Chiura Obata (1885-1975) American/Japanese, Color Woodcut

Lot description

Chiura Obata (1885-1975) American/Japanese, Color Woodcut. Titled: "Great Nature: Storm on Lyell Mt." Signed and has artists red chop lower right. From the 1930 World Landscape series based on his visit to Yosemite. Provenance: Private Collection, California for 3 generations since original purpose. Overall: 18 1/2 X 24 1/2 in. Sight: 11 1/4 X 16 in. #2683 . Born in the Okayama prefecture of Japan, Chiura Obata was adopted by his uncle, an artist. As a child he was trained in ink painting, and at 14 he was apprenticed to the painter Murata Tanryo in Tokyo. He also studied with Kogyo Terasaki and Goho Hasimoto. In 1903, Obata moved to San Francisco and began working as an illustrator for “The New World” and “The Japanese American,” two of the city's Japanese newspapers. He also did work as a commercial designer and embraced the Nihonga style, which fused traditional Japanese sumi-e ink painting with the conventions of western naturalism. He spent much of the 1920s painting landscapes throughout California, visiting Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada and creating over a hundred paintings and sketches of the high country. Obata stayed in the USA until the death of his father in 1928. Between 1928 and 1932, he worked in Tokyo as a painter and transformed his California landscape watercolors and sketches into a portfolio of 35 woodblock prints titled “World Landscape Series - America,” perhaps his most famous work, and the origin of this particular piece. Obata’s landscapes reveal his intensely personal and poetic vision of “Great Nature,” a vision grounded in an underlying Zen philosophy of selflessness that accepts the insignificance of human affairs in relation to the timeless forces of nature.