Sueo Serisawa

Sueo Serisawa trained in Los Angeles with his father, Yoichi Serisawa, a calligrapher and successful commercial artist, and at the Long Beach Polytechnic High School with George Barker, who specialized in plein-air landscape painting. From 1932 to 1933, Serisawa studied at Otis Art Institute under the New York realist Alexander Brook, a visiting professor at the school and specialist in figure studies.

On the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed, Arthur Millier featured Serisawa in his popular Los Angeles Times column “The Art Thrill of the Week.” He also had a solo show of plein-air paintings of the rural and urban environment at the Los Angeles County Museum, where he was being honored as “artist of the month.” With America’s entrance into World War II, Serisawa’s civic and artistic status in Los Angeles changed.

In February of 1942, under the threat of internment, Serisawa left Los Angeles for the Midwest. He studied for a year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York in 1943. His friendships there with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Isamu Noguchi, as well as exposure to the expressionist work of Max Beckman and the abstract expressionism of Hans Hoffman, contributed to the bold and expressive melding of East and West in Serisawa’s work beginning in the late 1940s.