AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

In August 2022, full scale charcoal preparatory drawings and over one hundred ink/sumi drawings were found inside Chiura Obata’s four-panel folding screen. A prominent Japanese American artist of the twentieth century with a unique focus on the American West, Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was born in Japan, trained in traditional Japanese painting, and immigrated to the United States in 1903 at the age of 18. He remained relatively obscure until recent decades. Obata created sketches of the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake, and watercolors and prints that celebrate the quiet beauty of the Sierra Nevada Mountains along with other western landscapes. He became a faculty member of the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1932. His body of work came during the early twentieth century at a time of high anti-Japanese immigrant sentiment, and the artist himself was forced into an internment camp in Topaz, Utah, during World War II.

In 2022, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) was gifted 35 of Obata’s works from the artist’s family. One of the works was “Horses”, a four-panel folding screen that illustrates a synthesis of Japanese and American art techniques and the artist’s mastery of sumi painting. This screen was not part of a 2018 retrospective on the artist at the UMFA due to condition issues.

Through a generous grant from the Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project in 2022, “Horses” was sent to The Nishio Conservation Studio in Washington D.C. for conservation treatment that included full remounting of the painting. During the dismantling, a multitude of surprises were discovered including full scale preparatory charcoal drawings of “Horses” and over one hundred sumi-ink study drawings hidden inside the screen – a finding worthy of a second conservation grant from Bank of America in 2023.

This four-panel folding screen was perhaps constructed by the artist himself with materials available to him at the time. The under-core lattice wood was made from American cedar, not sugi Japanese cedar. Japanese paper was difficult to source so the artist used his own practice sketches to build up the internal layers of the screen. These rare drawings reveal Obata’s academic training, teaching methods and artistry with his contemporary ArtDeco influences.

This presentation will provide an overview of Obata’s work in the early 1930s, leading up to the production of “Horses” and his techniques featuring the unique fusion of Japan and California. The conservation treatment of the screen, along with the surprises found will be discussed. The four-panel screen, full scale preparatory drawings, selected works found within the screen, and a documentary video detailing this compelling story will be on view in Chiura Obata: “Layer by Layer, An Inside Look At Horses” – a special installation at the UMFA dedicated to the conservation work of this incredible discovery during the AIC Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, 2024.