As Tanabe turns one hundred, there is much to celebrate about him and his career from over eight decades as a practicing artist. First of course is his art, but we must laud as well his pivotal roles in arts education and advocacy for artists in Canada, activity which includes his work to professionalize the Banff Centre School of the Visual Arts, where he was head of the Art Department from 1973-1980; and his instrumental role in establishing the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts, launched in 1999, receiving the award himself in 2003. In 2016, he established the Tanabe Prize to be awarded to outstanding emerging painters based in British Columbia, administered by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and in 2018, the Takao Tanabe Purchase Prize in Painting for Young Artists, administered through the National Gallery of Canada.
But it is Tanabe the artist that the present exhibition celebrates. Starting in the late 1940s, Tanabe has painted prolifically – and it is for this that we know him best – but, as abundantly, he has made drawings and prints (linocuts, etchings, lithographs, screenprints, woodblock prints, aquatints) and various combinations, as well as mural paintings, banners, reliefs and sculptures. Under his private printing company, Periwinkle Press - and often working with other craftspeople like the printer, Robert Reid (1927-2022) – he designed and published the most discretely elegant books, posters, greeting cards and other ephemera. To generalize, he worked, for the most part, abstractly for the first thirty years of his career, and then, for the past fifty his subject matter has been the Canadian landscape, first the vast panoramas of the prairies, and then the interior of British Columbia and its coastal waterways, and the Arctic, paintings at once awesome and formally grand. They eschew the details of human presence and yearn for the transcendental. They are pensive and pervaded by lonesomeness. From its beginnings, Tanabe’s work, whatever the medium, has always been undertaken with patiently honed skills and consummate mastery.
Yet, in his youth, it wasn’t a given that he would become an artist. Born in 1926 in Seal Cove, British Columbia, just on the edge of Prince Rupert, he never finished high school, his life upset by the shameful history of the forced internment of West Coast Japanese-Canadians during WWII, when his parents, then living in Vancouver, were stripped of their home and livelihoods and relocated eastwards into the British Columbia interior, coerced into camps and farm work. When he was twenty, after having followed some of his older siblings further east to Winnipeg, and while supporting himself working as a labourer – not a future that he aspired to – he discovered that the Winnipeg School of Art accepted students without completed high school degrees. Here was an opportunity to learn employable skills – he thought about becoming a sign painter – so he enrolled in the commercial art program, working at labouring jobs in the daytime while taking evening classes. There, when he discovered that the curriculum also offered courses in drawing and painting, the world of art opened itself up to him as a practice with its own rewards. One of his teachers, the painter Joe Plaskett (1918-2014), fresh from studying with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in New York, introduced him to the methods of Abstract Expressionism. Tanabe graduated in 1949 and by 1950, knowing that exciting art was being made in New York, he set off for New York himself to study with Hofmann and with Reuben Tam (1916-1991), quickly finding his way into the city’s most adventuresome artistic milieu, having drinks at the Cedar Bar and listening to the conversations of the not always so much older Abstract Expressionist artists who, as Tanabe tells it to me, were just beginning to get shows in the more prominent 57th Street commercial galleries.
When I was studying art history at the University of British Columbia in the mid-1960s I remember him as a serious presence on the local scene. I don’t remember meeting him personally. That would happen only in the early years of this century, in 2002 and 2004, when I visited him at his house and studio on Vancouver Island while I was researching my earlier writing projects on his work. On both occasions he gave generously of his time and let me record our lengthy conversations. (He both tells good stories and makes the simplest and most delicious quesadillas I have ever tasted.) We have met and communicated often since, including at his studio and by email via his partner Anona Thorne. But these two visits and my records and memories are the salient experiences that I think back on while writing the current text.1
After New York, the rest, we might say, is history. But for Tanabe, it has always been a dynamic history driven by his curiosity and his appetite for new artistic challenges. There were the summers from 1950-53, earning his living as a labourer at the Banff School of Fine Arts where he would meet up with and take courses from visiting artists like the British Willliam Scott (1913-1989). It was, however, after class, over a beer, that he learned from Scott “a lot of clues about what was happening in the English art world.”2
An Emily Carr Foundation scholarship, awarded in 1953-55, allowed him to spend the next two years based in London, UK studying, as per the requirements of the award, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. More consequential, however, often guided by Scott, he kept a close eye on the art galleries and got to know upcoming artists like the St Ives School painters Roger Hilton (1911-1975) and Peter Lanyon (1918-1964), and even encountered Patrick Heron (1920-1999) when he came into London from Cornwall. It is not surprising to spot traces of British influence on Tanabe in his mid-1950s work. Graham Sutherland’s (1903-1980) Thorn Tree imagery, for example, underlies Tanabe’s very earliest works of his White Paintings of the second half of the 1950s. But as often when noting such echoes, it’s more as if Tanabe, after having already scoped out the New York milieu a couple of years earlier, had arrived at similar stylistic propositions, and on his own terms. Like any serious artist, when Tanabe saw something interesting, he took from it what challenged him and put it to his own use.
