How League Artists Organized America’s First Postwar Exhibition of Japanese Art

In May of 1947, in a gallery in the back of a bookstore located in the subway arcade at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City, the Tribune Subway Gallery opened America’s first postwar exhibition of Japanese modern art. A short review in the New York Times, stated, “This interesting show includes forceful portraits by Yamomota (sic), a nude by Hiromati (sic), a delicate landscape by Minoru Tanabe, and strong echoes of the war in sculptural figure compositions by Fukuzawa.” The obscure gallery had 10,000 people a day pass by and relied on walk-ins, word-of-mouth, and resolute individuals—artists, critics, collectors, historians—for its survival. Within the gallery there resided leaders who saw in the drawings, paintings, and sculptures a connection to humanity, nothing less than man’s hope, the antidote to fascism, war, and man’s brutality. I know this because my mother, Bernice Sacks, a student at the Art Students League at the time, who in 1949 became the director of the gallery, was one of those leaders. What I did not know until several months ago was the singular role that my father, Raymond Sacks, played in bringing about this exhibition of Japanese artists.

Professor Alicia Volk, an art historian at the University of Maryland, contacted me earlier this year to ask what I knew about the exhibition, entitled Fifteen New Artists in Postwar Japan. A puzzling question. I knew that the gallery published a guest curatorial essay for each exhibition. My mother had written at least one of them, and I had in my possession the gallery’s publications. In response to Professor Volk, I went to a trendy West Village café to re-examine the article accompanying the Japanese modern art show. The byline reads: Ray de Monte. I did not yet know that this was my father. The essay is important because, as Professor Volk put it, the author “was looking at Japanese art through fresh eyes, not through a Western lens. Art historians were not doing that at that time.” Moreover, she added, the essay had an influence on one of the most important painters of the period, Ichiro Fukuzawa (1889–1992). It was clearly time for me to reread the de Monte essay:

Fukuzawa, a pre-war surrealist, has left the imaginative world and its symbols, has stripped his people naked, portraying them in fundamental conflict. Ignoring facial characteristics, race or nationality, his men, and women, not only cry out against injustice, but struggle for human dignity. His debt to the post-impressionists, to Rodin, is clear. His native heritage comes through, however, in the use of his palette. This is strikingly evident in his attempt to convey a unique experience, the atom bombing of Hiroshima. Though the composition itself reminds one of the Buddhist conceptions of hell, it is the bright yellow, used as a background against other bright colors, to convey grief, death, and destruction which is inconceivable for the Western artist.

According to Professor Volk, Fukuzawa cited these words as having shaped his thinking and future work.

It was remarkable, too, she informed me, not only because it was produced at a time when Americans remained hostile to the Japanese, but also because it demonstrated an awareness of the situation in which Japanese artists found themselves following the war. She told me that during the war years artists were compelled to use their skills to produce propaganda because “the war secured a highly visible public role for contemporary art, as artists and their artworks were no longer viewed as elitist or irrelevant, but vital to the national cause.” The government now defined artists as war painters.

From 1941 to 1945 any artist who did not overtly support the war came under suspicion. Accused of being a pacificist, Fukuzawa was arrested and sent to jail owing to his relationships with French surrealists known to be members of the Communist Party. The artist had lived in Paris prior to the war. His images of struggling human figures were also seen as making an anti-war statement. Fukuzawa denied the accusations but spent seven months in jail. When the government released him, Fukazawa accommodated himself to the war effort as he was expected to do.

Tsuguhara Fujita (1886–1968), also featured in the Tribune Subway Gallery exhibition, was well-known prior to the war. Associated with the School of Paris, influenced by Western artists, his paintings of cats and nude women fetching high prices. Fujita returned from Paris to Japan in 1938 and joined the Imperial Arts Academy. Celebrated as a patriot for his works in support of the Imperial cause, he became the director of the Army Art Association. After the war, Fujita would be blacklisted by the art community in Japan and would return to Paris where he spent the rest of his life. In contrast, Fukuzawa, opposing all the associations presented by Fujita, would soon take a place among those artists who portray war as hell. Works by these two prominent artists were among the ones brought to New York in the winter of 1947.

