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By Andrew Conti

Shigejiro Sano At Play in the Esprit of Paris

Tokyo Station Gallery mounts the retrospective of an important 20th-century artist

Portrait of Painter (Dead Painter), 129.7x89.3cm, oil on canvas, 1959 Images Courtesy of Kanagawa Prefectural Art Museum Archives

In these days of trumpeted artistic superstars, it has perhaps become unusual to come upon artists more dearly remembered for the artwork they left behind than any resulting namesake and brand developed around them. Shigejiro Sano occupies just such a place in the annals of modern Japanese art.

Although virtually unknown outside the archipelago, Sano is an artist who stirs in the memory of many Japanese. This is due primarily to the fact that his largest successes came as a commercial illustrator and designer for the covers of numerous books in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. The gracefully clear and alluringly stylish drawings of this one-time student of both Matisse and Miro brought a splash of European panache to a postwar society in search of new identities.

Work (Bird), 68.1x51.1cm, cloth and cellophane collage, undated

This first-ever retrospective for Sano collects well over 200 of the Osaka-born artist’s works, including oil paintings, collages, drawings and prints of his book illustrations. The exhibition focuses on Sano’s development as a painter and “fine” artist while at the same time amply delving into his more well-known and recognizable work as designer and illustrator.

Beginning with a few obligatory early works such as 1939’s Atelier—a student’s nod to Matisse—and Nude (1951), a mostly atrocious series of paintings suffering from fugitive pigments, the exhibition shows the progression of an obsessively adept but not necessarily gifted painter. Although never fully forgoing figuration, Sano’s canvases are born in teeming surfaces of pigment much like those of his more abstract contemporaries. Throughout Sano’s work, sharply stylized eyes leer out from a battering of broad slashes of black and ochre.

In more resolved canvases like Living Things A (1959) and Life A (1959), Sano scratches, scrapes and splatters his way across a bright palette smothered in thick, oily black paint to menacing figures both human and animal. Later works like 1967’s Blue Navel reduce black—a color for which Sano professed a life-long love—to a purely descriptive role, a gestural outline to the oblong geometry of an almost alien figure at the painting’s zinc-on-cadmium-red center.

Big Child, 54.5x39cm, mixed media, 1959

In many mixed-media works, such as Big Child (1969), Sano created equally ferocious images in collage. Torn from cellophane, used canvas and even nylon stockings, these pieces exude a snarled elegance and are undeniably his most expressively liberated work on show. Removed from both commercial restrictions and the plastic limitations of oil paint, Sano could compellingly synthesize his materials and his imagery.

Although primarily concerned with Sano’s work as an oil painter, this exhibition demonstrates the vast and varied talents of an under-acknowledged artist of Japan’s postwar era. In a final room containing over 60 book jackets dressed in a more commercially inoffensive modernity, one almost finds a different artist at work.

In contrast to his fervently expressionistic explorations in paint and collage, Sano’s designs and illustrations are considerably reserved in both manner and scale. Yet these works are self-assuredly vitalized by his delicate but forceful sense of line; the scraped, worked and reworked surfaces of the paintings give way to the seemingly effortless spontaneity of a consummate artist at work and play.

Tokyo Station Gallery, until May 15. See exhibition listings for details.

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