The Emily Carr scholarship also allowed him to travel extensively throughout Europe visiting galleries and museums immersing himself in historical and contemporary art. This, alternatively, included spending six weeks in 1954 on one of the Southern Danish islands living alone in a tiny cabin, “starving to death” and “deliberately making myself paint recognizable landscapes.” Reflecting back, a half a century later from his studio, he muses, it was like “leading, as I do now, a contemplative life.” Quickly, however, he adds that his Danish watercolours had no connection with his later paintings from the Canadian prairies.
At the end of the decade, 1959 to 1961, on a Canada Council for the Arts grant he visited Japan for the first time. Given that in Canada he had been treated as a foreigner, as he explains, “it was time I found out whether I really was Japanese or not.” His conclusion afterwards may have been that “I was a westerner,” but in the meantime he undertook an intensive study of sumi-e painting and calligraphy, learning the “one-shot” procedures that a decade later he would use in executing his first prairie landscapes. The challenges of the one-shot technique, working on soft and absorbent paper, was that once you executed a move you could not rework it, so you had beforehand to thoroughly work up your idea, think and concentrate, and only then paint it. “No pissing around,” he says. If you got it wrong, you trashed that sheet of paper, or when painting, the whole canvas.
From 1955 to 1968, Vancouver became his homebase, leading an active life teaching, making art, undertaking major public commissions, exhibiting. It was an ostensibly fulfilling career, but becoming nevertheless restless he pulled up roots moving to Philadelphia, where his then wife wanted to pursue an academic degree at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Quickly he realized that he needed the energy of New York, where he rented a space on Greene Street converting it into a studio using the carpentry skills he had acquired from his father, helping him improve the family's cabin in the internment camp in the Slocan and from his brother and brother-in-law in Winnipeg. His work during those four years in the United States turned to hard-edge abstraction. Then in 1972 he returned to Canada to devote the rest of his career to landscape painting.
Was this a real stylistic and subject matter turning point? Before, for some thirty years, he had defined his work as abstract, first free-hand and gestural, and then hard-edge and geometric. But abstraction was a slippery concept in those days. To page through the illustrations in any survey book of North American and European art from the post-war decades is quickly to learn that ‘abstraction’ was hardly an absolute but was dependent on artists’ respective backgrounds and cultural milieus.3 In Canada, abstract art would mean different things for Tanabe and Gordon Smith (1919-2020) in Vancouver, Harold Town (1924-1990) and William Ronald (1926-1988) in Toronto, or Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) and Guido Molinari (1933-2004) in Montreal. But, back then, it mattered significantly to Tanabe that his work be understood as abstract. Even a half century after the fact, he remembers stories of having to defend his work from being otherwise interpreted.
The first of these dates to Spring 1953 in Banff, when William Scott pointed out to Tanabe that his paintings, whether “consciously or unconsciously,” were really landscapes an opinion that Tanabe had “vehemently denied” insisting that he “was an abstract painter.” They could have been talking in front of a painting somewhat like Painting 3, City, NYC, March 1952 (pp. 20-21) with its criss-cross pattern of quick, spontaneous stabs of pure colours. As Tanabe tells the story he simulates the compositional strategy – the push and pull technique – that he learned firsthand in Hofmann’s classes in New York and had for a while adopted. If Scott and Tanabe disagreed, maybe it’s because they had come to their respective pictorial solutions working from opposite directions. At the time Scott made his paintings by abstracting from still-life subjects: table top set-ups with pots, pans, glasses, eggs and fruit. Tanabe began, not by copying from the real world, but by building up his compositions, like the Abstract Expressionists, from improvised gestures guided by his visual imagination.
