Artist John Melville Kelly's life in Hawai'i, we are told, followed a familiar path: He came to stay a year but remained a lifetime.

In the process, the images he created became — like Paul Gauguin's images of Tahiti and its women — powerful archetypal visions of a Hawai'i that perhaps never existed except in these romantic prints or in the countless reproductions found on lamps and numberless other items to the present day.

And also like Gauguin, Kelly's life and work at least raise the issue of the impact of the western colonial enterprise on the indigenous people and cultures of the Pacific.

In Kelly's case, the fact that so much of his work was in the service of advertising raises an additional question as to the authenticity of his vision.

The Honolulu Academy of Arts show, the first major exhibition of his work since a memorial show after his death in 1962, surveys his career as a printmaker by featuring fine examples of his prints from the museum's collection, which has been enriched over the past 12 years by gifts from the Kelly family.

The wonderfully designed show displays prints that span Kelly's years as an active printmaker, demonstrating his stylistic development and the broadening of imagery in his early drypoints and etchings and his later color intaglio prints.

On view is some of Kelly's best-known work, ranging from the 1934 "Kamalii" to "Grass Skirt, Hawaii," beginning in 1953.

Also on display are some of his less-familiar works, such as his oddly constricted and less accomplished pieces based on eastern philosophy, art history and culture that he began to produce in the 1940s, apparently done as head rather than heart work.

Born on an Arizona ranch near Phoenix, where he lived for his first 20 years, Kelly had his formal art training almost entirely in San Francisco, where he attended Partington Art School.

In addition to his advertising work, he spent 14 years as a staff artist for the San Francisco Examiner, and in 1908 married sculptress Katherine Harland.

He arrived in Honolulu in 1923 to develop an advertising campaign for a real-estate development.

A background of more than 15 years with advertising agencies in New York City and San Francisco made Kelly the ideal choice to introduce what the developer dubbed "the first modern advertising campaign in Hawai'i."

The story goes that one day in 1924, as he watched his wife print a plate for a class she was taking at the University of Hawai'i with legendary printmaker Huc Luquiens, he decided to try his hand. With this experience, his career as a printmaker began.

This informal introduction to printmaking when he was a mature artist perhaps explains why he seldom relied on a cleanly wiped printing plate in which the linear design dominates. Kelly was able to use the print medium to explore his interests in the modeling of form and the rendition of richly evocative and understated color.

After a stint as a Honolulu newspaper art department head, he finally became a professional freelance artist.

A prolific printmaker from the 1920s through the '40s — the era one associates with the classic art-deco images of Hawai'i found on Matson and luxury hotel menus — Kelly produced portraits and scenes of daily activities in Hawai'i.

In this regard, he stood in the tradition exemplified from the topless fantasies of Gene Pressler in the 1920s through the menu covers by his contemporary, Frank MacIntosh, and later Eugene Savage.

Kelly constantly experimented, abandoning etching for the richer effects of drypoint.

In about 1934, he took up aquatint and experimented with the color printing for which he is best known. At first using flat, decorative areas of color that resemble Gauguin's work, he soon learned to exploit color to create toned backgrounds and modeled figures.

Kelly was enchanted with the people of Hawai'i, and especially women, Hawaiian and Asian, nude and semi nude. Hula dancers, housekeepers and fishermen were his favorite models, from keiki to kupuna, all in the service of creating a perhaps imaginary image of the beauty and grace of an Old Hawai'i, a romanticized notion of the quieter and gentler side of Hawai'i's neocolonial past.

An interpretive section of the exhibition features Kelly's printmaking tools, printing papers, tartan rags and other memorabilia, including a selection of prints and sculpture by his wife. Her photographs of Kelly's models and resulting drawings illuminate his working techniques, and a sampling of working proofs corrected with ink wash reveal his technical processes.

Included are impressions reflecting early states and, in one instance, a set of progress proofs documenting the development of an impression through the superimposed printing of multicolor inkings of a plate. The copper plate Kelly used for the creation of "Grass Skirt, Hawaii" reflects his accomplished intaglio line work.

This is a gorgeous show, make no mistake about it. These are works of solid craftsmanship and often breathtaking beauty, deeply resonant images executed by one of the "real ones," as Lawrence Durrell dubbed artists of undisputed authenticity.

Much more than nostalgic eye candy, Kelly's work stands out from that of the many others mining similar territory just as dramatically as Gauguin's works eclipse Edgar Leeteg's kitschy black-velvet paintings of Tahitian nudes.

But something remains disquieting, a nagging question that throws a shadow, seen from the vantage of the 21st century, a disturbing feeling that, as gorgeous as these images may be, lurking beneath the surface are the colonial, sexist and racist stereotypes that playwrights like David Henry Hwang have explored in plays like "M. Butterfly."

Do we see evidence in the works of, for example, Gauguin or Kelly of socio-economic exploitation and subjugation together with cultural misrepresentations of women of color? Are their works as fundamentally misguided as Puccini's "Madam Butterfly" or the modern musical "Miss Saigon"? Or is there something extraordinary here, something that lifts their work to the Olympian heights?

The vision of the Orient and the South Pacific continues to enchant, with their women of exotic beauty willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man whose love is completely without worth and the promise of knowing and being loved by quite simply the perfect woman.

As Hwang has observed, certainly the myths of the east, the west, of men, of women have so completely saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort.

And in Kelly's case, like Gauguin's, the radiance of his images, imbued with a specificity and palpable human warmth, demonstrates that heroic effort.

In the end, perhaps it's all about an artist's identification with the subject: the love object as discovery of the artist's self, the reality that all art is autobiographical and self-referential while simultaneously aspiring to reach out to the Other.

What distinguishes an artist of Kelly's caliber from the others may very well be, to quote James Joyce: " 'Love,' said Bloom, 'I mean the opposite of hatred.' "

David C. Farmer holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's in Asian and Pacific art history from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.