After the war, the United States Army told Japanese artists not to depict the devastation of the war. No one wants to see gruesome images, the argument went, or, one supposes, the horror of the atom bombs. Plus, American soldiers wanted souvenirs to bring home and had money to pay for them. If artists, in need of income could churn out pictures of Mount Fuji, a beautiful woman, pleasing landscapes, and gorgeous flowers, along with a fan, soldiers would pay for them. These artists were therefore caught between classical traditions, the dictates of propaganda, Japan’s defeat, and overwhelming confrontations with suffering and death. It is in this moment that a Times Square gallery committed to an exhibition of Japanese modern art.

This historic show was the thirteenth exhibition at Tribune Subway Gallery under the direction of Friedrich Georg Alexan, a German émigré who founded the gallery in 1945. The gallery was committed to unknown artists. It did not take a commission on any original works. It did not exist to make a profit.

The gallery’s first show was dedicated to the homecoming of G.I.’s., and to work created by soldiers. Many exhibitions would continue to focus on the war in Europe. The gallery featured works from graphic artists, painters, sculptors, and more pointedly, works by women, men, Black, White, from the US, Latin America, Mexico, Europe, and China. Many of the artists were teachers and students at the Art Students League. The gallery survived by selling reprints of masterworks, mostly printed in Europe, and through its own Touchstone Press produced some monographs on famous artists to support itself, including work by Kollwitz, Goya, Van Gogh, Grosz, Daumier, and others. Prior to the show of Japanese artists there was a show entitled Eight of the Merchant Marine and it was soon followed by Art of the G.I. Art was political. It was about the war.

The New York Times, Art Digest, ARTnews and the Japanese paper, Hokubei Shinpo (North American News) in New York and the magazine Josei Kurubu in Tokyo commented on the show; many publications ran ads for it. Art historians are now citing this exhibition in their studies of postwar Japanese art. Articles and comments on the exhibition and ephemera from the exhibition itself are all that is currently known about the works shown during the eight weeks that the exhibition was on view. We don’t know, as of now, all the artworks that were in the show, but we have the artists names, and we know how the pictures got there.

Two Navy Communications Officers were responsible for the show. One was James. V. Coleman, Captain U.S.M.C.R., who, after six months of service in the Marines during the war, chose to go back in 1946 to, in his words, “work on the reorganization of Japanese Communications System at GHQ.” The other officer was my father, Raymond Sacks, USNR, who reached Okinawa on October 1, 1945. Both arrived in Japan with an interest in art. Coleman immediately went the Ueno Park Art Museum and to Gallery Hosegawa in Tokyo to familiarize himself with traditional styles and new works. From that moment on he wanted to build an art collection. Among many other works, he would bring home eight by Fukuzawa. We know from the records that Coleman spent six months in Tokyo, and then returned to New York early in 1947. It was a short time later that the exhibition featuring his collection opened at the Tribune Subway Gallery.

It seems unlikely that these works were for sale. In a brief note published in the gallery’s brochure, Coleman wrote: “With the kind cooperation and enthusiasm of Mr. Alexan, I am happy to show my collection at the Tribune Subway Gallery.” Coleman further states that artwork from his collection was on exhibit at the Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo the previous year. The entertainment complex, known as the Radio City Music Hall for Allied personnel, was named after the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who died at the battle at Okinawa toward the very end of the war. Japanese citizens were not allowed into this complex unless they were entertainers or workers. Newspaper clippings of this exhibition reveal two works by Fukuzawa. One remains today with the family while the fate of the other one is unknown. In June of 1947, ARTnews published a drawing by Fukuzawa entitled Final Phase, part of a series known as Fantasies Inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The mystery remains that no one has seen the Coleman Collection since the Tribune Subway Gallery exhibition closed. The Fukuzawa Memorial Museum in Nakatsu, Japan, continues to search for the works. Perhaps the art is here in New York. Perhaps, too, it was at the Ernie Pyle Theater in 1946 that Coleman and my father crossed paths.

