The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox

Night of the Tiki arrives as a small, smartly produced argument in the idiom of the coffee-table book: it stakes a curatorial claim with images, short essays, and selection rather than a long, linear history. What it proposes—clearly, and with a kind of tasteful provocation—is that postwar American “Tiki” is neither mere kitsch nor purely derivative souvenir culture; instead, it is a complex conversation between genuine Oceanic carving traditions, the mid-century designers and suppliers who domesticated Polynesian forms, and contemporary artists who rework the vocabulary for new audiences. The book functions both as the catalogue to an exhibition (Copro/Nason Gallery, 2001) and as a compact manifesto for the Polynesian revival. 

Visually the book is one of its strongest claims. It’s photographs reproduce a wide range of objects—authentic anthropomorphic carvings, Leroy Schmaltz’s mid-century tropic paraphernalia, and over thirty paintings by Josh “Shag” Agle—with a fidelity that privileges surface: grain of wood, lacquer sheen, the flat, ironic glow of Shag’s mid-century palettes. This emphasis on tactile detail invites a formal reading: tiki as texture, tiki as silhouette, tiki as engineered mise-en-scène. The book’s designers arrange images so that the viewer experiences continuity—an Oceanic proto-figure placed opposite Schmaltz’s commercialized variant, then Shag’s playful, stylized echo—encouraging the eye to see lineage as much as lineage’s deformation. 

Douglas Nason, with essays from Jeff Fox and Doug Harvey, keeps the prose economical and curatorially minded. The principal textual move is contextual: short historical notes and gallery-style labels rather than an extended academic apparatus. That is both strength and limit. On the one hand, the book succeeds as an accessible introduction that directs readers from the carved headland of Polynesia into the neon dusk of the American lounge. On the other, it rarely lingers enough on provenance, ritual function, or the voices of the Oceanic communities whose objects—the ostensible anchor of the project—are reproduced here as aesthetic exemplars rather than living cultural practices. The choice is defensible (this is, after all, a catalogue), but the result is a curatorial sympathy that sometimes flirts with the very exoticizing gaze it seems eager to historicize. 

Leroy Schmaltz—presented in the book as a central figure in 1950s tiki Americana—is usefully framed as both artisan-entrepreneur and cultural broker: the co-founder of Oceanic Arts whose carvings and supply business helped standardize the go-to vocabulary of American Polynesian décor. The book’s pairing of Schmaltz with Shag is especially fertile; where Schmaltz industrialized and distributed tiki motifs, Shag refashions their iconography into a pop-nostalgic, self-aware play. Together they dramatize how objects travel: from ritual object, to restaurant décor, to ironic collectible, to contemporary artwork. 

A responsible critical reader will want the book to do more in the way of cultural ethics. The volume gestures to authenticity and influence, but it rarely confronts the power disparities embedded in the West’s appropriation and repackaging of Oceanic forms. A contemporary reissue (or a companion essay) might use the book’s beautiful plates as the starting point for voices from the Pacific—craft practitioners, cultural custodians, and scholars of material repatriation—so that the dialogue shifts from aesthetic lineage to accountable stewardship. That absence does not ruin the book; it marks the limit of its scope and reminds us that even attractive object-based catalogues participate in larger debates they cannot wholly encompass.

Night of the Tiki is a lucid, visually rich statement about an aesthetic lineage that is as amusing as it is uneasy. For collectors, designers, and readers interested in the afterlives of Oceanic forms in American popular culture, it is indispensable: a beautifully produced artefact that stages the tensions between reverence and reinvention. For scholars of material culture it is a provocative starting point—one that invites further research into context, ownership, and the ethics of display. If you want an introduction that looks as good on the coffee table as it does in a syllabus, this volume fills that niche handsomely. 

Recommendation. Buy it if you want a carefully curated visual survey and a compact argument about how tiki moved from island ritual to American lounge and back into art. Keep it beside The Book of Tiki and a follow-up reading on Oceanic histories to get both the pleasures and the responsibilities of this colourful, complicated field.