Sadao Watanabe (1913-1996) Japanese, "The Last Supper" Woodblock Print. Depicts Jesus and the disciples partaking of the famous final meal together in the Japanese mingei (folk art) style. Signed in pencil with red seal bottom right. Dated 1973 in pencil bottom left. Framed. Paper with information taped to the back. 

Overall Size: 11 1/2 x 13 in. 

Sight Size: 7 1/2 x 9 in. 

Sadao Watanabe was born on July 7th, 1913 in Tokyo. His father died when he was ten years old, so he dropped out of school and became an apprentice in a dyer’s shop to support his mother. He worked primarily at sketching patterns and dyeing clothes, and his earliest surviving art pieces showed traditional Buddhist imagery and the influence of sumi-e (“black ink”) painting. At the age of seventeen a Christian woman in his neighborhood invited him to attend church with her, and within a few months Watanabe received baptism. The Christian population of Japan had always been small, particularly after it was banned during the Edo Period for roughly 250 years, and Watanabe began to explore methods of honoring his new faith through his art. In 1937 Watanabe saw an exhibition at the Folk Art Museum, established by Yanagi Sōetsu (1889-1961), father of the Japanese mingei (folk art) movement. Particularly influenced by the work of Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984), Watanabe began attending a mingei study group in which Keisuke taught his Okinawan katazome technique of stencilling and dyeing. Keisuke became his mentor, and encouraged Watanabe’s focus on portraying the Christian gospel rendered in the mingei style. His most famous piece, The Last Supper, depicts the disciples in kimonos, drinking sake and eating sushi. His Japanese contextualization of Biblical images and scenes is considered ground-breaking today, but his work was met with little interest in his own country until after World War II. Watanabe used both kozo paper from the mulberry tree and momigami (kneaded paper) that he crumpled by hand to give a rough quality to his prints, adhering to the mingei insistence on incorporating natural materials and pigments into their work. In 1958 Watanabe received first prize at the Modern Japanese Print Exhibition held in New York City for The Bronze Serpent, and his piece Kiku was featured in James Michener’s “The Modern Japanese Print,” a book that introduced ten sōsaku-hanga artists to Western audiences. During President Lyndon Johnson’s administration Watanabe’s prints were hung in the White House, and he worked with many Japanese-American advocacy groups to help combat anti-Asian racism throughout the 1970s and 80s. He passed away on January 8th, 1996, and today his pieces can be found in the Vatican Museum, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

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