At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism

May 7, 2022–Feb 26, 2023

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Born 1887 in Tokyo, Japan
Died 1924 in Los Angeles, CA

Taizo Kato immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1906, eventually settling in downtown Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where he opened a series of businesses processing, printing, and selling photographs. He was also an important member of the Japanese American community of photographer who sought to combine the soft-focus, elusive qualities of pictorial photography with Japanese artistic traditions. The group’s goal of fusing Japanese and Western sensibilities was reflected in its choice of name, Shaku-do-sha—a reference to shakudō, a bronze-colored alloy of copper and gold. For Kato, this cultural cross-fertilization entailed adopting the pictorialist movement’s blurring of details to engender a mysterious mood of reverie as well as utilizing notan, the Japanese method of massing dark and light areas to flatten the image and emphasize its atmospheric qualities. By featuring large areas of open space, he endowed photographs such as Bowl with Two Flowers with a sense of absolute stillness and the “emptiness of mind” he associated with Zen Buddhism.

A sepia photography with a short vase and two white flowers beside it

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At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism

Taizo Kato

7

Bowl with Two Flowers, c. 1920

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At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism

Taizo Kato

7

Bowl with Two Flowers, c. 1920

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

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in the Whitney's collection