Toko Shinoda valuation
Took the sumi brush of classical calligraphy into abstraction, and worked until she was 107.
Toko Shinoda was born in Manchuria in 1913 and was taught calligraphy by her father from the age of six.
What a work by Toko Shinoda is worth
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Bio
Toko Shinoda was born in Manchuria in 1913 and was taught calligraphy by her father from the age of six. She trained in the classical discipline, then broke with its requirement of legibility, and from the 1950s — including two years in New York, where she met the Abstract Expressionists — made abstract works using sumi ink and the calligrapher's brush, in which a single black stroke is set against empty paper, sometimes with a line of silver, platinum or vermilion. She worked into her second century and died in 2021 at a hundred and seven.
Two categories dominate and are frequently confused. The unique sumi paintings on paper are the top of the market. Beneath them are the lithographs, published in editions of usually thirty to a hundred and, crucially, hand-embellished by the artist after printing with additional brushwork in ink and metallic pigment, so every impression genuinely differs and each requires individual assessment. Sumi on paper is light-sensitive and cannot be cleaned. Signature, seal and pencil numbering should be present, and the market runs principally through Japan and the United States.
Kana poems, Tange and the New York years
Shinoda's given name was Masuko, and she took the artist's name Tōkō, red peach flower. Her first solo show, at the stationer Kyūkyodō in Ginza in 1940, was of kana calligraphy of her own short poems, and the calligraphy establishment criticised it. In 1954 she showed abstract ink paintings at the Matsuzakaya store in Ginza, in a space designed by Kenzō Tange.
In 1956 an invitation from the Swetzoff Gallery in Boston took her to the United States, and through the painter Kenzō Okada she had her first New York solo show at the Bertha Schaefer gallery. She went home in May 1958, finding the dry American climate wrong for ink, but showed with Betty Parsons in New York in 1965, 1968, 1971 and 1977. The Toko Shinoda Art Space and the Gifu Collection of Modern Arts, both in Seki, show her work.
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