My father’s arrival, two months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was less auspicious. As an officer who reported to the Port Director, he had some privileges and position, but mostly he served his commander, waited for orders, counted his naval points, and worked hour after hour in a windowless room below deck, longing to go home. As he moved from Pearl Harbor to Guam, to Okinawa, to Matsuyama, located less than two hours from Hiroshima, he toted a 150-pound seabag full of books, desperate to engage his mind and to avoid the drinking and carousing that characterized so much of life around him. In a letter he describes how his weighty seabag got lost after Typhoon Louise, which occurred shortly after his arrival in Japan. Wet and miserable, days later he accidently stumbles across the bag. He rushes to secure the bag which causes him to be late for a meeting with an Admiral. A court martial offence. But his books! What could be more important to a Jewish intellectual stuck in a bloated Navy operation, with confusion and mayhem everywhere, than his books! And the first one he is reading, started back in Hawaii: Ideals of the East by Okakura Kakuzo, a classic text. Happily, the Admiral overlooked his tardiness and his bag filled with novels, sociology, history, philosophy, and poetry remained with him.

Not knowing where he would end up or what would happen next, Raymond wrote daily to my mother Bernice, describing everything that happened to him, with all the ardor and passion of a frustrated young man longing for the woman he adores. He implored her to draw, to paint, to go to New York and study at the Art Students League, to follow her heart. “Talent leads to genius in the sweat of desire. Paint. Study. Paint!” he wrote furiously. It must have been overwhelming for her to receive his daily appeals, his unsatiable hunger. She did go to New York to study at Art Students League and what she drew were images of him, which, not surprisingly, were of him reading. She sent him drawings which took weeks and weeks to reach him. Months passed. His work was both tedious and demanding, punctuated by boredom. He went in circles trying to figure out when the Navy would discharge him. It was during these long days and nights that the twenty-six-year-old naval officer found a way to go walkabout on his own. He got lost. He walked along roads where he found tombs built into the hills, where the ashes of the dead were placed in vases atop a bed of shells. He made friends with a small boy who led him through the countryside and back to the port. He went into homes and made friends.

He developed relationships with the Kasagi and Sakamoto families. Bit by bit, he began to observe, learn, and participate in a culture different from his own. They introduced him to the tea ceremony. He shared with his friends one of Bernice’s realistic and humorous portraits of him, non-idealized, which led to discussions of aesthetics. His friends insisted that he place the drawing on the table so that Bernice could be with them, a gesture which touched his heart. What ensued during a long dinner was a discussion of philosophy and why images of bamboo resonated with meaning.

Gone were the English books. Here was an American, interested in individual expression, engaging with the traditions of Japanese life understood through the changing landscape. Arguments ensued, barely understood given the language difficulty, but the feelings were grasped by all. Raymond was part of the conquering force, in the home of the vanquished enemy, with a family, each trying to understand the other, with art as the focus of their mutual effort. Touched by Ray’s love for his wife, the Sakamoto family presents him with a gift. Hidden and protected during the war, it is a red silk Kimono to bring back to Bernice. “Okusan kirei. Kimono Kirei.” Beautiful wife. Beautiful kimono.

For me, like many others after the death of a parent, there were discoveries. I discovered after my mother died in 2013 more than four hundred pages of letters written to her by my father. I was ten when my father died in 1965; my baby brother not yet three. I’ve had fractured memories, mostly the words of others. But now I have his words. His thoughts. Not only are these letters full of words that tell me about his time in Japan and his love for my mother, but they also tell me about him, who he once was. Was there a thread that I could feel, claim, which would connect me to him? A 1961 portrait of my father by Larry Rivers hung in our living room since I was a child. Large scale, it had a commanding presence and was the first thing you saw when you walked into our home. My mother when she looked at is, always said, “he’s appearing and disappearing.”

