In this state of confusion, the members of the Gutai art association are responsible for the creation of a new informal Japanese art. The exponents of the Gutai group are: Jiro Yoshihara, Saburo Murakami, Sadamasa Motonaga and Kazuo Shiraga. This group, which represents the epicenter of Japanese culture, was born far from Tokyo, in Osaka, and is therefore in a position to operate freely. The exhibitions along the beaches, above the stages, the advertising balloons floating in the sky, are the pinnacle of the avant-garde and have an international echo. The Gutai groupin 1962 he founded the Gutai Art Gallery in Osaka, where the works of the same members and also those of many foreign artists are exhibited. Their art, imbued with local color and so different from European concrete art, is highly appreciated by Michel Tapié, but Gutai’s greatest exponent dies in 1972 and the group disbanded. At that time many foreign artists and art critics visit Japan. First of all Tapiè, then Sam Francis, Michel Ragon and Pierre Soulages. Everyone indiscriminately takes a great interest in Japanese Sho art. And again, between the 1950s and the early 1960s, organized for the most part by Japanese newspapers, personal exhibitions of P. Cézanne, PA Renoir, V. Van Gogh, H. Matisse and P. Picasso, that is, from the last period of Impressionism to the Ecole de Paris, increasing the general interest in European art. In 1963 J. Tinguely came to Tokyo and held an exhibition there, bringing in Japan motives and interests unknown until then. In Tokyo he does not find the Japanese tradition, but he discovers the Japan of the future.
In fact, foreigners who visit Japan find Tokyo not unlike New York or Paris: either they are disconcerted by the contemporary Japan or they see the future of the country in it. The attachment of the majority of the conservative class to the tradition of Japanese painting continues to be very much alive. Since before the war, the Japanese beauty ideal has been directly pursued with the painters Yukihiko Yasuda (born in 1884), Seison Maeda (1885-1977), Kaii Higashiyama (born in 1908), Yasushi Sugiyama (born in 1909) and others from the postwar period: Misao Yokoyama (1920-1973), Matazo Kayama (born in 1927), Ikuo Hirayama (born in 1930). However, it cannot be said that the younger generations, who present notable or promising artists, have limited themselves to deriving from European and American art since, little by little, the new painters assert themselves internationally. Kumi Sugai has lived in Paris for a long time: her art seeks the traditional symbolic beauty that characterizes Japanese poetry; Kenzo Okada (born in 1902) lives in New York, of which the esoteric beauty of color should be mentioned, and finally the sculptors who live in Milan Tomonori Toyofuku and Kenjiro Azuma, followers of the Zen Buddhist sect, whose excellent works obtain a remarkable success. The Japanese artists who carry out their activity abroad are faithful to the traditional aesthetic sense of the motherland, so that they suggest the way to merge Eastern beauty with Western one. whose excellent works achieve considerable success. The Japanese artists who carry out their activity abroad are faithful to the traditional aesthetic sense of the motherland, so that they suggest the way to merge Eastern beauty with Western one. whose excellent works achieve considerable success. The Japanese artists who carry out their activity abroad are faithful to the traditional aesthetic sense of the motherland, so that they suggest the way to merge Eastern beauty with Western one.
According to NEXTICLE.NET, the paintings of J. Pollock and W. De Kooning have revealed to Japanese artists the existence of the real man. American post-war art, with its abstract expressionism, stands between the East and Europe with a new avant-garde trend that tends to merge the East with the West. Japanese artists and critics pay close attention to the existence of this trend from which avant-garde artists born after 1930 descend. These, after an informal period, are influenced by the new currents of Pop art, Op art, Neo dada, but they keep the way open to their original individuality. Tetsumi Kudo from Paris, Shusaku Arakawa from New York and others made their debut with informal art. They must be particularly the object of attention, in the period after 1960, the makers of Japanese Neo Dadaism Jiro Takamatsu and Tomio Miki. The artist Takamatsu, one of the best exponents of contemporary Japanese art, took part in the Venice Biennale in 1970, in 1972 he obtained the Grand Prix at the Tokyo Biennial Woodcut Exhibition and in 1977 he was invited to represent Japan alla show Documenta by Cassel.
Niji no Ay – O (Rainbow Ay-O); the woodcutter Masuo Ikeda and Tetsuya Noda; Takamichi Ito, Masunobu Yoshimura and also Minoru Yoshida and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, exponents of kinetic art; the excellent abstract sculptors Masakazu Horiuchi, Bukichi Inoue, Yoshikuni Iida; the “photo-painter” Kozo Mio; graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo; Shinmei Kojima of Pop art; the plastic sculptor Minami Tada; Keiji Usami, who also introduced the use of laser beams in his research; Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Nobuo Sekine, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Masabumi Maita, Kenji Inumaki, etc., who work in the field of conceptual art; all these artists, who represent the various avant-garde currents by participating in major contemporary art events (biennials in Paris, San Paolo, Venice, Mostra d ‘
While in the field of the figurative arts of today’s Japan today many artists continue their research in the field of tradition, others carry out their activity in the field of avant-garde art, even if their ways may seem only imitation of European ones.. Europeans may perhaps not perceive at first sight the existence, in their works, of the motifs of Eastern thought that a more careful consideration, once preconceived schemes have been abandoned, will not fail to reveal. The sense of color of the old masters of the Momoyama, Korin and Sotatsu era is still alive in the expressionism of contemporary young paintings, while the Ukiyoe spirit subsists in modern woodcut.
