“Mr. Ryder's driving is very careful and we have not had any trouble with the car. We are driving with two beds, fourteen boxes of food, painting materials, fishing gear, two suitcases, a tent, a large saw, a large axe, a big shovel, and a big bucket of water in case of emergency. Most people smile at us, thinking we are going to the mountains to find gold.”-Chiura Obata, 1927 In conjunction with the exhibition Yosemite in Timein the Theater Gallery, Yosemite Views from Berkeley presents alternate views of the Yosemite landscape by two artists living in Berkeley in the early twentieth century. When Perham Nahl, then head of the UC Berkeley art department, accepted Emma Michalitschke's paintings into the University's collection in 1919, and recommended Chiura Obata for a position as an art instructor a few years later, he could not have imagined that their work would be the subject of a two-person exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in a century's time. Chiura Obata, born in Japan in 1885, studied classical Japanese sumi (ink) painting as a child. By the twentieth century, Western culture and modernization had found their way into Japanese art, and Obata immigrated to California in 1903. Here he worked as an illustrator and designer, with California mountain landscapes among his favorite subjects. In the summer of 1927, at the invitation of UC art professor Worth Ryder, Obata spent two months in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, camping, painting, and making sketches. Following the expedition, Obata returned to Japan and transformed his Yosemite-inspired sketches into a portfolio of thirty-five brightly illuminated woodblock prints titled World Landscape Series–America (1930). Obata returned to California in 1932 and worked as an art instructor at the University until World War II, when he and his wife were sent to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. When the war and military exclusion ban ended, Obata was allowed to return to teaching at Berkeley, where he stayed until his retirement in 1954. Born in Germany in 1864, Emma Michalitschke was once a student of the French painter Adolphe Bouguereau. The widow of a prominent San Francisco tobacco dealer, she was also a UC benefactor. Along with a cash donation for deserving art students, fourteen of Michalitschke's paintings entered the University's collection in 1919. When, in 1975, ten of these were shown in a one-person exhibition at the then University Art Museum, art critic Alfred Frankenstein described the paintings as “primitive in a wildly luxurious, gorgeously gaudy way.” Michalitschke's grand Yosemite Landscape (1913) will grace the stairwell of the Berkeley Art Museum along with sixteen luminous color woodblock prints from Obata's landmark World Landscape Series.
