When Chiura Obata began teaching art at Berkeley in 1932, his English was imperfect and he had no college degree. What he did have was an ability to see beauty and that, he thought, was a skill worth teaching. “No one,” he said, “should pass through four years of college without he be given the knowledge of beauty and the eyes with which to see it.”

The administration evidently agreed, and for 19 years, from 1932 to 1942 and from 1945 to 1954, Obata’s students spent much of their class time out of doors, learning to see. “A typical assignment from him,” says Obata’s granddaughter and family historian Kimi Kodani Hill ’78, “would be to send the students out on a foggy day in Faculty Glade and say, ‘Come back and paint me a painting that makes me feel the dampness and the fog and the quietness of the morning.’ ”

Obata himself is known as a master at seeing the beauty in nature and putting it on paper. Born in Japan in 1885, Obata’s talent for drawing was evident by the time he was 7. When he was 14, his father wanted to send him to military school. Obata ran away from home and eventually persuaded his father to allow him to apprentice with a master painter in Tokyo. At 18, Obata emigrated to the United States, arriving in San Francisco in 1903. His first job was as a “schoolboy,” a live-in servant who performed domestic duties while learning English. He enrolled in the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, but he thought the students there were too undisciplined. He dropped out to study independently, and began his career in earnest.

Over the next 70 years, Obata found his muse wherever he went. He found it in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, after which he lived as a refugee in a city park. He found it in the grandeur of Yosemite, which he described as “the greatest harvest for my whole life and future in painting.” And he found it in the desolation of the Utah desert, where he and his family were imprisoned, along with 8,000 other Japanese living in the Bay Area, during World War II.

The range of Obata’s work can be seen through December 31 at the M.H. DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. The exhibit is the museum’s final show before it closes for reconstruction and retrofit. Titled “Transcendental Landscapes,” the exhibit of paintings, woodblock prints, and large-scale scrolls features Obata’s most famous work, the World Landscape Series, which was inspired by a trip to Yosemite in 1927, as well as pieces created by Obata while confined at the War Relocation Center in Topaz, Utah.

Accompanying the Topaz portion of the exhibit is Topaz Moon, a book by Hill chronicling her family’s experience at Topaz, and later, Tanforan. When Hill started researching the book 15 years ago, she realized she knew very little about her famous grandfather or her family’s internment in the camps. In spite of the volume of work Obata created there, the only painting of Topaz she remembers displayed in her grandparents’ home was a small oil painting that hung in her grandfather’s studio—and that was by Matsusaburo Hibi, a friend and fellow internee of the Obatas who died soon after being released from Topaz.

As she interviewed relatives, former internees, family friends, and former students, she realized she was being given a second chance to know her grandfather. “It was the first time in my life I got a real sense of who my grandfather was,” says Hill, who was 20 when Obata died in 1975 at the age of 90. While he was alive, she says, “I wasn’t really that interested in his work. I was going to Berkeley; I had my own thing going on. It wasn’t until he passed away that I became really interested in who he was. Fortunately, my grandmother was still alive. I was her primary caregiver the last ten years of her life and taped hours and hours of interviews.”

The works gathered by Hill, from a haunting sketch of the San Francisco skyline—drawn by Obata as he rode the bus across the Bay Bridge leaving the city for Utah—to the drawings of everyday life in the camps, speak eloquently of Obata’s talent. But Hill says the more she studied her grandfather’s work, the more she came to value a less tangible legacy. “Both my grandparents were very positive, very grateful people. When my grandfather was in the camps, and things would get really depressing,” she learned, “he would tell his fellow internees: ‘You can choose to look down at the ground, or you can choose to look up at the sky, the mountains and the moon.’”

Hill has been surprised by the amount of feeling Obata’s students still have for their teacher, particularly for his sense of humor. “They remember him as being very funny. He loved to tell stories and laugh about things,” she says. And they remember him, always, for teaching them to see. “I believe he is the teacher who most influenced my life,” said Lawrence Shepard ’49, who was a metallurgy major when he took Obata’s class. He later earned a doctorate at MIT and pursued a career in science. Of all his classes at Cal, Shepard says he remembers his mornings with Obata best. “He opened up a whole new world, a whole new way of looking at the beauty and vitality of all things natural, living and nonliving. He increased my joy and pleasure in every sense.”