George Tsutakawa

Fülszöveg

George Tsutakawa
by Martha Kingsbury
With an introductory essay by
Sumio Kuwabara
Painter, sculptor, teacher, and internationally
renowned fountain designer, George Tsutakawa
is one of the treasures of the Pacific Northwest.
In his life and his work he has achieved a rare synthesis
of the traditions of Japan, his parents' native land, where
he lived and went to school for ten years, and those of
America, where he was born and to which he returned
at the age of seventeen.
Martha Kingsbury draws upon her own and others'
interviews with Tsutakawa to reveal the way his
accomplishments have been shaped by, but have also
transcended, the influences of his dual cultural heritage.
Throughout we hear the artist's own voice—witty, ironic,
passionate, irreverent—the voice of a man possessed of
deep convictions and great wisdom. In six chronologically
arranged sections, Kingsbury discusses Tsutakawa's long
life and distinguished career, examining his artistic
development... Tovább

Fülszöveg

George Tsutakawa
by Martha Kingsbury
With an introductory essay by
Sumio Kuwabara
Painter, sculptor, teacher, and internationally
renowned fountain designer, George Tsutakawa
is one of the treasures of the Pacific Northwest.
In his life and his work he has achieved a rare synthesis
of the traditions of Japan, his parents' native land, where
he lived and went to school for ten years, and those of
America, where he was born and to which he returned
at the age of seventeen.
Martha Kingsbury draws upon her own and others'
interviews with Tsutakawa to reveal the way his
accomplishments have been shaped by, but have also
transcended, the influences of his dual cultural heritage.
Throughout we hear the artist's own voice—witty, ironic,
passionate, irreverent—the voice of a man possessed of
deep convictions and great wisdom. In six chronologically
arranged sections, Kingsbury discusses Tsutakawa's long
life and distinguished career, examining his artistic
development in two extended periods.
In more than sixty fountains designed and built since that
time, as well as in the sumi drawings he has produced for
many years, Tsutakawa has expressed his beliefs about
our relationship with nature. His fountains are not the
traditional structures in which jets of water squirt at or out
from a sculpture, but ones in which the water's move-
ment over shapes, its sounds, and its reflected light are
indispensable to the concept of the form as a whole. "My
fountain sculptures are an attempt to unify water—the life
force of the universe that flows in an elusive cyclical
course throughout eternity—with an immutable metal
sculpture," he wrote in 1982.
This profusely illustrated book, published in connection
with an exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum that honors
George Tsutakawa in his eightieth year, includes an
appreciation of the artist's fountain sculpture written by
the Japanese art historian and critic Sumio Kuwabara,
professor at the Musashino College of Arts. Martha
Kingsbury, professor of art history at the University of
Washington, has written a number of studies of art in
the Northwest, among them Art of the Thirties: The
Pacific Northwest and Northwest Traditions.
Bellevue Art Museum Bellevue, Washington
University of Washington Press Seattle & London
Plwto by Paul Macapia
Fountain, Song of the Forest, 1981, Sendai, Japan.
Photo by Osamu Murai
9 78
The first period, from the late 1920s into the mid-1950s,
encompasses the artist's early education, growing mastery,
and artistic awareness from his student days to beyond
World War II. He studied with teachers as diverse as
Alexander Archipenko, Ambrose Patterson, and Paul
Bonifas, and enjoyed the exhilarating company of the
artists who came to be identified as the "Northwest
School"—among them Mark Tobey, Morris Graves,
Kenneth Callahan, Paul Horiuchi, and Kamekichi Tokita.
Throughout the Great Depression they painted, talked
about art, and socialized long into the night. At this time,
Tsutakawa thought of himself as a modern artist in the
western tradition, striving for expression of a private,
personal vision.
By 1956, Tsutakawa—married and settled in his native
Seattle—had gained artistic confidence and success as a
painter, printmaker, sculptor, and teacher. Two events in
that year influenced a major shift in his thinking about art.
He returned to Japan after an absence of thirty years, to
rediscover a deep appreciation of his Japanese heritage.
And he read, in a book by William O. Douglas, a descrip-
tion of the ritualiy stacked rock structures, obos, left
by pilgrims at spiritually auspicious sites in the Indian
Himalayas. Tsutakawa began to study the organic,
almost fortuitously stacked and piled shapes of the obos,
compelled by their public nature, the way they combined
anonymity with personal meaning. The obos forms (which
he was later to see for himself on a trek in the foothills of
Mt. Everest) inspired a series of sculptures and led
Tsutakawa in the 1960s to use related forms in fountains. Vissza