Raymond wrote these letters while he was drinking the water, breathing the air, walking the streets of Hiroshima, unknowingly inhaling the atomic-bomb-produced particles that would one day kill him. Lonely and cold, the carbon dioxide fumes from charcoal fires giving him headaches, he wrote:

The look of agony on the faces of the trees is indescribable, twisted in the most horrible shapes, completely naked but for a few slabs of bark remaining. Not a leaf anywhere, ash brown roots ripped from the ground to lie bare and dead, broken limbs and dust everywhere. Unsmiling people who move with reluctance despite the cold and junk. People still searching for items amidst all the littered mass, collecting iron, wire, and mashed remains of one thing or another. There are so many afflictions. It is heartbreaking to see little babies covered in running sores and scabs. (Hiroshima, 1945)

Spotlighted by the American and Japanese press that reviewed the Tribune Subway Gallery’s Fifteen Japanese Artists was Takashi Nakayama’s painting entitled Tokyo Orphans. Notwithstanding references to other works and artists in the show, it is the only other work which we know with certainty was in the exhibition. Professor Volk speculates that the gallery—that is, Alexan, Bernice, James, and Raymond—may have titled this painting along with the others. It is highly unlikely that the artists themselves would have given these works provocative titles, given the climate in Japan at that time. But in New York, the titles could and did draw attention to the show. Tokyo Orphans portrays two young children—sweet, bereft, poorly dressed—but nothing close to the horror on the ground.

In In Search of Lost Time, Proust writes that we “investigate and re-investigate pain.” I have never thought of myself as an orphan, though others, particularly older relatives, did. Loss, that was familiar. Imagine my surprise while sitting in a Manhattan café in 2022, reading the 1947 exhibition essay by “Ray de Monte” when I suddenly realize it is a pseudonym for my father. I had read the essay before, but before I had read the letters, I had failed to comprehend its meaning for me. Right there, staring at me, placed at the end of the brochure, was a one sentence description of the author: art critic, a young lawyer in the US Navy who had traveled in Japan during the war. I began to giggle, stunned and in wonder, as everything in his letters to my mother correlated so perfectly with the essay. I recognized him.

In the letters, my father describes his solitary walks in the Japanese hills, his terrible loneliness, and the beauty of suddenly coming upon a Shinto shrine. He uses all his capacity to summon words to describe the colors he saw in the sunsets, the blazes of fiery yellow and orange, while all else is ashen and in turmoil. The kimono given to Ray for his wife by the Sakamoto family was red, with exquisite yellow and gold embroidery on heavy luxurious silk, and that kimono had long been mine, hanging in a closet. Now I know that color was his solace and would be part of mine. The yellow and orange in my mother’s portrait of him. I have come to refer to the picture as The Reader. More color. I can see my father, more of who he was, walking in those hills, in the cold, the wet, the grey, and seeing, in the sunset over the turbulent waters and overcast skies, promise. His energy for life amid tragedy, his finding warmth in two Japanese homes. Here was a way out of the horror. Here was hope. He wrote:

The sun, a tremendous fire ball was but a few feet above the horizon, but for a few indistinct white clouds overhead, and as always, the eye traveled through the shades of light blue to pale. It crossed the blueish grey clouds, orange and red tufts, there was no white, there was no black, but purple and blue and orange and red and spotted around the sky, unregulated and unattached, everything still in the sharp air. Matsuyama, December 1945.

Professor Volk and others are still looking for the missing Coleman Collection, searching for greater understanding of Japanese postwar modern art. Later there were other Tribune Subway Gallery exhibitions—my parents would drive across America to meet with artists in Mexico. There will be more discoveries. Other shows. I have found my thread. What moved my father then, moves me now. The small gallery at the back of the bookstore down in the subway below the crossroads of the world had captured a truth for me.

‍