Art: California Japanese

The imperfections of Japanese military strategy have made more news lately than the perfections of Japanese art (see p. 14). But one day fortnight ago a demonstration of brush drawing by a 53-year-old Japanese artist drew the unprecedented number of 1.900 visitors to the old Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento. Calif., and his atmospheric, formalized landscapes, on view last week, made critics remember him as one of the most accomplished artists in the West.

Chiura Obata’s father was one of the Japanese artists who did their best 60 years ago to imitate Leonardo da Vinci. Little Obata was apprenticed at seven to a traditional master, spent two years learning to draw a circle and two straight lines. For seven years he was allowed no color. One result of this discipline was a skill which his Sacramento audience found as exciting as a circus. Another result, possibly, was that Obata took ship for California at 18. A good friend of the late great Botanist Luther Burbank, he still gives as much time to his garden in Berkeley as to his teaching at the University of California.