Having studied under Leonard Foujita (1886 – 1968), the Japanese modernist painter who was a colleague of Chaim Soutine (1893 – 1943), Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920), and Fernand Léger (1881 – 1955) in Paris, in the 1930s, Sawada began exhibiting in New York in 1960. By that time, he had developed a semi-geometric type of abstraction focusing on hard edged lines, color, and light and a unique style of shading called “bokashi.”
