“Certain forms float up in my mind’s eye. Aromas, a blowing breeze, a rain drenched gust of wind, the air in motion, my heart in motion. I try to capture these vague, evanescent images of the instant and put them into vivid form.”
March is Women’s History month and I saw this obituary of a woman who lived a big chunk of it.
First I heard of her was when she made her exit.
I am humbled always by how little I know and I now know Toko Shinoda was a zen master.
Like an ninth degree blackbelt.
By Margalit Fox for The New York Times. March 1, 2021.
Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of abstract expressionism, died Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107.
Her death was announced by Allison Tolman, her gallerist in the United States.
A painter and printmaker, Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades.
Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family.
Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.”
As a painter, Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries.
Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brushstroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line.
“The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.”
Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago.
Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young.
Deeply influenced by American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Shinoda shunned representation.
“If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.”
Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf.
Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview.
Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo.
The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Shinoda was born March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father managed a tobacco plant. Her mother was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo.
One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Shinoda’s father, who passed it on to her.
“My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the UPI interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.”
She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford.
“I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.”
Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery.
During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA.
21 1/4″ x 14 1/4″
Provenance: Collection of David Rockefeller (label on verso)
Private Collection, New York
In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Shinoda managed to remain for two years.
She met many of the titans of abstract expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work.
“When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.”
During this period, Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, a New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries.
Returning to Japan, Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.”
Among Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She was the only living Japanese artist to be so honored.
No immediate family members survive.
When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation.
“I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.”
“Surprised that I am still here at 104.”
Toko Shinoda was the art treasure herself.
From The Japan Times by Tyler Rothmar. 2017ish.
The concept of 守破離 (shu-ha-ri) has been applied to pursuits of all kinds over the years, including the tea ceremony, noh drama, and various martial and visual arts.
It describes three stages of development in a creative person: 守 (shu) means keeping or adhering to the form and rules of an art by following a teacher without question. 破 (ha) is the point of digression, a willful veering away from the tradition with the intent to explore. Finally, 離 (ri) refers to a transcendent state, achieved through long practice and focus, where the act of creating happens naturally and work of the highest order stems from the deepest roots of the artist’s being.
Although she turned 104 years old on March 28, Toko Shinoda, having passed through shu and ha in her formative years, seems to have been existing comfortably in the ri stage since at least the mid-1960s. A favorite artist of the Imperial Couple and the only living Japanese to be immortalized on a postage stamp, Shinoda remains as immersed in her creative endeavors as ever.
Her work is currently on display at Musee Tomo in Tokyo’s Toranomon neighborhood. Titled “Toko Shinoda: in the autumn of my years…,” the show is supported by the U.S. Embassy and The Japan Times, and includes around 50 works dating from 1958 to the present selected by Norman H. Tolman of The Tolman Collection, Shinoda’s longtime dealer and friend. The exhibition runs through May 29.
“I am surprised that I am still here at 104. I never thought that I would live to be this old, and to think that I am still able to produce works that delight art lovers is in itself rewarding,” Shinoda tells The Japan Times. “I don’t paint on any regular schedule, just when the mood strikes me. Sometimes new forms that I had never thought of until recently seem to come to mind and I try my best to put them down as I see them.”
Born in Dalian, Manchuria, in 1913, she soon moved to Tokyo with her family and began a largely self-guided study of calligraphy. An artistic streak ran in her family, and her great uncle, a carver who fashioned the inkan (personal seal) of Emperor Meiji, passed on a love of poetry and calligraphy through her father.
Shinoda had her first solo calligraphy exhibition in 1936, and by 1945 she was producing abstract work that departed significantly from the rigid forms of traditional brushwork.
She exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1953, before moving to the city in 1956, and remembers the time vividly: “At first I was impressed by the freedom that American artists had. In Japan we used to copy the calligraphy of the masters, but at that time in New York artists were expected to produce something new and different. It was the start of abstract expressionism and artists were called on to bring forth new forms. I was able to paint my work, first based on calligraphy, to new forms and shapes and I think that it happened first in New York and then continued when I came back to Japan.”
After a few years in the U.S. she returned, but her fame here and abroad grew in tandem, and today examples of her prolific output can be found in galleries and private collections worldwide.
Among Shinoda’s more famous quotes is the remark that she is married to her work.
“I never married and have no children,” she says, “and I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.”
Although she also works in lithograph, Shinoda often chooses to use brush and sumi ink, exacting materials that don’t afford the luxury of backtracking or revisiting strokes. Where oil painting, like prose writing, is the result of contemplative, cumulative composition, art made with ink is immediate and of the moment, perhaps more akin to playing a musical instrument. The paper instantly drinks the ink, making the medium a superconductor for the intent, even the personality, of the artist. For this reason painting with ink requires great poise, and the act itself is a kind of performance of which the marks become the record.
Shinoda’s lines have a lean economy and together they generate the tremendous tension of stillness pulling against movement. With a few strokes, she pares her expression down to the pith, transmuting beauty with precision wherever she finds it. Like daring feats, her larger works in particular are not to be looked at so much as watched.
The artist confirmed this fact at an impromptu press conference given on her birthday at the opening of the “Autumn years” show.
“My works are all delicate — just one little part keeps it all together. If one line went just a bit wrong, if the color were a little darker, it would not be what I was trying to show. My works are all like that. They are fragile. I cannot create stable, contented, rich kinds of works. I might be able to create one in the future, though.”
Later, seated in front of twin birthday cakes and an attentive crowd, she elaborated: “Every morning, I pick up a brush and do some work, even just a little bit. Without it, I wouldn’t feel quite alive, or I wouldn’t feel like I should be living without doing some work. You could say it’s a sense of responsibility. It’s the proof that I am alive.”
The relationship between Tolman and Shinoda extends back four decades to a time when they happened to live in the same building. Exhibitions of her work almost invariably involve him, and it was at one of these at the Conrad Hotel in Tokyo last year that he was approached by representatives from Kitte, the arm of Japan Post that makes postage stamps.
Soon there were talks to hold a Shinoda show in the new Kitte Nagoya office tower, and somewhere in the give-and-take of negotiation Tolman made an unprecedented request: “You have to make stamps for Toko Shinoda.” They replied that stamps simply are not made for living people. In the end, however, both sides came to an accord — and Shinoda made history. Sheets of nine unique stamps featuring the artist’s work, and one with her portrait, can now be purchased for ¥3,000.
“I think it’s my greatest accomplishment,” says Tolman. “After Shinoda-san there’s no second course; if you have baked Alaska, who wants an eclair?”
“Toko Shinoda: in the autumn of my years…” runs through May 29 at Musee Tomo in Minato-ku, Tokyo (11 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Mondays). For more information, visit www.musee-tomo.or.jp/exhibition_english.html.