She is called Tina, and though you might not know her name, chances are you’ll recognise her face. Sultry, elfin, Brigitte Bardot crossed with a woodland nymph, she gazes out from countless posters hanging in New Zealand homes.
Her sisters-in-art – glamorous, dark-haired women emerging from forest pools, lounging in trees or just staring coolly from the canvas – can be found in op shops and fashion stores alike. They have long been a staple of Kiwi interiors. In the 1960s and 70s, according to a recent post on a Facebook history account, “Almost everyone had a kitschy print of Tina hanging in their living room, kitchen or hallway.”
The post’s 600-plus replies are a parade of memories. “Woodlands coffee shop in Tokoroa had one on their wall back in early 80s,” one person recalled. Another reminisced about buying their parents one of the prints “with my very first pay packet at Singer Sewing Machines in Masterton”.
Unusually popular Downunder, Tina and friends are nonetheless a global phenomenon. Their faces have appeared on Stella McCartney dresses, the album cover for Edwyn Collins’ 90s hit A Girl Like You, and on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Worldwide, their prints have sold in the hundreds of thousands, potentially millions. Yet almost nothing is known publicly about the artist responsible, a man who signed his paintings with just seven undemonstrative letters: JH Lynch.
Curious about kitsch
The first of the Lynch detectives was the Dutch graphic designer Piet Schreuders, who, from 1991 onwards, published multiple articles on the enigmatic painter in his magazine Furore. Then came the German artist Mario Klingemann. Although his award-winning, AI-inspired art is ultra-modern, he has “always been interested in kitsch”, he tells me over the phone from Munich. “Once I saw one of [Lynch’s paintings], I became curious.” The appeal was hard to describe, he admits. “I can’t really put my finger on it. I don’t know many other images like this, and I guess that makes them special for me.
“I like them because they don’t look like women look today. They have that typical 60s look to them.”
Klingemann was also intrigued by Lynch’s immense popularity – and paradoxical obscurity. On the website he previously maintained, “JH Lynch – Mysterious Artist”, he described the painter as someone who “for many years left nothing but his paintings and his signature. I am not talking about someone who lived 400 years ago or some local hobby artisan. No, I am talking about a persona whose works were sold worldwide. And even though this happened only some 30 years ago, there are almost no traces left.”
In 2002, Klingemann began to hunt out clues to Lynch’s identity, buying prints online, interrogating art collectors and soliciting tips via his website. Much of this work involved refuting myths. The most intriguing from a Kiwi perspective was the persistent rumour that Lynch had been – of all things – a New Zealand nun. The confusion was semi-understandable: Sister Julia Lynch (1896-1975) had been a talented portrait artist whose style, under a dim light, vaguely resembled that of Tina’s creator. But she was not he.
After various false starts, and with the help of Schreuders and others, Klingemann tracked down enough details to establish a bare-bones portrait of the man himself.
John Henry Lynch, it transpired, had been born in 1911, near London’s St Pancras station, and died in 1989. Of his youth, Klingemann could glean nothing solid. The earliest detail, as supplied by Lynch’s relatives, was that the future artist had spent World War II at Hatfield, a British airforce base, reputedly working in radar.
After the war, he moved to the Gloucestershire town of Stroud, where he and his wife Sylvia shared a home with his brother and sister-in-law. At some point he and Sylvia had their only child, a daughter named Susan. This unusual arrangement – two couples co-habiting – seems to have been made easier by the house’s size. David Poultney, Lynch’s great-nephew, describes it as a big place with eight or nine bedrooms and an almost 1ha garden, “a really impressive manor-type house up on the hill”.
Part of the home became Lynch’s studio. Poultney, speaking from the UK, recalls visiting it as a child “and seeing these pictures of semi-naked women, just covered up with fig leaves or whatever”.
That wasn’t the limit of the oeuvre, though. Poultney says Lynch “made a comfortable living as a commercial artist”, painting commissions, pictures of “London flowers”, and other works. “I actually remember a massive Bible scene he had done of Jesus with, like, all the Apostles behind him.”
Beyond the family’s belief that Lynch “toured around Europe but did not go further afield”, and Poultney’s childhood impressions – “he was a really nice chap, as far as I can remember” – little has emerged about the man known to friends and family as Joe. (Efforts to contact his daughter Susan proved unsuccessful.)
In family photos, he assumes a relatively staid character: a bespectacled, white-haired man, sporting sideburns and clad in either a painting smock or a comfortable jumper. When one of Lynch’s former neighbours contacted Klingemann some years ago, all he had to say was that “Joe” had been “such a nice guy” and was, unsurprisingly, often seen painting. “He seems to have lived a very normal life,” Klingemann says.
It is unclear what inspired such a seemingly ordinary man to paint such sensual portraits. Lynch’s subject matter didn’t even elicit much family comment. “Nobody really gave a second thought about it, to be honest,” Poultney says. Out in the wider world, though, the pictures were a smash hit. A newspaper story on a 1960s Blackpool art fair reported that “one of yesterday’s sensations” was “the fantastic demand for a painting of a mystery raven-haired girl”. Some 6000 copies of Tina were sold, the paper reported, within just 24 hours.
