Untitled (News of Pearl Harbor)

Sugimoto, Henry [ bio ]

Description

Unstretched and unframed.

A Japanese family of three in Hanford, California listen to the radio about the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. A bearded man sits with his back to the viewer at a checked cloth covered table, right hand tuning a radio. To the right, a woman in a white collared blue dress sits next to him, leaning against her right arm with a worried expression. Above her on the grey wall is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a small American flag sticking out of the yellow frame. A pennant, "Hanford HI" hangs above it. A little boy in a blue and white striped shirt and blue overalls stands in the left background, pointing out of the window at a bird flying away into a winter landscape. The upper half of the painting is dominated by a cloudlike scence, overlapping the domestic scene, of two fighter planes coming out of the upper right corner toward a sinking, smoking battleship, USS Arizona, exploding in red and yellow. A tiny plane is visible in the upper left corner.

Inscription
Signed in medium, bottom left: H. Sugimoto

All requests for permission to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in this collection must be submitted to the Hirasaki National Resource Center at the Japanese American National Museum (hnrc@janm.org).