Struggle, Trail to Johnson Peak

Struggle, Trail to Johnson Peak (1930) is one of the more dramatic and physically charged sheets in Obata Chiura's World Landscape Series 'America,' a horizontal composition that captures the upward pull of a backcountry trail in the high Sierra. The print depicts a steep, broken slope ascending the right side of the sheet, with windswept conifers leaning into the rock face and a band of distant peaks rising at the upper register; the palette is muted — slate greens, cool grays, and warmer ochres in the ground — and the sky is taut with the high-altitude clarity Obata had encountered on his 1927 expedition. The title openly acknowledges the bodily effort of mountain travel, an unusual emphasis within a Japanese landscape tradition that more often invokes contemplation rather than exertion, and Obata's composition uses diagonal mass to suggest the difficulty of the climb. The image originated in a watercolor made during the artist's two-month 1927 trip through Yosemite and the Sierra with the painter Worth Ryder and a small party, during which Obata produced roughly a hundred studies. Between 1928 and 1930 he returned to Tokyo to oversee production of the World Landscape Series at the Takamizawa Print Works, where thirty-two carvers and eighteen printers worked under his direction and each image required between 120 and 205 progressive proofs before he approved the final sheet. The Whitney Museum of American Art holds this impression (accession 2015.18, https://whitney.org/collection/works/46359) as part of its larger Obata family gift, and shows the print as evidence of how Obata's California work expanded the subject range of Japanese woodblock to include American wilderness travel. For students of Obata and collectors of Japanese-American art, Struggle is a key sheet because it makes plain the physical investment behind the series: every print in World Landscape Series 'America' was generated from on-site hiking and sketching, and Struggle, Trail to Johnson Peak honors that effort directly in its title and composition.