George Tsutakawa

Artist

• Pronunciation: SOO-tah-kah-wah
• Born: February 22, 1910
• Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
• Died: December 18, 1997
• Place of death: Seattle, Washington

In over sixty years as a painter and sculptor, George Tsutakawa produced art that creatively combined his observations of nature with forms and styles adapted from Japanese, European, and American traditions. His monumental public fountains are considered his best-known and most influential work.

Area of achievement: Art

Early Life

George Tsutakawa was born in Seattle, Washington, the fourth child of Shozo and Hisa Tsutakawa. His parents came to the United States from Japan in 1905, and Shozo Tsutakawa ran an export-import business based on trade between Japan and the United States. The business prospered and the family lived comfortably in an affluent Seattle neighborhood.

Tsutakawa grew up speaking English and attended elementary school in Seattle until 1917, when he and his older brother were sent to Fukuyama, Japan, to live with their maternal grandmother, Mutsu Naito. When Hisa Tsutakawa died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, Shozo sent the rest of his children to live with their grandmother as well. She introduced the nine Tsutakawa siblings to classical Japanese arts. Tsutakawa also grew close to his paternal grandfather, Kiichi Tsutakawa, an expert in Japanese flower arranging and other traditional arts.

Strongly inspired by young Japanese artists who had studied in Paris, Tsutakawa dropped out of high school to become an artist. This unsettled his father, who had returned to Japan, and he sent Tsutakawa back to Seattle in 1927. Working hard to relearn English, Tsutakawa returned to school while working part time with his uncles in the grocery branch of the family business. Art remained his passion, however, and he studied printmaking and watercolor in high school until he graduated in 1932. Tsutakawa went on to attend the University of Washington, where he graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in 1937.

Life’s Work

In the 1930s, Tsutakawa joined a diverse network of Seattle-based artists, including Mark Tobey and Morris Graves (later internationally recognized as leaders in the Northwest school of painting), as well as Kenjiro Nomura and Kamekichi Tokita, Tsutakawa’s close friends and painters of urban scenes. While Tsutakawa won some art competitions and earned the esteem of Seattle artists, his livelihood depended on his job with the family business, and his family’s circumstances changed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Blocked legally from becoming American citizens, Tsutakawa’s father and uncles were considered enemies of the United States, and their business was confiscated.

Much of Tsutakawa’s extended family in the United States was relocated to internment camps in 1942, but Tsutakawa himself was inducted into the US Army instead. Although he trained for combat, health problems and his bilingual skills led to a position teaching Japanese to army officers in Minnesota. Throughout World War II, Tsutakawa perfected his artistic skills and studied art whenever possible, occasionally painting murals and portraits. He traveled to Chicago and New York to tour museums and art exhibits.

When the war ended and Tsutakawa returned to Seattle, he decided to commit himself fully to art. In 1947, he married Ayame Iwasa, whom he had met while visiting family in the internment camp where she was being held, and joined the faculty of the University of Washington’s School of Art. He earned his master’s degree in fine arts in 1950 and remained at the School of Art until 1976.

In the 1950s, although he had won praise for his work in many genres, Tsutakawa emerged mainly as an important sculptor. He worked first with wood, drawing upon Himalayan obos, or stacked stones, for inspiration. When he was commissioned to design a fountain for a downtown Seattle plaza in 1958, he turned to metal, creating patterns in the flowing water by having it move across a variety of surfaces and shapes. Additional commissions quickly followed; in all, Tsutakawa created over seventy public fountains in the United States, Canada, and Japan.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Tsutakawa alternated between designing distinctive public sculptures and creating intimate ink-stroke paintings in Japanese sumi style. His work often reflected his close examination of shapes in natural settings, and he turned more frequently for inspiration to the shores and mountains near his Seattle home.

Significance

Upon his death in 1997, George Tsutakawa left behind a powerful legacy of artistic accomplishment and influence. From the late 1960s to the 1990s, he received numerous major awards, including lifetime achievement recognitions from the emperor of Japan, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the University of Washington. His work as an educator and spokesperson for the arts helped shape artistic careers for many young people, including his own four children, and his ability to create beautiful works in almost every artistic medium remains noteworthy. Tsutakawa’s work reflected a unique fusion of classical Japanese art traditions with modern European and American styles, the product of his diverse life experiences and constant desire to experiment with new combinations of materials and genres.

Bibliography

Chang, Gordon, Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, eds. Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Print. An overview of Asian American art history that situates Tsutakawa in a critical discussion of whether Asian American art can be distinguished from work by non–Asian Americans.

Kingsbury, Martha. George Tsutakawa. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1990. Print. Includes dozens of illustrations of Tsutakawa’s artwork, analysis of his artistic development, and extensive biographical material.

Poon, Irene. Leading the Way: Asian American Artists of the Older Generation. Wenham: Gordon College, 2001. Print. Useful for comparing Tsutakawa’s art with that of other Asian American artists active in his lifetime.

Wechsler, Jeffrey, ed. Asian Traditions, Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945–1970. New York: Abrams, 1997. Print. Includes numerous references to Tsutakawa, as well as an essay on Asian American artists in Seattle.