Sueo Serisawa (1910 - 2004)

Portrait of a Potted Plant, 1943, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 16 x 13 inches, annotations verso read "#79 / Portrait of a Potted Plant / Sueo Serisawa / 1943 / DC"

$3750

Sueo Serisawa was a well-respected Los Angeles-based modernist painter. He was born in 1910 in Yokohama, Japan, and immigrated to the United States in 1918. His father, Yoichi Serisawa, was also a professional artist who heavily influenced Sueo from a young age. In 1921, Serisawa and his family moved to Long Beach, California, where he attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School and studied with George Baker. Yoichi died in 1927, and Sueo’s mother returned to Japan, leaving Sueo and his brother, Ikuo, in California. Upon graduation, Serisawa studied at the Otis Art Institute from 1932 to 1933 under Alexander Brook, while Ikuo pursued photography and filmmaking. In 1934, the Serisawa brothers collaborated on a silent film Nisei Parade, which featured among its actors, Mary Tanaka, who Sueo married in 1937.

Serisawa’s first solo gallery exhibition took place in 1937 in Long Beach. He soon was noticed by Los Angeles Times art critic Athur Millier who praised Serisawa’s efforts. He won prizes at the California State Fair and had a solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 1940 at Dalzell Hatfield Gallery which represented Serisawa for more than a decade. During this period, Serisawa exhibited in group shows in Southern California which included other Japanese American artists such as Benji Okubo, Mine Okubo, Hideo Date, and Henry Sugimoto. Serisawa’s second very well reviewed solo exhibition opened at Los Angeles’ Museum of History, Science, and Art (LACMA), on December 7, 1941, the same day as the bombing of Peal Harbor.

With the outbreak of war and to avoid internment under Executive Order 9066, Sueo, Mary and their daughter, Susan Eiko, joined approximately five thousand other Japanese Americans, who left the West Coast. The Serisawas first moved to Colorado in 1942, where nearly two thousand other Japanese Americans also fled. After living in Denver for about a year, the family moved to Chicago in 1943 where Sueo studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From Chicago, the Serisawas moved to New York, where Sueo associated with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Isamu Noguchi and lived in Greenwich Village. During the war, the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery continued to support Serisawa, who sent his work from Chicago and New York to Los Angeles, where it continued to be well received. Serisawa also exhibited at New York’s Lilienfeld Gallery and in Boston, together with other East Coast Japanese American artists.

Serisawa moved back home to California in 1947 to teach, first at the Kahn Institute and later at Scripps College, Claremont College, and the Laguna Beach School of Art. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1953 and in 1955, Serisawa, together with Millard Sheets, embarked on a trip to Japan where Serisawa became influenced by Zen Buddhism and Japanese calligraphy. Serisawa’s late work became abstract, and he often worked in sumi-e.

Serisawa is also represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the O'Brien Art Foundation, and other institutional collections. He is listed in Who Was Who in American and other standard references.