Additional Images

Provenance:

The Women’s Committee of the Art Gallery of Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Ian M. Thom et al., Takao Tanabe, Douglas & McIntyre, Toronto, 2005, page 110 and page 58 for a similar work entitled Untitled (NYC), 1952, reproduced.

Note:

“Tanabe developed the confidence to refrain. Many of his works embrace the pleasures of near monochrome, constrained middle greys, rounded landforms and non-agitated, curvilinear flowing lines, generating tranquil, transcendent pictures.”

Tanabe’s White Paintings were a series of works that the artist began in England and continued to paint through to 1958 in Vancouver. Titles for most of these works, explained Tanabe, were formulated only once the paintings had left the studio for exhibition. They were often drawn from poetry which Tanabe was reading at the time. Here & There a Dewdrop Glistening seems no exception to this method of naming. Painted in the year prior to his first trip to Japan and in the final year of the White Painting series, the work exudes a refrain of colour over geometry. In swoops of shades and pigment, Tanabe creates phantoms, passionate whispers on the canvas.

See Lot 33 for another work from this series.