A Painter Ready to Claim His Place

It was not an auspicious beginning. When Karin Higa first ventured to phone artist Hideo Date, he railed against curators and museums, and asked her not to call again. Then he hung up. That was in 1991, when she was a consultant for L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum and still living in New York.

Her curiosity had been piqued by word-of-mouth about the artist among art historians and others familiar with Los Angeles’ history. Date had been active before World War II in L.A., he was a member of the Art Students League under Stanton Macdonald-Wright, he had shown regularly, but a decade after the war, his work more or less disappeared from public view.

Her own research yielded the phone number--and then the truncated conversation. Seven years later, Date arrived at the museum, brought around by the son of an old friend. Higa had joined the staff as senior curator of art, and Date hardly remembered their previous encounter. This time, he eagerly showed photographs of his works and began to talk about his life.

That encouraged Higa, who paid him a visit a year later at his apartment in Flushing, N.Y. Over his lifetime, Date had preferred not to sell his artwork even when he had the chance, which meant that more than 50 years’ of art--drawings, watercolors and oil paintings--were crowded into the space. What Higa had hoped for was a chance to get a close look at the work, and perhaps to acquire some for the museum. That year, 1999, Date decided to donate more than 190 works to the museum.

“I saw that he was a very, very good painter,” Higa says, “but it wasn’t until we got the work in Los Angeles and were able to take it out of the old frames and mats that I realized he was really a remarkable find.”

The museum shares that find in a current exhibition, “Living in Color: The Art of Hideo Date.” Featuring 56 drawings, watercolors and paintings, it is the 94-year-old artist’s first one-man show since 1954, and his first in L.A. since 1947.

The rediscovery of Japanese American artists has become a bit of a cottage industry at the museum. Earlier this year, the museum mounted a show of another mostly forgotten painter, Henry Sugimoto. The museum’s existence has drawn some of the work out of the shadows, and scholars in Los Angeles and elsewhere are turning up more and more evidence of a thriving prewar Asian American art scene.

The finds have been as much an eye-opener for Higa, a third-generation Japanese American, as for anyone else. “I had grown up under the assumption that there was no such thing as a historical example of an Asian American artist,” she says.

Through the research of the last decade, by herself and others, it turns out that there were probably hundreds of such artists--but their careers were poorly documented and, in the case of Japanese Americans, short-circuited by internment during World War II.

Date’s history, which has been pieced together mostly from his memory, illustrates the pattern, albeit with its own twists and turns.

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1907, Date was 16 when he arrived in the United States to join his family. Graduating from Polytechnic High in Los Angeles, he enrolled at the Otis Art Institute. He was there only a year before leaving, in a huff, to study in Japan.

In the exhibition catalog, he relates the story. It was 1928, and the school director told him, “It’s kind of a tragedy to see you paint in an Oriental manner.” To which the proud Date retorted, “I don’t know anything about Oriental art, and if you don’t like the way I paint, you can go to hell.”

That year, he sailed for Japan and ended up at an art school where he was introduced to nihonga --a style that melded the traditionally strong use of line in Japanese painting with Western techniques of perspective and modeling.

When he returned to Los Angeles the next year, he became active at the Art Students League, falling under the wing of the charismatic Macdonald-Wright, who exposed him to his color theories--Macdonald-Wright was one of the originators of Synchromism, the “orchestration” of colors in paintings based on “major” and “minor” color scales--as well as the avant-garde art scene.

The works of Macdonald-Wright impressed him deeply, as Date told The Times recently. “I was flabbergasted, such colors I had never seen before.”

For a while, Date worked in the family business--a flower shop in Little Tokyo--but when his dedication to the business flagged, his brothers asked him to leave. Thereafter, Date stayed wherever he could, sometimes at the league on Spring Street, sometimes with friends. “It was the best thing,” Date later wrote. “I became independent, free, bohemian.”