Tanabe would object a second time when viewers saw snow-covered winter shrubbery in his “White Paintings,” as Joe Plaskett called them, his first extended landscapes series that ran through the second half of the 1950s (see Sea of an Interior Place, 1957-58, p. 23). “But I didn’t think of them that way,” Tanabe recalls with a bemused smile. “Maybe viewers saw my gestures as “landscapy,” and maybe one could, but “to me they were just curly brushmarks.” Whichever, the White paintings were perhaps more abstract than anything else in Vancouver at the time.
Their “tenderness of touch,” as Jeffrey Spalding (1951-2019) finessed it,4 then hardens and solidifies. The paintings move off the wall to act like objects in space. They hang like banners, stretch across corners, or drape onto the floor. Through the 1960s Tanabe pursued several distinct stylistic strategies through which he depersonalized his work until, by the end of the decade, his application becomes detachedly flat and hard-edged.
And then comes Tanabe’s third story of a disagreement vis-à-vis abstraction. It occurred during a visit to his Vancouver studio by the American art curator William Seitz (1914-1974). Seitz was travelling on behalf of the National Gallery of Canada as the sole curator for the Gallery’s upcoming Seventh Biennial of Canadian Painting, 1968, an exhibition dedicated to “the newest developments in Canadian painting.”5 What Seitz saw was Tanabe’s most recent work, paintings constructed with mostly rigid geometry, ruled and crisp, their surfaces textureless and flat. Even to today’s accustomed eye they qualify as hard-edge abstractions. They are “very handsome paintings,” observed Seitz. They may be abstract, “but really they are based on the landscape, they are really seascapes. “How peaceful,” he described a grey painting (perhaps Early Autumn, 1967, Vancouver Art Gallery), its stark grey triangular divisions accented by a bright blue band and other colour striations.
Seitz travelled across Canada fairly fresh from having curated the The Responsive Eye (1965) for New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition content ran the gamut from Op Art to Colour Field painting to the works of the Plasticiens from Montreal: from Bridget Riley (b. 1931) to Kenneth Noland (1924-2010). It was an exhibition that admitted little compromise between abstraction and representation.
In contrast, for Tanabe, formalist purity was rarely the issue, anytime through the 1960s. The loosely brushed competes with the precisely ruled; flat and unmodulated planes are engineered with blunt, if false, in-and-out imputations of depth. Sometimes the planar is gainsaid by chunky constructions like heads or houses (see Summer 1, 1967, p. 33). The serious and the playful intermingle and “landscapy” echoes persist. Tanabe, for the decade, revels in ambiguity, and, when asked to explain himself, he refers back to the legacy of his New York training in the early 1950s:
It was a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. It was drilled into one that the space had to be shallow, you went in and you had to come out again, space should be shallow all the way around, all through, no depth, nothing like that…OK, I decided, I will make it as complicated as possible, bouncing back and forth, and be completely confusing. It doesn’t matter as long as I am not restricting myself to a shallow Abstract Expressionist feeling. It was very hard, after twenty years of doing the Hofmann thing to realize I could do whatever I wanted, as complicated as I wanted, as irrational as I wanted.6
How do Tanabe’s abstract paintings of the 1960s, although executed in Philadelphia and New York, relate to the work of the contemporary hard-edge abstraction that for a few years had flourished in Vancouver, comparably eccentric and eclectic. There was Gordon Smith, a few years older, and then the younger Michael Morris (1942-2022) and Reg Holmes (1934-2004), among others. Tanabe gently disputes my speaking of any close connections here, pointing out that the younger generation were mostly still students under Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994) at the Vancouver School of Art, and he did not know them very well. So let us for the moment say that hard-edge abstraction was in the air to be engaged with if one wanted to be of one’s time. But when, in a recent email to Tanabe, I ventured to wonder whether there perhaps was another deeper Vancouver background to his hard-edge abstractions, he shot back with a firm “No!”7 I had in mind the paintings of the much older Lawren Harris (1885-1970) from just before and after he moved from Santa Fe to Vancouver in 1940.
