Galka Emmy Scheyer in Honolulu

In April 1918, Emmy Scheyer moved from Zurich to Ascona on Lake Maggiore. There she met the writer Hermann Hesse, who was writing a story called Klein und Wagner. The story‘s protagonist, the civil servant Friedrich Klein, sees the town with its cypresses and palm trees for the first time and is delighted: „That’s more or less about how I imagine Honolulu to be.“

On her trip to New York, Emmy Scheyer met a doctor. He invited her to come to Honolulu, where he would organize lectures for her at the academy. „Honolulu, how that sounds, and it makes me think of Klee…“, Emmy Scheyer wrote to the Blue Four.

Although stranded in New York, Emmy Scheyer was quite confident: „My feeling is that I will see all of America, including Honolulu, even if it is far away and, as Jawlensky writes, a small island found in a fairy tale in the great ocean… Paradise America…“

Having travelled on from New York to California, she recuperated by listening to „Hawaiian gramophone strings“ and thought: „Going to Honolulu is still as far as from New York to London, 6-7 days. But then comes paradise…“ She let her return ticket to Germany lapse because her hope of soon being able to travel on to Hawaii was rekindled. A „Honolulu art painter and plantation owner“ would arrange her trip, her stay and her lectures, she wrote. „That‘s for the future…“

In 1931, the future became the present. Galka Emmy Scheyer opened an exhibition of children’s drawings in Honolulu.

Photo: Coconut Palms, Honolulu
Picture postcard, 1931