KANEMITSU!

REDCAT

Mickey Mouse played a large role in a series of Kanemitsu's work

By Catherine Wagley

Japanese pop art on display in Chinatown

Tongue-in-cheek joie de vivre is a rare thing in abstract expressionism, a movement born of war and machismo and bent on its ability to take itself seriously. For this reason, Matsumo Kanemitsu's cleverly whimsical abstractions, currently on view in KANEMITSU! at Sabina Lee Gallery, are enigmas. They clearly grow out of the intuitive, visceral language canonized by expressionism's post-war kings – Kanemitsu particularly admired Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline – but they also feel like inside jokes. They poke subtle fun at themselves, dropping obscure pop references, indulging in decorative patterns, and taking beauty lightly.

Kanemitsu's biography feels like a bit of an inside joke as well, though one he fell into rather than made. Born to Japanese parents in Ogden, Utah, he spent his childhood and adolescence near Hiroshima. At age 18, he convinced his father to let him return "home" to the United States. Soon after his arrival, the U.S. entered World War II, and Kanemitsu devotedly enlisted – what better way to embrace Americanism? This meant he had to forfeit his Japanese citizenship but, as it turned out, didn't mean he would be treated as a full citizen in the States. After Pearl Harbor, he was detained and interrogated; while stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, he and other Japanese-American enlistees were locked in a garage when President Roosevelt came to speak; then, when he finally went overseas, he was asked to stay in France, first in Nice then in Grasse, as a bartender while the rest of his outfit went to Japan.

But living in Grasse worked nicely for Kanemitsu. He found cheap studio space in a brothel, and began painting often. At one point, the madam and call girls he lived with cajoled him into accompanying them to church. "They were the best customers of the Catholic church," Kanemitsu recalled in a 1977 interview, "big donations they give to them." Kanemitsu didn't want to go, but the madam told him he had to, "Because, after all, you are one of us."

"I'm not a prostitute," he argued.

"You are," she said, "You just don't sell sex, but you're going to sell the paintings. Rich people will buy your work." She had a point.

"Am I going to confess to the father because I paint pictures?" Kanemitsu asked.

Whether or not Kanemitsu confessed, he continued to paint, working as an artist in France, New York, and, from the late 1950s until his 1992 death, in Los Angeles. He produced most of the work included in the Sabina Lee exhibition while in L.A. Ink paintings like #17 Drip (1971), in which red literally drips down the page, or H-9 (1965), dominated by an organically smudged dip of black, glory in the inherent properties of material, celebrating the ways ink blurs and bleeds. The Mickey Mouse Series (1970) – sometimes called the Mikey Mouse Series, a play on "Mike," the nickname Jackson Pollock gave Kanemitsu – glories in material, too, but has a more subtle, irreverent twist.

All lithographs, the images in the Mickey suite are sensual and unpretentiously precise. Black-inked shapes fill the 8-by-10-inch space of the full-bodied prints, and the ever-present Mickey Mouse ears likely go unnoticed by viewers who don't know to look. But once you've located one pair of ears, others begin popping out everywhere. And this is perhaps the joke: Images that, at first, seem as inspired as anything Motherwell would have made are actually the modernist equivalent of Where's Waldo?, playful spin-offs that turn the sublime into a game of hide-and-seek. Originally, collectors who purchased the whole Mickey set would receive the lithographs in a hand-crafted black box with big round ears.

When Kanemitsu died, his L.A. Times obituary included the following observation: "Over the years, some critics came to feel that his paintings began to lose some of their visceral edge and vibrancy, centering more on style than meaning." It's a funny statement, and one that seems to miss the point. Style and meaning are indistinguishable in the work of Kanemitsu, an artist who came into his own as a military man living in a brothel, determined to be an American painter in an America that wasn't sure what to do with him. He made American styles – the emotive marks of abstract expressionism and the joviality of a newly emerging cartoon culture – his own, suggesting that identity is not such a sacred thing and that flip pop references can coexist with magnificent abstraction.

ADVERTISEMENT