Born in Hokkaido Prefecture in 1905. In 1915, he entered the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, but left the following year. He studied at the now Taiheiyo Art Association Institute and then at the Hongo Painting Institute for a time. Since his house was located behind Kotaro Takamura’s studio, he became acquainted with Kotaro Takamura while working as a night patrolman in the neighborhood after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Around the following year, he began visiting Kotaro’s studio with his own poems, and Takamura introduced him to Riichiro Kawashima. This led him to exhibit his work at the National Painting Society in 1929, and Nanbata’s painting career began.

During the interwar period, he painted works expressing his admiration for the art of ancient Greece and Rome, but after the war, he began to experiment with autonomous abstraction and developed into painting lyrical abstract paintings with geometric compositions. In the 1960s, however, he shifted to a style in which countless sharp, supple lines intersected, and in the 1960s, he shifted to a style in which he used sloping brushstrokes, giving birth to his unique abstract paintings. After the loss of his two sons in 1974 and 1975, he produced abstract paintings filled with deep emotion by focusing solely on his own inner self.

The Dam is Sighing is a work from the period when the “World Art Today” exhibition in 1956 brought Antoni Tapies and Georges Mathieu to Japan, creating the informel whirlwind in the country. The influence of Dubuffet and Fautrier can be seen in these figures, and at the same time, the poetic lyricism characteristic of Nanbata’s work can also be felt.