Harris was in his early 80s when Tanabe met him. Tanabe was invited to Lawren and Bess Harris’ residence on Belmont Avenue in West Grey on several occasions, before and after his Japan stay. There were small afternoon cocktail parties and the occasional dinner along with other guests like Joe Plaskett and Arthur Erickson (1924-2009). Bess Harris (1890-1969) bought one of Tanabe’s Beachcombing sculptures, and then another. Later he gave her a third one, installed in her garden. Tanabe recalls how during his visits they couldn’t talk about art or the old days, but he remembers Harris’ paintings on the walls. Could one of them have been Abstraction 119, ca. 1945?
This is a remarkable painting, something like a mission statement in reverse, summing up Harris’ work of the past quarter of a century. It’s also both abstract and landscape and all the gradations in between. Despite Tak’s adamant “no”, in some of his abstract paintings from the late 1960s – like Untitled 3/68 (Passing Rainbow), 1968 (Vancouver Art Gallery), and Untitled #4, 1968 (National Gallery of Canada) – I nevertheless see echoes of Harris, both in subject matter and formal details and in their transcendent spirit. Subconscious memory perhaps?
There is the receding sequence of clouds from dark to light that Tanabe, in Untitled 3/68 (Passing Rainbow), rounds off into perfect semicircles. There are those aggressively upward thrusting diagonal bands that in Untitled #4, 1968, as per Harris, striped in yellow, black and white. There are the horizontal, tonally gradated bands of blue like a receding ocean, or a hardened version of Harris’ atmospheric blue progressing from ethereal light towards the darkness of infinity.
But maybe when Tanabe says “no” he does not have in mind so much formal motifs or colour coincidences. Harris’ Abstraction 119, ca. 1945 soars up into ethereal heights, it’s a mystical pursuit to be fulfilled in the above and beyond. Tanabe stays grounded in the here and now. His wonderment is sparked by what is in front of our eyes, whether it is the immediate abstract presence of Untitled #4, 1968 or the earthly hereness embodied in the sublimely panoramic landscapes to come.
By 1972, as Tanabe tells it, he got bored with the whole business of abstraction, and soon, in the next paintings, soft colour-field paintings segue him into representation.
In an interview published in the Regina Leader Post in 19748 he explained, with some conviction to the journalist, the importance of commercial galleries and professional dealers not only to give their work exposure, but to promote the work with potential collectors, and negotiate the business of the market place. The article refers to Tanabe’s own exclusive contract with Mira Godard Gallery in Montreal, formerly Galérie Agnès Lefort.
Tanabe had his first exhibition with Agnès Lefort in the fall of 1962. He had specifically gone to Montreal to find a good gallery and picked Agnès Lefort because, as he recalls, she was interested in contemporary art, and she had a good reputation and a good location. “Simple as that,” he tells. Did he approach her with a portfolio of work? “Nothing so fancy. I probably had a pocket full of slides with me.”9
He would have done some homework before he first dropped into the gallery at 1504 Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. He would also then meet the young woman, Mira Godard, who had just within the year purchased the gallery from Agnès Lefort, initiating Tanabe’s over 60-year relationship with the gallery as it eventually morphed into Mira Godard Gallery, first in Montreal and then Toronto and Calgary. In 1971 Mira visited Tanabe in New York and offered to pay him a small monthly stipend for exclusive rights to his paintings. This financial assistance provided significant additional support and opportunity to focus on his painting. Over Tanabe’s seven decade career which has consistently continued to the present at Mira Godard Gallery, the gallery has placed his works in numerous private collections as well as most major corporate and museum collections in Canada and U.S.
