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There are
stories to be found everywhere in New York, and we thought that we
would stop to tell the fascinating tale of an artist who lived and
worked, for very many years (of his long and eventful life), in
his large apartment in the building where we write our
eCognoscente
riffs from, in Hamilton Heights, on the edge of Harlem, and where
his daughter Madeleine continues to live. Japanese-American
painter
Henry
Sugimoto
(1900 - 1990) awoke every morning to take a long walk down
Riverside Drive where views of the New Jersey cliffs and blue of
Hudson River waters inspired him.
Sugimoto’s
life is an American story of extraordinary resilience, strength of
spirit, and devotion to both art and country. The story
begins in Wakayama, Japan where Sugimoto was born in 1900 and
spent his childhood and adolescence under the tutelage of his
grandfather, a former Samurai warrior (Henry's parents having
moved to California when he was 9). The Samurai class had
been officially dismantled during the Meiji reforms in the late
19th century but something of the fiercely independent spirit
remained in Sugimoto grandpère who, perhaps sensing a
parallel between the creativity that lay behind both sword and
canvas, encouraged Henry in his early artistic endeavors.
Sugimoto
joined his parents in 1919 in Hanford, California – when he
arrived, at the age of 19, he barely spoke English, and had not
seen his parents in 10 years. He graduated from art school
in 1928, and his spirit of adventure then propelled him across
continent and ocean again, this time to Paris, the center of the
artistic world where he searched out and took up with a small
coterie of Japanese artists. He had long admired Cezanne and
van Gogh but was also influenced by the contemporary French
painters Maurice de Vlaminck and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.
Many of the
world’s artistic fine fleur also found haven in the City of
Lights but for a young Japanese-American artist to undertake such a
journey reveals a remarkable spirit of adventure and independence
of mind that took him beyond what might have been the constraints
of being a Japanese immigrant in the early 20th century.
Early on in his career Sugimoto painted dark, brooding romantic
landscapes and developed a distinctive palette – deep earth
colors, jeweled green of foliage and patches of blue, that he used
to paint both the French countryside and later (he returned from
Paris in 1931), the California landscape, until the 1940s.
When
Can We Go Home?, 1943,
Oil on canvas
More history,
this time of a slightly darker hue, when Sugimoto and his family
(he married in 1934) were interned in a camp along with other
Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the
cubist and Diego Rivera-inspired When Can We Go home? (1943)
Sugimoto’s daughter Madeleine (her name homage to all things
French and his time in France) looks up imploringly at her mother,
asking the same question that must have been on the minds of
everyone in the camp.
After the war
Sugimoto remained devoted to his adopted country -- he moved to
New York City where, with the knowledge that skyscraper, river,
and cliff were at hand, he assiduously worked at his craft
creating a large and refined body of work. Since his passing in
1990, Sugimoto’s reputation continues to grow. In the 1943
Self-Portrait in Camp (top) painted during his internment, this
American master and grandson of a Samurai who took a journey from
Japan to Harlem by way of California and Paris wears a blue beret
and stares out at the viewer, dignified and courageous, in art as
in real life.
Read:
Henry
Sugimoto, Painting an American Experience
See:
Online
Collection, Japanese American National Museum
Read:
Henry
Sugimoto, article in The New York Times
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Henry Yuzuru Sugimoto with his parents, Japan, 1900
Henry Sugimoto, Notre Dame Cathedral, 1931, Oil on canvas
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