From natural and political disaster, she became one of America's great artists

Washington Post

21 hours ago

Great Works, In Focus
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#194 From natural and political disaster, she became one of America's great artists
Miyoko Ito survived an earthquake, incarceration and illness. Her transporting paintings defied ideas about abstract art.
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Column by Sebastian Smee
June 12, 2025 at 11:42 a.m. EDT
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By the time she painted this mysterious work in 1975, Miyoko Ito — the Chicago-based painter born to Japanese parents in California in 1918 — had survived the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923; spent six months incarcerated with her husband in a detention facility for Japanese Americans during World War II; raised two children; beaten breast cancer (a double mastectomy); and pulled through a second nervous breakdown, the first having occurred during childhood. She was producing about one painting a month.
These paintings, it's now widely acknowledged, amount to one of the most powerful bodies of work in modern American art.
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If you've never heard of Ito, don't worry. I hadn't either until 2023. That's when I walked into one of Matthew Marks's galleries in New York and almost immediately fell into a hyper-suggestible state bordering on hypnosis.
The works in that show have mostly ended up in museums and private collections. This one, untitled, is on view at Glenstone. Although it is abstract, it quietly evokes things the mind already knows: a landscape, forms of botanical life, even a head with wispy remnants of hair.
Formally, the painting combines patterned, curving shapes with rectilinear forms, its coloring suggesting the mellow, radiant glow of worn velvet. Ito used graduated shifts in value — both tonal and chromatic — to convey atmosphere and spatial recession. But the way she uses these mechanisms is mysterious. The shapes seem to shift and float. You feel that, if you were to turn away and turn back a minute later, they might have changed irrevocably, as happens to the sky above the horizon at dusk.
When you get close to the canvas, you can see how fastidiously Ito brushed on her paint, which in some places is thick enough to produce cakey textures and in others so thin that the tooth of the canvas and the underdrawing remain visible.
There are unexplained abrasions in some areas, such as the bottom left corner of this painting. And in many of her mature works you can find a single, thin, meandering line — sometimes attached to a small circle, evoking an escaped party balloon or a slender line of reflected moonlight in broken water.
For years, abstract painting in America was swept up in an ideology of progress and purity. Abstract artists — if they wanted to be taken seriously — felt obliged to meet certain criteria: patterned, 'allover' composition (implying infinite extension in all directions); extreme reduction; concealed brushstrokes; and a ruthless evacuation of all figurative content.
Now that the critical orthodoxies of those years have collapsed, the artists who resisted them — preferring to follow their own paths, often working in regional shadows — seem all the more interesting.
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Ito's work, which draws a little from Paul Klee and has affinities with some of her peers in the Chicago imagist school, isn't just 'interesting'; it's beautiful, shimmering and enduringly enigmatic. You sense that she had, besides the world seen by everyone, another world of her own, accessible to no one but her. So unaccountably alive are her paintings — yet so restrained and distilled — that they suggest portals to states of consciousness that stubbornly elude description.
You do turn away from them, inevitably, but always with the fear that you may be bidding farewell to what the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer described as 'a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route.'