Paley Design Center at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. “It is really just a decorative art.”

The ‘Vargas of Polynesian Women’

Black velvet’s most successful incursion into the mainstream began in the early 1930s when American expatriate Leeteg first put brush to velvet in Tahiti. Over the next 20 years, Leeteg’s paintings, mostly Polynesian nudes, soared in value from $4 (or a bottle of whiskey) to roughly $7,000 each at the time of his death in 1953, according to author James Michener’s book “Rascals in Paradise.” Dealer Severson now asks $3,000 to $5,000 for a good Leeteg velvet.

Leeteg’s work became popular in the 1950s among tourists and bar owners seeking a South Seas decor, but it never gained wide acceptance in the art world.

“In a delectable sort of way, he was ‘the Vargas of Polynesian women,’ ” University of Honolulu art professor John Wisnosky said, referring to the artist whose nude drawings regularly appeared in Playboy.

“There is a richness in his depiction of Polynesian beauty,” Wisnosky said. “But there was a backlash toward Leeteg. It seems that the intelligentsia at the time . . . held a certain moral reserve for Leeteg and his voluptuous Polynesian women. His work was never shown at the university, never [seriously] collected.”

Yet since many believe Leeteg’s work is responsible for a subsequent explosion of bad velvet paintings, his fans hope its return to the public eye will earn the medium a little respect. Juxtapoz art magazine curator Greg Escolante and John Turner, a curator at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, are assembling a Leeteg show from private collections. The monthlong exhibition, titled “A Rascal in Paradise, the Velvet Paintings of Edgar Leeteg,” is tentatively set to open Feb. 27 at the Huntington Beach Art Center.

“There are all these guys who think black velvet is cool and kitschy, but they don’t know there’s this guy who is the father of this whole style,” Escolante said.

David Price loves Leeteg, but he also has an infatuation with the first black velvet he ever bought--a nude Brigitte Bardot bathed in red light.

“Art took on a whole new meaning to me at that time,” he explained.

Price represents a bridge between those who favor more serious velvet art and those who love kitsch. His goal is to open a black velvet museum in Seattle, where the good, the bad and the ugly of black velvet painting will exist in harmony.

“The first things that come to mind are Elvis, dogs playing poker, curios from Tijuana,” Price said. “That basically halts any kind of investigation into its origins. I think that’s kind of good because, in a way, it is one of the few art forms left to discover.”

Border Impresario

On the U.S.-Mexican border in El Paso, businessman Doyle Harden discovered velvets three decades ago, and--though he’s known around town as “the King of Velvet”--he’s content with the current state of ridicule that surrounds his product.

“I’ve sold many, many millions of dollars’ worth of it,” the plain-spoken Texan said. “We ship velvet paintings all over the world. Been doing it 34 years. People think it’s no good--[that] it doesn’t sell. We like it that way.”

Harden crossed the border in the 1960s seeking curios to sell in Georgia. Seeing no wholesale market for black velvet, he created one. Today, he buys truckloads of the fabric and ships it to neighboring Juarez, where painters churn out popular images.

“It’s cheap, it’s original, it’s oil,” Harden said. “It’s simple art. It’s not for everybody, but then again, no product is for everybody.”

One thing Harden said he won’t sell is a velvet Elvis. North of the border, where attorneys from Elvis Presley Enterprises roam, it is a risky business.

No one makes money off the King without his estate’s permission. Velvet Elvises--in any form--are forbidden.

“There are currently no velvet paintings of Elvis under license,” said Todd Morgan, director of creative resources at Elvis Presley Enterprises in Memphis. “Most everything you see of Elvis that’s associated with velvet is pretty schlocky. I’m sure if something of high quality [were] put on velvet, our licensing department would approve it.”

Therein lies the rub with the Velvet Elvis bar in Houston.

“The theme of the bar is tacky Americana,” said manager Suzie Nelson. “We have a lot of different velvet paintings. The bar is named after the velvet Elvis. It just sounded better than Velvet Dogs Playing Poker.”

Graceland’s legal team decided that the Velvet Elvis was infringing on their plans to build Elvis-themed restaurants. Clearly, they argued in court, the Velvet Elvis was cashing in on the King. Lawyers on both sides battled for two years all the way to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

On May 7, after weighing the pop culture significance of a velvet Elvis against the legend of the real King, the federal judges reversed a lower court decision in favor of the bar. They ruled that the bar’s name could cause confusion with enterprises approved by the Presley estate and infringed on Graceland’s trademark. The bar was forced to black out “Elvis” on its sign.

“Maybe we’ll call ourselves ‘the Velvet Dead Fat Junkie,’ ” Nelson said with a laugh. “We’re not bitter.”

Bidding for Legitimacy

The culmination of the velvet Elvis brawl went unnoticed at Laguna Beach’s Ocean Brewing Co., which featured a similar painting of the King--the best of many still for sale in Tijuana at a recent auction to benefit the Friends of the Sea Lions in Laguna Beach.

Some highlights from the auction block included the obligatory bullfighter, a trio of bullet-notched Mexican bandits, a flinty-eyed Clint Eastwood in his “High Plains Drifter” prime and a stone-faced chimp gambler holding four aces and a stogie.

The velvets were hung in the bar according to owner Jonathan Thomas’ taste. Elvis got center stage over the bar’s fireplace. A portrait of a crusty old cowboy hung by the toilets.

“Come on, folks, give with your hearts, not your wallets--or in this case, give with your sense of humor,” auctioneer Richard Fields shouted, tapping a time-honored vein of velvet humor. “I’m sure there’s room in your garage.”

The night was a success. The sea lions got $2,000 from the auction, including $300 from the velvet Elvis alone.

Despite velvet aficionados’ hopes for mainstream acceptance, the velvet invasion into tony Laguna Beach was an anomaly--a friendly fund-raising joke. The velvets aren’t the worst goods Fields had ever auctioned off, but they were close enough to make him thankful for cute sea lions to boost the bids.

“One person’s trash is another’s treasure,” he shrugged. “Hey, look at Beanie Babies.”

For now, velvet remains a medium of the bad and the bold.

Noted New York artist Julian Schnabel once glued plates to a black velvet painting--thumbing his nose at the fine art world. In Los Angeles, Alexander turned to velvet for the same reason back in 1973. He came back to it recently for the “incredible luminosity” velvet gave his paint.

“If it works,” Alexander said, “who cares what it’s on?”

Although less known than Schnabel and Alexander, San Francisco artist Eleanor Dickinson is among the most consistent defenders of velvet art.

She discovered the fabric in 1974 while painting the revival culture in the Deep South. The poisonous-snake handlers and rapt faithful whose faces she captured in religious ecstasy naturally assumed she painted on velvet, she said. It was the only art they knew.

“What I am doing is extreme emotions, and velvet is perfect,” she said. “The blackness of it is very claustrophobic. It gives a very condensed, inbred feeling.”

Her revival series, and a later series of pastel crucifixions, is a contemporary velvet success story.

“Just because horrible things are done with it doesn’t mean it’s not a good base,” she said. “You just have to overlook its muddy feet and see the lotus.”