The hard-edge abstract paintings from 1968 are imposingly scaled and stately. Even so, their logo-like designs hint at landscape formations, and their tightly drawn strategies will continue to underscore, if gently, even the compositions of the soft-edged prairie vistas about to come. The Land X, 1972 (page 37), in the current exhibition, with its recession of fields and forests topped by an infinite sky, is a smaller example of where Tanabe will take us next. Sitting there on the floor in the Godard Gallery where I first saw it, it disconcerted me. In its black frame, its surface finely overlaid with a thin black wash, it looked a little drab, until, with a little time, slowly, it miraculously awoke, vigorous and radiant.
On a grander scale is The Land #23, 1972, which I had recently discovered on a visit to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg. I came upon it at the exit from a sequence of galleries dedicated to the Group of Seven in all their impasto ways. It hung on the outside of the partition wall that punctuated the end of the Group installation, as if turning its back to the past and introducing a yet unknown landscape future.
I had not seen it before, not even in reproduction, so there was the delight of discovery, both for its freshness and its self-assured authority. As per its title, it is of course a landscape, but no direct descendent from the Group. It comes from another direction, almost as if it were a new emergence. Its flat, loose-edged forms can lead independent abstract lives, or they can coalesce into simplified landmasses with the sky above. Colours can be non-referential or naturalistic.
The Land #23 is a scene of land and lakes viewed from overhead, something Tanabe would have seen when flying between Philadelphia or New York and Canada. It is also flat like a stain painting, like a Colour Field painting, the mode that since the mid-1960s, was championed as the most advanced development in abstract painting by the influential critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), both in the US and Canada. And Tanabe, never a slouch, would have been fully alert to these developments in New York, if only from walking 57th Street and visiting the progressive galleries.
It’s not untoward then to take a glance at contemporary stain paintings, the geometric ones of Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Tanabe’s near contemporary, or even better, those of the slightly younger Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), to see just where Tanabe stood. In the 1960s Frankenthaler had abandoned expressive gesture to put her emphasis on more anonymous and amorphous shapes. Speaking of such shapes, as in, for example Flood, 1967, she would also characterize them using geographical terms like, “district” or “territory.” “I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes,” she explains, “worlds and distances held on a flat surface.”10
Frankenthaler, of course, is speaking metaphorically, and if her Flood, for a moment can be read as sitting on the cusp between representation and abstract, she has already cast her lot with the latter. Tanabe in 1972, when he evokes natural terrain, is pointing instead towards the observable world. Towards transitioning there, attending to the procedures of stain painting had its uses. In New York and elsewhere Tanabe took what is useful from the art around him, and repurposed it in accordance with his own evolving needs.
Thus The Land #23, with its transparent washes, may exploit the thinness of stain painting, but Tanabe achieves his surfaces in his own way applying the “one-shot” method that he had perfected while in Japan. He did not paint directly into raw canvas but instead prepared his canvases with layers of sizing as a necessary step before applying his individual colour shapes in single sweeping gestures, a process that allowed for no mistakes and required enormous preparation. Then as his last surface-affirming step, he applied on top an even, thin wash of black paint, its traces caught in the weave of the canvas covering the painting as if by a single tightly stretched material veil (see detail of The Land #23, 1972).
The first of the paintings, like The Land #23, 1972, are composed of flat patterns of colour laid out as if seen from above. Then they come down to earth showing us a low, long but distant horizon underneath an immense sky. In general, the compositions may seem to repeat themselves, but Tanabe’s touch, especially where land meets sky, captures with surprising detail the roll of the land, the shifts in vegetation, the nuanced glow of the light where earth meets sky. Earth and sky that at first glance look monochromatic reveal themselves to be full of incidence. What in the beginning may have been generic landscapes evolve into images of real places. These were the expanses of near empty grasslands and foothills that Tanabe travelled as he crossed the country eastwards and westwards, when based in Banff during much of the 1970s until 1980 when he returned to British Columbia.
As I am writing about the prairie work I get word from the Godard Gallery that another, the last painting selected for the exhibition, has just arrived from Montreal, and I rush in to see it. Strait of Georgia 1/87: View of Howe Sound, 1987, (p. 50-51) is altogether breathtaking. Ten feet long, it’s an epic depiction of the sea and the mountain sailing up through Howe Sound. The composition is locked into place by a crisp horizon line that separates the foreground sea from the silhouettes of the mountains on the far shore. Above dominates a cloudy sky that’s light and bright at the picture’s centre but then darkens at its peripheries with moodier premonitions. This is the land of mist and imminent rain and changeable weather that Tanabe was born into some six decades earlier.
