Tadashi Sato

Remembering a Master

 

Rita Goldman

 

Sato. The name is brief and to the point, like the brush strokes that have become a hallmark of his art. Like those brush strokes, the name evokes much more: an artist of international stature whose commissions grace some of Hawai‘i’s most important public places, and whose paintings have hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and Whitney, and the Willard Gallery.

In a career spanning more than half a century, Tadashi Sato became one of the most important artists ever to emerge from Hawai‘i. He perfected his style as an abstract painter in the sophisticated milieu of the New York art scene of the 1940s and 1950s, but found his inspiration in the natural world he grew up with on Maui. When he passed away on June 4, 2005, at the age of 82, Tadashi Sato was still the gentle, unpretentious man who had inspired generations of young, local artists.

His parents were Japanese immigrants who had come to work on Maui’s pineapple plantations. As number-one son, Tadashi could expect little more in the way of job prospects—had fate not intervened.

In 1941, mere months after he graduated from Lahainaluna High School, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and America entered World War II.

In 1943, when Japanese-Americans were finally allowed to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces, Tadashi enlisted, and was placed in the Army’s Military Intelligence Service. After the war, he attended Cannon Business School in Honolulu on the GI Bill, but got in trouble when a teacher discovered a less-than-flattering cartoon he had drawn of her.
Tadashi was sent to the office of Mr. Cannon himself. “When I got there, he had the cartoon on his desk,” Sato told writer Tom Stevens in a 2002 interview. “He made me close the door. Then he started to laugh. ‘Don’t ever do this again,’ he said.” Soon after, the Honolulu School of Arts (now the Honolulu Academy of Arts) was authorized to admit students on the GI Bill. Sato applied for a transfer. “When I went to see

Mr. Cannon for a recommendation, he remembered my cartoon.

‘You’d better go,’ he told me.

‘I can tell you really want to be an artist.’”

Fate must have wanted it, too. Ralston Crawford, one of the country’s most influential modernist painters, happened to be teaching there, and was impressed by the young art student from Maui. With Crawford’s help, Tadashi obtained a scholarship to the Pratt Art Institute in Brooklyn, and later studied with Crawford’s equally influential friend Stuart Davis at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

In 1947, Tadashi had married his high school sweetheart, Kiyoko Kaita. In 1948, they were living in a walkup apartment in New York, with their new baby girl. To provide for his family, Tadashi waited tables, worked as a janitor and a security guard and filled the little apartment with his paintings.

A friend of Tadashi’s was an extra in the Broadway production of Teahouse of the August Moon, which starred Charles Laughton. At a cast party, Tadashi’s friend overheard the distinguished thespian discussing his collection of modern art.

“My friend must have had a couple of double martinis,” Sato later told Stevens. “He walked up and said, ‘Mr. Laughton, you haven’t seen a painting until you’ve seen a Sato!’”

Astonishingly, several days later Laughton arrived on Sato’s doorstep, along with fellow actor Burgess Meredith and writer Cornelia Otis Skinner. Kiyoko served coffee, and the visitors sat there, in silence, while Laughton studied one of Tadashi’s paintings.
At last, he turned to Tadashi and said, “Mr. Sato, this is pure poetry.” When they left, Laughton had purchased three paintings, Skinner and Meredith two apiece.

Throughout the 1950s, Sato’s work was exhibited in many of the country’s most important museums and galleries. Had he stayed in New York, there’s no telling how much more sweeping his reputation and influence might have become. But in 1960, the Satos returned to Hawai‘i for good.

Ben Kikuyama, one of Maui’s best-known contemporary artists, was a Lahaina boy of 12 or 13 the first time he met Tadashi Sato. “He was very warm and encouraging,” Kikuyama recalls. “He brought out his sketch books and said, ‘Just draw. Keep drawing and painting, no matter where you are.’

“Knowing that this man succeeded without crass commercialism has influenced me. Here was a local person, born and raised on Maui, who broke through the unspoken barrier. He’s a major symbol for local artists, and very revered, not only because of his work, but because of what he stands for.”

The Satos spent their last four decades in Lahaina, whose ocean, shoreline, and mountains had captured Tadashi’s imagination in childhood, and figured prominently in so much of his art. To the end of his life, Tadashi continued to work in the studio he had built on the hillside behind their home—building, as well, a legacy that inspires art lovers to this day.

“Sato’s early abstract ‘Compositions’ of the 1950s, with their subdued palettes and spare arrangements of simplified geometric shapes and thin, elegant lines, show Sato forging his own style combining American Modernism and elements of the aesthetic culture of his Japanese heritage.”

—James Jenson, Associate Director,
The Contemporary Museum of Honolulu

In 2002, Honolulu’s Contemporary Museum paid homage to Tadashi Sato with a major retrospective of his work. In the exhibit catalog, Chief Curator and Associate Director James Jensen writes: “Sato has become well-known for his spare, subtle abstract compositions with imagery drawn from the natural world around him, especially the tide pools and submerged rocks of the coastline near his home… He is also known for the shimmering luminosity of his paintings, the rocking, curling, ‘feathery’ strokes of his bristle brush which softly modulate and activate the surfaces of his canvases.”