Lot 144
TAKAO TANABE
Additional Images
Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature:
Elissa Barnard, “Tanabe Helped Re-establish Roots of Canadian Art,” The Chronicle Herald (June 3, 2006): F6.
Note:
In 1972, Takao Tanabe left New York to accept a summer teaching position at the Banff School of Fine Arts, a move that marked a new stage in his career and an even more radical change in his work. Tanabe took a week to drive from Winnipeg to Banff with the intention of painting the prairies, taking photographs when a scene caught his eye. While the prairies have led other Canadian artists towards abstraction, these paintings were to become Tanabe’s first representational landscapes. According to Elissa Barnard, Tanabe later stated that the landscape is “really rather simple abstraction, the band of sky and the band of land.”