Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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September, at the prestigious Sao Paulo Bienal, the jury picked unsung Manabu Mabe for the $1,150 award as Brazil's best painter. This month Mabe ventured into the European arena and walked off with top honors at Paris' first biennial (for painters under 35): the Prix Braun for the best "painter in oils" and a six months' scholarship for study in Paris. Manabu Mabe, a Japanese-born farm hand who had sold only one painting in his life (for $12 to a friend), found himself with a sellout show in Rio de Janeiro; dealers from Caracas...
...been a prosperous ferryboat owner and hotelkeeper (the House of Flowers). But when Manabu was seven, father fell on evil times. "A Japanese father never explains business affairs to the family," Mabe recalls, "but I knew something terrible had happened. My father was bankrupt and humiliated." His father tried first being a barber, then finally decided to move to Brazil. The family made the 50-day trip in steerage, and father became a contract laborer on a Sao Paulo coffee plantation...
...weak for field work, devoted his waning life to drinking pinga (sugarcane spirits), finally died of cancer. Mabe, the eldest of the seven children, borrowed enough money to become a small-time farmer, struggled to keep the family alive and intact while he grabbed spare moments to paint-first copying calendars, then endlessly sketching his sister Yoshiko. When Mabe married eight years ago, his father-in-law forced him to sign a contract to paint no more ("a foolish extravagance...
...Paris. The first tentative recognition came in 1951, when a single early painting of Mabe's was accepted for Rio's National Salon. The honor was enough to make Mabe's father-in-law relent, and Mabe began to paint again. Two years ago he decided to make the break, sold out the family's small plot of land at a loss and set off for Sao Paulo to paint, and sell ties. On his own, he developed his present style, in which a basic, slashing, abstract expressionist manner is given style by hints...
...totalitarian system "there is no right in the Christian sense of the word . . . Paul's words are set aside." Encountering a speed-limit sign along a highway in the free world, wrote Dibelius, he would not hesitate to slow down. But not in East Germany. First, because the speed limit would not be applied equally to ordinary citizens and Communist functionaries and because the slowdown would be made necessary, in all likelihood, by some immoral purpose, such as starving out West Berlin. And second, "because I know that these ordinances are those of . . .a regime which...