cover image Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment

Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment

. Heyday Books, $22.5 (168pp) ISBN 978-1-890771-26-3

Japanese-born painter Obata (1885-1975) taught at UC-Berkeley from 1932 until December 1942, when the federal government forced 110,000 Japanese-Americans (Obata among them) from their homes and into internment camps. Detained at Tanforan, Calif., and then at Topaz, Utah, Obata used vivid watercolor, black-and-white sumi ink painting and other techniques to record events, impressions and scenes of the Japanese-American internment. He also set up art schools in both camps, encouraging others to paint and draw what they saw. This volume reproduces much of Obata's art from the internment years: 24 color pages present watercolors, while his numerous sketches, drawings and sumi work dominate the rest of the book. (Obata's elegant pre- and postwar paintings also appear, along with relevant photographs of his family.) Hill, the painter's granddaughter, has drawn on her family's collection of Obata's works, on historical records and on the memories of those who knew him to create a comprehensive record of the evacuation and detainment as Obata and those around him must have experienced it. Perhaps a third of her text is excerpts from Obata's letters and speeches, which urge calm and dignity amid awful circumstances. Some readers will treat this volume primarily as a historical record. Others will see in Obata an aesthetically remarkable blend of Japanese figurative conventions and Western-style documentary realism--one sketch recalls centuries-old ukiyo-e, the next suggests K the Kollwitz. Obata's spare observations and vivid brushwork demonstrate pride and challenge as wind sweeps through redwoods, dismay amid the crates and huts of Tanforan and determination against Utah's stark landscapes, fences and dust storms. (June)