Tomie Ohtake

Biography

On the evening of 29 November 2013 the Simón Bolívar auditorium of the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo burned down, and with it a tapestry of eight hundred square metres that Tomie Ohtake had once made at the request of Oscar Niemeyer. She was a hundred years old. She said at the time that the hardest part had been to get away from the usual rectangle and to tie the auditorium to the stage with cloth.

She did not stop working: in that same year, 2013, she began a series of monochrome canvases in which the line is held not by colour but by thick ridges of paint, and she painted them to the end.

She was born on 21 November 1913 in Kyoto, the daughter of Inosuke and Kimi Nakakubo. In 1936, at twenty-three, she went to Brazil to visit a brother; the war closed the way back, and she stayed in São Paulo, married the agronomist Ushio Ohtake, also Japanese, and settled with him in the Mooca district. Of their two sons, Ruy became an architect, and Ricardo later ran the culture department of the state of São Paulo. She came to painting only in the early 1950s, after seeing an exhibition by Keisuke Sugano at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art and starting to study with him; in 1953 she joined the Seibi Group, an association of Japanese artists in Brazil. Her first pieces were figurative, landscapes and genre scenes, but fairly soon she chose abstraction. Her first solo exhibition was in 1957, in 1960 she won a prize at the National Salon of Modern Art, and in 1961 she took part in the São Paulo Biennial. The “blind paintings” date from the same time: she bandaged her eyes and painted blind, arguing with the rationalism that, as it seemed to her, had taken hold of Brazilian art. She spoke of her painting through haiku: seventeen syllables hold a view of the world, and she too wanted to reduce form to the bare essentials. That, to my mind, is more precise than any art-historical term.

In 1968 she took Brazilian citizenship. In the 1960s her canvases were built on contrasting tones, and critics found in them a kinship with Rothko and the pulse of his colour; from the 1970s she took up screen printing, lithography and metal engraving. In 1972 the Venice Biennale itself invited her into its print section, where she showed with the Seibi Group; in 1978 she took part in the Tokyo Biennale. The São Paulo Museum of Modern Art gave her its Panorama of Brazilian Painting prize.

From the late 1980s she made sculptures for the streets, and twenty-seven of her public works now stand in Brazilian cities. In São Paulo these are the four large panels at the Consolação metro station, the concrete wave on Avenida 23 de Maio for the eightieth anniversary of Japanese immigration, for which she was awarded the Order of Rio Branco in 1988, and the painting on a blank wall at the Ladeira da Memória in the city centre. The floating “Star”, placed on the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, was removed in 1990 after long controversy. At the 23rd São Paulo Biennial in 1995 her sculptures were given a room of their own; the same year she published the book “Drop of Water” with Alberto Goldin and received the National Prize for Visual Arts.

In 2000 (by other accounts, in 2001) the Instituto Tomie Ohtake opened in São Paulo, a non-profit museum built by her son Ruy, where contemporary architecture and art are shown beside her own work; in 2006 she received the Order of Cultural Merit.

She died in São Paulo on 12 February 2015, in her hundred and second year; her body was cremated. Her works are in the Metropolitan Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate; in 2023 they were included in the London exhibition “Action, Gesture, Paint” on women in global abstraction, 1940–1970.