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Description
Signed in medium, bottom left corner: H. Sugimoto, Attacked Pearl Harber [sic] Hawaii. Written on back: Attacked Pearl Harbor/22" x 18" Stretched and framed. Family reacting to news of Pearl Harbor attack. Older man, with back to the viewer, sits at table bent over a newspaper reading about the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. He wears a brown jacket and glasses and has his left hand on the back of his head. A woman in green with white collar faces him across the red/white checked tablecloth. In the background a younger man sits at a desk next to a lamp before a window, with his back to the viewer, and listens to the radio with his left hand on the back of his head. He wears a white sweater with two purple stripes at the biceps. "I...turned on the radio and heard them say, 'A Jap bomber squadron has bombed Pearl Harbor; there are many casualties, and many American battleships have been destroyed....What was going to become of us Japanese? What were we to do?" (From Henry Sugimoto's diaries.) When the United States entered World War II, the lives of many Japanese Americans were torn apart. Sugimoto's work after 1941 shows a dramatic transition from landscapes and still-life paintings to powerful narratives focusing on this experience.
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