Lynch’s relatives now believe the paintings have been reprinted millions of times. Although unverifiable, such figures seem plausible, given the pictures’ ubiquity.
In his book on kitsch art, Just Above the Mantelpiece, designer Wayne Hemingway identifies Lynch as one of the foremost producers of “mass-market masterpieces”, his work sitting alongside 70s staples such as Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Green Lady and Margaret Keane’s paintings of big-eyed children. In homage to Lynch, the cover of Just Above the Mantelpiece features yet another of his heroines, Lisa Rose. Lynch prints have also been spotted in the background of Billy T James clips and, until recently, covering the walls of Wellington bar Meow.
There is no evidence, though, that Lynch himself benefited financially from this boom. This seems surprising: although unlicensed reprints are a fact of life, successful artists are usually able to enforce their copyright, at least in part. But Lynch, for whatever reason, did not. “I don’t think he ever made too much money from it,” says Poultney. That lack of success may, in turn, have inspired the desperate action Lynch took in his final years.
Mass-market art
Just what is the paintings’ appeal? “I always liked the idea of this mass-market art,” Klingemann says. “I find it beautiful … but at the same time, it’s more a lowbrow art, and it’s more despised.” Kitsch “is art that is popular, let’s say, easy to grab”, he adds. “It’s very agreeable art, because it’s pretty, it has beautiful colours, it’s raw, it’s sexy.” And by the 1960s, mass printing had made such images available to a whole new cohort of consumers. “It was just kind of popular to have those sorts of artworks.”
Art critic Mark Stocker, a former curator at Te Papa and University of Otago academic, says Lynch “knew his stuff” but “shares the fate of many other talented commercial artists who are snobbishly disdained by art historians”.
Some of those painters “were quite brilliant, doing things every bit as interesting as pop artists”. And they played a full part in their era’s aesthetic.
“People who liked Lynch would be inclined to like tiger-skin rugs, have bars in their houses – still a rather outré/louche rarity in the 1960s – and drive Jaguars,” Stocker says. “We’re not far away from Austin Powers here.”
On that note, the paintings are unsurprisingly popular among men. Poultney says his great-uncle “depicted the 60s and 70s style – that sort of sex goddess type – quite well, shall we say”.
Art writer Jack Moss sees Tina as a “voluptuous, kohl-eyed subject, painted in the saturated, sensual style of a B-movie poster”.
The paintings’ appeal may also stem from their sexual tension. Conventionally attractive subjects, produced for and by the male gaze, Tina and company nonetheless stare right back at the viewer, their power buttressed by their other-worldly – and thus perhaps unobtainable – nature.
And it’s not just men who are fans. Describing the catwalk collection that repurposed Lynch’s paintings, Stella McCartney told fashion reporters, “We embrace realness here, and definitely sexy. We are not scared of being sexy.” Lynch’s enduring kitsch value – a sense of bad taste made good – had the charm of “something a little bit wrong”, she added.
Closer to home, two of Lynch’s prints, blown up to greater than life-size, adorn the walls of fashion label Annah Stretton’s Wellington boutique. And Facebook discussions of Lynch’s art are littered with comments from women like Glenda Fox: “Although considered quite naughty and risqué by my parents … they [the paintings] intrigued me so. Have to say that now I quite love them.”
Large-scale erasure
Who owns Lynch’s oeuvre? Like most of his life, the answer is mired in obscurity. It certainly doesn’t help that, in his final years, the artist took a bizarre and dramatic step: to everyone’s horror, as Poultney recalls, he burnt most of his work.
The little that remained he gave – or claimed to have given – largely to a charity. However, the organisation in question – British grief support and end-of-life care charity Sue Ryder – has no record of the gift.
The motivation for these acts is, once again, a mystery, although Klingemann thinks hurt feelings were the main factor.
“Probably he was frustrated that during his lifetime he never received the recognition he would have deserved. I think he never got rich with this, or earned a lot of money, even though there were so many printed. It sounds like a rip-off business. I guess that’s why he burnt them.”
Following this large-scale erasure, only a handful of originals remain, scattered among family members.
The fate of the images’ copyright is – as far as anyone knows – equally obscure. Poultney says he has no idea who owns it, although his father believed it was assigned to a firm once known as Robinsons of Bristol, now part of the stationery conglomerate DRG.
The widespread and continued reproduction of Lynch’s work suggests, in any case, that few people are worried about copyright. Fans simply enjoy his work.
In Klingemann’s house, the pictures are always on the walls, he says. At the time of our interview, he had one in the bathroom and one downstairs.
Poultney, a photographer, sometimes comes across his relative’s paintings when snapping people in their homes: “If there’s a JH Lynch copy hanging on the wall, it does make me chuckle.” In a small-world moment, he also has a Kiwi friend who collects the prints.
But even to Poultney, the images’ popularity remains, like the man himself, a mystery. “I really don’t know,” he says, when asked about their enduring appeal.
“It’s strange. I think it’s fashion as well, isn’t it? They have become more fashionable, in a retro way. If you have a 70s house, it does look cool. I do quite like them.”