The Brooklyn Rail

In a 1978 interview, the artist Miyoko Ito evokes painting as a form of healing—a creative and somatic act to which she could always turn. Painting has been “a straight and narrow path. An elaboration of a narrow path all my life,” she says, alluding to a practice long defined by formal parameters, but also to something like the colloquial “straight and narrow,” painting as an abiding principle around which to organize her life and self.

Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts, edited by curator and art historian Jordan Stein and published by artist Matt Connors’s Pre-Echo Press, enters the world as a stunning introduction to Ito’s mysterious visual realm and, as the artist Amy Sillman remarked at the publication’s launch, as a subtle if stern “reprimand to art history.” At over four-hundred pages, the first book on Ito is also the most complete inventory of her work to date. Comprised of reproductions of the majority of her works, a critical-biographical essay by Stein, the aforementioned 1978 interview, archival ephemera, and documentary back matter, Heart of Hearts makes a convincing argument for Ito’s significance as a major, if singular, figure in postwar American art.

Ito was born in Berkeley in 1918 and lived briefly in Japan as a child, but eventually settled in Chicago after attending the School of the Art Institute in the mid-1940s. Informed by a variety of approaches—including Synthetic Cubism’s deconstruction of the object, Morandi’s depictions of light, the geometry of Japan’s Heian period, and the Chicago Imagists’ inflections of Pop—Ito’s perceptive visionscapes combine deep sensitivity to color with elements of abstraction and surrealism, situating her in an evocative in-between that might account for common responses to her work as feeling contemporary. If not widely recognized during her lifetime, neither was Ito obscure—her paintings were included in the 1955 Carnegie International and the 1975 Whitney Biennial—but overall she received limited attention outside Chicago. Four decades after her death, Heart of Hearts arrives amidst a surge of interest following solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2017 and Artists Space in 2018, both curated by Stein, and a critically lauded 2023 presentation at Matthew Marks Gallery.

The book’s graphic design, by Grant Schofield of American Art Catalogues, is elegant and unobtrusive, beginning with the cover: against a white background free of text floats a debossed reproduction of Island in the Sun (1978), the gnomic, red-hued painting that was the first of Ito’s works Stein encountered, by chance, in the Chicago home of an artist who “communes with it each morning.” For Stein, Island in the Sun sparked the affinity that grew into what he describes as the “slow-burning treasure hunt” of recovering Ito’s oeuvre, which isn’t centrally held or archived, making Hearts “the product of several years of looking not only at her work but also looking for her work.” The resulting book feels rarefied in a way that an institutional publication never could—as a semi-private, lovingly attended-to project offered publicly—a gesture in keeping with the intimate, invitational quality of Ito’s compositions.

More than one-hundred reproductions of the artist’s mature paintings comprise the book’s centerpiece, sequenced in a loose chronology that makes traceable the remarkable range of expressions and permutations she realized on her “narrow path.” Stein notes the “astonishingly unique stride” Ito hit in the mid-sixties, in which “a picture emerges of a formidable artist positioning her art in relation to her inner and outer worlds, hard at work to summon painting not only as a network of signs, but also as a sign unto itself.” In this period—which lasted until the end of her life—forms reminiscent of bureaus, mirrors, thresholds, or the stretcher bars of canvases come to dictate her compositions, suggesting portals to liminal states and opaque moods only accessible through painting’s incantatory process. Ito’s preoccupation with the emerging or dissolving “almost,” be it an almost-representational depiction or an almost-symmetrical arrangement, is nowhere more apparent than in several paintings from the early 1970s. In Heart of Hearts, Basking (1973), a series of nested structures frame a glimpsed, elusive horizon, which seems capable of floating up and out of the painting, were it not arrested by the shapes around it. Elsewhere, as in Interior Landscape (1973), Ito’s signature approach to hue and its many gradations captures a sense of fading daylight reflected, doubled, and inverted—an effort to fix in place or otherwise make useful the phenomenon of time’s passage, in all its baffling poignancy. Ito says she completed about one painting a month, “start[ing] early in the morning, at sunrise, and work[ing] almost to sunset.” Sitting with one of her works, then, also means sitting with a month of an artist’s process, or day after changing day of a person’s impermeable life.

Reading Ito’s interview, it’s impossible not to feel the resonance of what’s missing. “Even now if I go on vacation, if I’m not painting, my arm starts swelling,” she says, before the interviewer pursues a different topic. Almost fifty years later, I have the desire to double back and ask more—about her physical relationship to painting, or the nervous breakdown she suffered as a child, or, as a young adult, her experience teaching art classes to her fellow inmates at the California internment camp of Tanforan. That these elisions are now concretized within Ito’s legacy is the obvious (if no less tragic) result of what happens when acclaim is granted only posthumously, a spotlight afforded too late. In a review published in Hyperallergic last year, poet and critic John Yau laments, “The fact that Ito has yet to have a comprehensive monograph is inexcusable.” However deferred the artist’s moment, Stein, Connors, and their collaborators do right by Ito in compiling this lasting record, a gift that extends both backward and forward.