Art: The Year of Manabu Mabe

A year ago short, lank-haired Manabu Mabe was a familiar but furtive peddler on the streets of Brazil’s metropolitan (pop. 3,650,000) Sao Paulo. His wares: his own hand-painted ties, priced from 85^ to $1.15. “It was embarrassing and illegal,” Mabe confesses. “I had no peddler’s license, but they sold fast.” Only at night did Manabu Mabe indulge his private obsession, squandering his money on oil and canvases, sitting up, often until dawn, to paint large, calligraphic abstractions. Suddenly this year the whirlwind of artistic success sucked 35-year-old Manabu Mabe into its embrace, tossed him sky-high and made him not only the toast of Brazil but the season’s brightest new art discovery.

First had come the top award in Sao Paulo’s Contemporary Art Salon. Then in

September, at the prestigious Sao Paulo Bienal, the jury picked unsung Manabu Mabe for the $1,150 award as Brazil’s best painter. This month Mabe ventured into the European arena and walked off with top honors at Paris’ first biennial (for painters under 35): the Prix Braun for the best “painter in oils” and a six months’ scholarship for study in Paris. Manabu Mabe, a Japanese-born farm hand who had sold only one painting in his life (for $12 to a friend), found himself with a sellout show in Rio de Janeiro; dealers from Caracas, Paris, New York and Rome were plying him with offers.

Father’s Tragedy. Back in Japan, Manabu’s father had been a prosperous ferryboat owner and hotelkeeper (the House of Flowers). But when Manabu was seven, father fell on evil times. “A Japanese father never explains business affairs to the family,” Mabe recalls, “but I knew something terrible had happened. My father was bankrupt and humiliated.” His father tried first being a barber, then finally decided to move to Brazil. The family made the 50-day trip in steerage, and father became a contract laborer on a Sao Paulo coffee plantation.

Little Manabu tended rice and vegetables between the rows of coffee trees, gradually grew husky enough to tote the 88-lb. coffee sacks. He taught himself to read Portuguese at night by kerosene lamplight, hoarded scraps of paper to make sketches on. But the heavy farm work, plus malaria and amoebic dysentery, bore down relentlessly on the family. The father proved too thin and weak for field work, devoted his waning life to drinking pinga (sugarcane spirits), finally died of cancer. Mabe, the eldest of the seven children, borrowed enough money to become a small-time farmer, struggled to keep the family alive and intact while he grabbed spare moments to paint—first copying calendars, then endlessly sketching his sister Yoshiko. When Mabe married eight years ago, his father-in-law forced him to sign a contract to paint no more (“a foolish extravagance”).

Off to Paris. The first tentative recognition came in 1951, when a single early painting of Mabe’s was accepted for Rio’s National Salon. The honor was enough to make Mabe’s father-in-law relent, and Mabe began to paint again. Two years ago he decided to make the break, sold out the family’s small plot of land at a loss and set off for Sao Paulo to paint, and sell ties. On his own, he developed his present style, in which a basic, slashing, abstract expressionist manner is given style by hints of the elegant lines of Japanese calligraphy and architecture.

By last week Artist Mabe had paid off the last of his old farm debts, and packed his bags for Paris. “I’ve given my brother-in-law the tie business,” he said happily. “I’m a painter now, a real painter!”