Manabu Mabe

(September 14, 1924 – September 22, 1997) was a Japanese-Brazilian painter. Mabe worked as a vendor of hand-painted ties in São Paulo before becoming an artist.

In the late 1950s, Mabe won the top award in São Paulo's Contemporary Art Salon, the top award as Brazil's best painter in the São Paulo Bienal, and the top honors for artists under 35 at Paris's first biennial.

His works are currently displayed in the permanent exhibitions of the São Paulo Contemporary Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, the Boston Contemporary Art Museum, the Beaux-Arts Museum of Dallas among others. The Rio de Janeiro National Museum for the Beaux-Arts lodges the most expressive paintings of a Still Life (oil on canvas). Other institutions that display his work are the National Art Museum of Bolivia and the V+R Sapoznik Art Collection.

Mabe died in São Paulo on September 22, 1997.

Early life Mabe was born into a formerly prosperous family in Japan, where his father owned a ferryboat business and a hotel called the House of Flowers. When Mabe was seven years old, his father experienced financial ruin. "A Japanese father never explains business affairs to the family," Mabe recalled in a 1959 interview, "but I knew something terrible had happened. My father was bankrupt and humiliated."

The family's circumstances led them to emigrate to Brazil in 1934, enduring a 50-day journey in steerage. His father became a contract laborer on a São Paulo coffee plantation. Young Manabu worked in the plantation fields, tending to rice and vegetables between coffee trees, and eventually became strong enough to carry 88-pound coffee sacks. Despite the demanding physical labor, he taught himself Portuguese by kerosene lamp at night and collected paper scraps for drawing. He won the painting prize at the second São Paulo International Biennial (1953), where only two Japanese-Brazilian artists were accepted: Mabe and Tadashi Kaminagai.

In 1956, he participated in the Japan Art Biennial, and in 1959, he won the award for best national painter at the fifth São Paulo Biennial as well as international recognition at the Paris Biennial. When commenting on Tomie Ohtake's work upon reaching artistic maturity, Cecília França Lourenço draws comparisons with the works of Fukushima and Mabe, noting that all three shared "a certain restraint, without allowing the emotion of the work to completely overflow."

Career and Legacy In 1986, Mabe held a major retrospective exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) and published a catalogue featuring 156 reproductions of his work with text in Portuguese, English, and Japanese. By 1989, Japanese-Brazilian artists had become prominent figures in Brazil's informal abstractionism movement.

In 1995, Mabe published his autobiography Chove no Cafezal (It Rains in the Coffee Plantation) in Japanese, which was initially serialized in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper in his native Kumamoto region. The following year, he traveled to Japan for a major retrospective exhibition of his work. and the V+R Sapoznik art collection.