In the 1930s, he began to exhibit regularly with various groups--the College Art Assn., the Foundation of Western Art, the Los Angeles Oriental Artists Group and the Los Angeles Art Assn. Date maintained close ties with the Japanese American community, but the art scene put him in touch with a wider world as well. When he took off for another visit to Japan in 1936, a farewell card was signed by Art League members Jimmy Redmond, Don Totten and Albert King, as well as Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier.

Because he tended to hang on to his artwork, Date had to make his living from odd jobs, and he also depended on the generosity of friends. He did have the occasional commission, however. Once he worked on a mural at Pickfair, Mary Pickford’s mansion, and later he began a Federal Art Project mural on Terminal Island, a project halted when World War II began.

With the war came the internment, and in 1942, he was sent, like more than 110,000 other Japanese Americans, to an internment camp--Date went to Heart Mountain, Wyo. He helped set up an art school to teach others, and he kept making art. But unlike some other artists in the camps, such as Sugimoto, Date’s work from the period ignores his surroundings--he mostly drew cats.

After the war, Date ended up in New York to try to restart his art career, but it didn’t prove easy. His artworks, which had been held by a friend’s family during the war, were shipped to him. He married a Japanese American woman, Yuriko Tamaki, and continued to work odd jobs and to paint into the 1980s, but his last exhibition was in 1954.

Recent research on L.A. art history kicked off his rediscovery, with two exhibitions in 2000 including his work: “On Gold Mountain” at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and LACMA’s “Made in California” show.

Higa has arranged “Living in Color” chronologically, with the internment camp drawings of cats between two periods of luxuriant play with color. For Higa, the contrast is resonant.

“All his work is about color except the camp material,” Higa says, “which is just pencil drawing on paper, monochromatic.”

Date’s earlier works, from the 1930s, blended nihonga techniques with Art Deco touches. They are mostly watercolors and oil paintings. The subject matter includes still lifes--one circa 1930 shows a bowl containing a pomegranate and a pepper and a vase decorated with a dragon, set on a small table before an exotic landscape. Women with elegant coifs and hats--as in “Cathleen,” “Mary Campbell,” “Aida” and “Nostalgia”--were a favorite subject, as were allegories featuring nude figures such as “Age of Confusion” and “Journey--In Search of” from the same period. While his draftsmanship was meticulous, Higa points out, he was bold about color choices--”Cathleen,” for example, shows a woman with lime-green flesh and orange hair.

One work of the period--”Unholy Trinity”--reflects a political awareness not previously evident in Date’s work, according to Higa. The large watercolor and gouache painting on paper depicts Hitler with his arm around Mussolini, with Stalin as a smaller figure at their feet. All have halos around their heads and are wearing vaguely Asian dress--Mussolini’s is decorated with swastikas.

“It may be a kind of double critique,” Higa notes, “against religion and the fact that charismatic leaders can be corrupt--ergo, unholy.”

The postwar works veer into abstraction. “While he was informed by contemporary art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism,” Higa notes, “his paintings continued to display tremendous technical finesse and sensitivity to color and composition.” The late works in particular bear evidence of Wright-Macdonald’s concept of using major and minor keys of color, although Date was then working from color scales of his own devising.

For Higa, the rediscovery of Hideo Date is the rediscovery not just of an artist she considers to be exceptional, but also of a forgotten piece of cultural history.

“I would never have guessed we would have gotten this collection and that it would be so good,” Higa says. “And I never would have guessed what his history and his biography have to tell us about prewar Los Angeles.”

To her, Date’s prewar life reveals how freely the Los Angeles art scene was connected--across racial and socioeconomic lines--in ways we did not imagine.

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“LIVING IN COLOR: THE ART OF HIDEO DATE,” Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., L.A. Dates: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, Fridays-Sundays,10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Ends April 7. Prices: $6, adults; $4, seniors; $3, students and children. Phone: (213) 625-0414.