Takao Tanabe b.1926

Dorothy Cameron Gallery

Private Collection, Toronto, 1957

Private Collection, Vancouver

Scott Watson, Art in the Fifties: Design, Leisure and Painting in the Age of Anxiety" in Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983, Vancovuer, 1983, p.98

This work has been viewed under UV and it is in good condition. Several concentric rings of craquelure suggest that it has sustained impact from behind. The paint appears to be stable with no paint losses.
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Tanabe is an artist who cannot be placed in any school of painting. His early abstracts, such as this one, are challenging, lyrical and compelling.

Vancouver was a hotbed for abstraction in the 1950's. Shortly after this work was painted, in 1959, Tanabe was included in the nationally touring exhibition 7 West Coast Painters, alongside Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, Don Jarvis, Herbert Gilbert, John Koerner and Peter Aspell. All of these artists were experimenting in abstract painting and built a reputation for a uniquely Vancouver school of painting.

Scott Watson describes this development:

The Vancouver version came from a world of gracious suburban living, job security, classical music, contact with nature... it was tied to an attitude about the way artists ought to live.

In the 1950s Vancouver painters were involved in the discourse about modern design, architecture and urban planning that was such a strong presence in Vancouver after the war... Harmony, integrity order, and balance were the aesthetic criteria of this aspect of modernism.