In Memory of Shozo Nagano
1928-2008

SHOZO NAGANO: LIVING SIMPLY AND ABUNDANTLY
by Edward Moran

It seems appropriate that Jim Thorpe artist Shozo Nagano should have established his studio in the feudal quarters of old Mauch Chunk. The Japanese-born artist hails from Kanazawa, a city on the northern coast of Honshu island that was recently described by French travel writer Olivier Thereau as “a small city full of charm, where a lot of old neighborhoods have been kept intact throughout the years.” Though the Asa Packer mansion, seat of Carbon County’s nineteenth-century feudal shogunate, was erected only in the 1860s, one can easily imagine how an expatriate Japanese artist might derive sustenance from the cairns and crevices of this town precariously perched in the crack of the earth.

It has now been more than half a century since Nagano left Kanazawa on a lifelong artistic pilgrimage that has taken him to Jim Thorpe after dalliances in Tokyo, Santiago (Chile), New York City and Brooklyn. He studied at Kanazawa Fine Arts University during the chaotic days of Occupied Japan, when the devastated nation was trying to reinvent itself after its recent forays into imperial militarism. Like many other Japanese artists and intellectuals of this period, Nagano sought spiritual sustenance in the writings of Western writers—in his case, Rainier Maria Rilke and Romain Rolland, among others—in a fretful search to reestablish the nation’s moral foundations.

During this period, Nagano began showing his work in Tokyo galleries as part of the “Timism” group: a loose association of abstract artists whose manifesto sought to kindle a modern Japanese aesthetic on the embers of the nation’s damped fire. In the early 1960s, he resolved to trade the relative certainties of his homeland for the life of an expatriate artist. He initially sailed across the Pacific on a tramp steamer bound for Santiago, Chile, where he could explore for the first time his vision vis-à-vis a “New World” culture. In 1965, he made his way to New York City, living a threadbare existence in an East Side tenement and painting on bed sheets from Macy’s when he couldn’t afford canvas—but always surrounding himself with living plants, lovingly tended.

It was during his early years in New York that Nagano began experimenting with the shaped canvas format that has come to characterize his work. In the late 1960s, he created a series of a dozen monumental canvases inspired by the New Testament Book of Revelation, which was exhibited at Brooklyn’s historic Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. He was at the time represented by the Alonzo Gallery in New York City, and later by the Sindin Gallery, and had major exhibitions at the Berkshire Museum, SUNY/Albany, Squibb Center, and other prominent locations. Some of his pieces during this period were purchased for the James Michener collection and for the collection of actors Cary Grant and Steve Martin. During his residence in Jim Thorpe, Nagano has explored the potential for art to express the spiritual and erotic dynamics of the human body, veiled in flesh but transfigured beyond the commonplace.

Unbeknownst to Nagano while he and his fellow artists were attempting to revive Japanese postwar culture, Carbon County was also experiencing a profound nervous breakdown due to the collapse of the coal and railroading industries. Though the conventional wisdom has it that the United States “won” World War II, it decidedly lost the war in the coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania, the area that ultimately came to inspire Nagano’s vision in his later years. Though local hardship was mild compared to that in Japan, the scarred psychic landscape of Carbon County--and its people’s determination to survive and endure--resonated in the artist’s psyche, like the barely perceptible vibrations of a temple bell, when he first visited here in 1979. For nearly thirty years, he has called old Mauch Chunk his home, living modestly but painting grandly, embracing without qualm the daily discipline that his art demands, serving as mentor and confidant to many, all while serving many causes of civic betterment and sharing his unremitting love for living plants by tending the vest-pocket community garden on Race Street. Few have lived out Epicurus’ maxim to live secretly and abundantly as has Shozo Nagano.