I am shown the painting under differing light levels. When low, sunset pinks whisp in from the right, halo the hills, and set aglow its deepest channels and inlets. At another instant the near mountains, flat and dark, take on heavier weight. Do I see, or do I imagine their reflections tenebrously mirrored in the black band of sea? Throughout the canvas weave, it retains its physical presence, not drawing attention to itself, but nevertheless perceptible.
When the curtain goes up it all looks easy, whether the paintings are large or small like Inside Passage, 14/98: Slingsby Channel, 1998 (p. 69), or the many prints that he did over the decades. Before a painting finally meets the wall, however, it has been preceded sometimes by months of work. In preparation Tanabe may take photos of his subjects and make sketches as aides-mémoire, later to be synthesized, back in the studio. Then there is the work of laying down the multiple layers of paint, the dense pattern of brush strokes from which emerges a visual world at once detailed and grand.
Because the paintings come alive, imbued by the idiosyncrasies of particular places, some have suggested that Tanabe’s BC landscapes are so realistic as to be almost photographic. On the abstraction-to-representation axis, they appear to have reached the naturalistic end. They are rich in visual information, portrait-like. But at the same time there is that crisp horizontal line that runs through the paintings (and the prints), from edge to edge, that asserts itself as the firm backbone of what turns out, on scrutiny, to be formally rigorous compositions. Sometimes in Tanabe’s work his thumb is on the scale favoring the realistic and at other times the abstract. This tug-of-war between landscape illusion and the canvas’ material flatness, even if we sense it only subconsciously, remains fundamental to our perceptual experience.
Where does Tanabe’s work belong in the larger scheme of things? We have seen him alert to postwar progressive Modernist practices, especially Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field Painting. We have seen how he absorbed successive waves of influences, but did so from an independent stance, using what was useful, but never really joining any movement.
Tanabe’s landscapes also crown a long landscape tradition that harkens back to the northern Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in the early 19th century, an artist that Tanabe admires. The two may sometimes share subject matter, but where Friedrich is redolent with human presence, Tanabe remains primordial and remote. Human figures imply narrative, a programmatic approach abandoned by northern Mystical Landscapists by the end of the 19th century and later in Canada by the Group of Seven. Instead of being settings for stories the landscape unfolds itself as a motif for extended contemplation. Friedrich’s deep vistas flatten into Tanabe’s decorative patterns. Expressive formal structures overrule representation. Romanticism cedes to Modernism. This was Tanabe’s route towards his own sublime version of landscape painting, an effortless melding of abstraction and representation. Throughout his eighty-year-long career, Tanabe has been astutely attentive to the art world around him, its changing looks and techniques. But he has always stood independent, his work unique and unassailable.
Dr. Roald Nasgaard
1 My interviews, taped made during studio visits, date to May 6, 2002 and June 7, 2004.
2 Unfootnoted quotations come from our 2002 and 2004 conversations.
3 See, for example, Art Since Mid-Century: The New Internationalism Vol 1, Abstract Art, Greenwich, (New York: Graphic Society, 1971)
and New Art Around the World (New York: Abrams, 1966).
4 Jeffrey Spalding, “Anatomy of a Wave" in Takao Tanabe, (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2005), 114.
5 Seventh Biennial of Canadian Painting, 1968, (Ottawa, National Gallery). Seitz selected five paintings from 1967 and 1968 for the exhibition.
In the catalogue they are titled simply by numbers: No.2, No. 4, No. 5, etc.
6 Author in conversation with Tanabe in his studio May 5, 2002.
7 Email from Anona Thorne, Jan. 5, 2026.
8 Ann Walker, “Tanabe stresses importance of commercial gallery’s role,” Regina Leader Post, Nov. 20, 1974, 7.
9 Email from Anona Thorne, Feb. 9, 2026.
10 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80712.
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