Our better nature
The legacy of American immigrant and artist Chiura Obata.
AMERICAN HISTORY
Across the divide
CONGRESS UNANIMOUSLY PASSED the Yosemite Grant in 1864 when the country was engaged in a fratricidal war. The vote came on the heels of the divisive congressional debate over the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery. When President Abraham Lincoln signed the grant establishing the nation’s first protected wilderness, many interpreted it as an early act of reconciliation. Even in the midst of our bloodiest war, we were able to agree that a place of such beauty, a land that makes our spirits soar, individually and as a people, should be preserved for current and future generations.
Six decades later, in 1927, a Japanese immigrant and artist, Chiura Obata, was invited to accompany a small group of artists on a summer journey to Yosemite. Despite the xenophobic climate in California when Obata arrived early in the century, over time he had received accolades for his work. But it was Obata’s Yosemite journey that summer that inspired his best-known paintings. He called it ““the greatest harvest of my whole life and future in painting.” From his Sierra camp, he wrote to his wife Haruko, “After the passing of a thunderstorm, the freshly brightened colors vanish as the evening falls. As the deep blues turn to purple, one can still hear the melody of a thousand streams.”
Over six weeks, Obata created an estimated one hundred and fifty sumi-e drawings and watercolors, almost single-handedly renewing the fine painting tradition in Yosemite. Returning for two years to Japan in 1929, Obata employed some of that nation’s finest woodcut artists to make block prints from the paintings. A perfectionist, he often used one hundred or more passes to achieve subtle color wash effects in a medium originally designed for flat color.
In 1932, Obata was appointed as an art instructor at UC Berkeley and mounted several exhibitions of his work. His reputation grew over the next decade. But after the outbreak of WWII, and over the protestations of UC President Robert Sproul, Obata was sent to a the Tanforan Assembly Center and then the Japanese-American internment camp in Topaz, located in the Utah desert. Remarkably, he established art schools in both places and continued to produce paintings in the camp. After the war, he returned to the university, where he taught for another eight years.
Obata’s work as an artist and teacher introduced sumi-e painting and other Japanese methods and aesthetic traditions to numerous American artists. Several major museums have collected his work. Summarizing his legacy, art historian Susan Landauer writes: “An individualist, Obata believed in giving free range to his poetic voice and in making the best of his resources, which, encompassing the traditions and innovations of both the East and the West, were vast indeed. Finally, Obata’s accomplishment reflects the courage with which he faced the project of being an Asian artist in a hostile society. It was in order to transcend that hostility that he kept his gaze trained so intently on the timeless beauty of the California landscape.”
Obata died in 1975 at the age of 89. He did not live to see President Ronald Reagan sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which included an apology and compensation for eighty-two thousand Americans of Japanese descent who were incacerated in camps during WWII. And four years ago, the California legislature designated a portion of Highway 120 running through Yosemite as the “Chiura Obata Great Nature Memorial Highway.”
Chiura Obata and his paintings are featured in a chapter of the book I edited and designed for an exhibition I co-curated, Yosemite: A Storied Landscape, at the California Historical Society in San Francisco in 2015. The book is available as a free download on Apple Books. It includes an interactive feature showing how Obata achieved nuanced color effects in his block prints.
HARD TO BELIEVE we’ve published fifty weeklies of Wild Things. As we warned our readers at the beginning, we’ve strayed over a variety of subjects, from personal stories to health and science to wildlife and photography. I once worked on a weekly newspaper and had not been on a weekly publication schedule in over forty years. What was I thinking?? In truth, Barbara and I (mostly) enjoy the challenge of coming up with new stories each week and have a fine time working them over with each other. With luck, we’ll be able to keep up the pace in 2025. Thanks for staying with us and especially for your comments. Hearing from you is one of the things that keeps us going. —Kerry
Nothing moves me more readily to tears of bitter regret and sadness than the stories of the gifted Japanese families interred in camps during WWII. There's something about those stories and the magnanimity with which the survivors of those camps continued to live and give their talents that undoes me. I was born in the midst of that war, but I had never heard about the internment camps until Ed Tsutakawa, owner of Litho-Art printshop in Spokane, Washington, told me the stories about the effects of the war on families like his and the founders of the Uwajimia market and the stunning Kubota Gardens in Seattle. Such grace under unimaginable trauma. I'll look for Chiura Obata's work, thank you.
Wonderful imagery. Hard to believe he could get his brushwork captured as woodblock prints. We enjoy every column you create. Thank you!