Japanese realist painter Samizu Matsuki is being honored in New York City on October 20th for being first woman ever inducted into the famous Salmagundi Art Club, nearly 40 years ago. Salmagundi Club membership is limited to greatest of realism artists painting in America. As one of the last survivors of the first group of women accepted into the Salmagundi Club, she is extremely honored by this opportunity.
Salmagundi Club website http://www.salmagundi.org
The event, “Pioneer Women: First Ladies of Salmagundi Club” is 6 to 8pm at the Salmagundi Art Club, located at 47 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
Please help Samizu, who is frail and very poor, and lives in Maine USA, raise $1,000 US to pay for travel for her and two paintings, to receive this honor, by visiting Samizu’s “kickstarter” fundraising page. Check out this link to Samizu Matsuki’s kickstarter page.
Samizu Matsuki’s gold medal winning triumph was for returning techniques of Western Classical Realist artistry, refined through generations of Japanese art schools, back to the West. This was in defiance of then-prevailing American fixation on abstract expressionism. Her work electrified enormous crowds who came to her exhibited works.
Matsuki’s meteoric flash was short lived. Failing health at end of the 1970s cut short her career, despite many offers of commissions and exhibitions. Yet during her brief intense career Samizu was like an artistic accupuncture needle, reopening long closed channels of creativity, playing a subtle yet critical role in re-establishing the legitimacy of highly realistic oil painting in the 1970s American art scene.
Matsuki’s unique ‘magical realism’ style was also influenced by Setsuko Migishi at Joshibi University in Tokyo. Samizu is a 1958 graduate of Joshibi, then called Womens College of Fine Arts.











