No Meaning, No Composition, No Colour. From Zero to Gutai
In the United States, Germany and France, Japonisme developed from a combination of distinct Western and Japanese elements into an almost homogeneous mixture of the two cultures in the nineteen-fifties. A similar development occurred in Japan. Until the middle of the twentieth century Western elements could be recognized quite clearly in Japanese paintings, and in the fifties some artists can be perceived to have integrated Western art to form a more constant blend. That was the case with several artists of the Zero group in Kansai district. This group, formed in 1952, merged a few years later partially with the Gutai group of artists. The product was what can be termed ‘the starting point of contemporary Japanese art’.1
The Zero period
In Tokyo nearly all the avant-garde artists in the fifties were very much geared to Western modern art movements, and the styles which best matched the Japanese character were followed very carefully. In the Kansai district, the region in which both Kyoto and Osaka are located, the culture of the fifties was more traditional than in Tokyo, in both a material and a non-material sense. That in itself would seem to be a significant explanation of the fact that modern art in Kansai displayed more Japanese characteristics.
In around 1950 the artists of what was called the ‘Shinseisaku Kyokai’ (those making new art), a group of some twelve artists, regularly met to criticize one another’s work.2 The meetings resulted in the formation of Zero no kai (Zero group) - Zero, or ‘0’ as it was generally written. The name was an idea of Saburo Murakami, one of the members. He chose it to refer to the members’ basic principles. As he observed: “Zero means ‘nothing’: start with nothing, completely original, no artificial meaning. The only meaning is: natural, my body”.3 This comment is reminiscent of something Suzuki said:
“When we speak of being natural, we mean first of all being free and spontaneous in the expression of our feelings, being immediate and not premeditating in our response to environment (..) to be like a child, though not necessarily with a child’s intellectual simplicity or its emotional crudity”.4
The Zero artist Kazuo Shiraga emphasized that in traditional Japanese arts there was a tendency to ‘simplification’, as in the art of the tea ceremony. He was of the opinion that Zero had a similar tendency.5 He also added another meaning of the group’s name: a point of neutrality, of balance between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ abstraction (the two different preferences of the the group’s members). Another, but less important meaning was a new start, from point 0, following the Second World War.6
The Zero group was disbanded after less than three years, and held only one group exhibition.7 The artists met once a week or sometimes only once a month, and discussed ‘new art’. The artists Saburo Murakami, Akira Kanayama, Atsuko Tanaka and Kazuo Shiraga have been chosen for further examination in this chapter. They turned out to be the most important members of the group. Moreover, they joined the Gutai group of artists in 1955, to become the foremost members there, alongside the founder Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972) and Shozo Shimamoto (b. 1928).8
The style of the Zero works varied considerably, yet there are similarities. To start with, all the works were ‘minimal’: paintings with very slight differences in tone and colour, and very simple in composition. In 1953 Murakami made a series of works by bouncing a ball smeared with black ink against sheets of paper. The ball’s imprint on the paper resembles an explosion of black ink. The name Haboku (splashed ink) would have been appropriate - that was actually the name of the painting style of the famous sixteenth century Zen Master Sesshū. Not that Murakami made a typical Zen painting. He worked with the same material and comparable spontaneity, yet his work was primarily ‘Zero’. He believed that it was typical for Zero to start with nothing: no subject, no paintbrush, no composition, no tonal values (just black ink on white paper) and completely original (the first time a painting had been made with a ball). Nor was any artificial meaning involved. He merely called the works ‘Boru’ (ball). The only meaning that, according to Murakami, was permitted, was ‘the natural, the physical’ - to be found in the physical action of throwing the ball.9 To my mind, this ‘Ball’ series can be seen as an original integration of Western and Japanese elements, since it combines the characteristics of traditional Japanese ink painting with the Western artist’s ‘striving for something new’.
Murakami wrote in 1956, in the Gutai magazine (issued by the group of the same name) something about the will required in the context of the modern Japanese artist’s intention: “I set this will free in my way, an empty ‘I’ is created as a basis for a new will. (..) It is a good thing to let the will thrive limitless. A weak will is crushed by a strong one. A small but precise will resists an incapable will, and the surviving will certainly gets a shape”.10
This quotation brings to mind the vols (will) to which the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre often referred in his existentialist writings. And that is not by chance. Murakami had become interested in Sartre’s Existentialism when he was studying philosophy. Sartre’s theories were very popular with students in Japan in the fifties. For Murakami ‘will’ stood for the will an artist must find to create a distance between himself and art history, and in particular between himself and the art-work.11 It is interesting that in Zen especially there is a connection between ‘will’ and ‘self-denial’ (as between ‘will’ and ‘distance from the self’ with Murakami). According to Suzuki, Zen is “a religion of will-power, related to the Zen discipline, which is self-reliant and self-denying”.12 The similarity between ‘nothingness’ in Zero art and that of Zen will be discussed at a later stage.
The members of Zero claimed that the group’s practical principles, which amounted to members having neither an idealistic nor a political intent, reflected the area from which they originated: Osaka and surroundings. Osaka was primarily a city of merchants, so people with a practical orientation.13
One of the topics on which Zero members debated was the relationship between art and the ‘pure attitude of children to work’.14 A series of works by Murakami which he began making in 1954 clearly reflects that connection. The series came about as a result of an incident which occurred with his son: after a minor quarrel Murakami shut the two-year old outside. The child was angry and banged so hard against the fusuma (sliding partition made of paper with an interior wooden frame) that he broke through it. This event inspired Murakami to produce square wooden frames across which he had stretched paper. He then proceeded to make holes in them with the same physical spontaneity with which he had made the ‘Boru’ series.15 When Murakami joined the Gutai group, the experiments with materials became even more ‘event-like’.16
Akira Kanayama painted monochromes in a completely different style from Murakami. Yet they too coincided with Zero’s basic principles. He took a rectangular white ground, and painted several narrow little rectangles at the edge, the effect of which was to give the large empty space of the paper a central place (ills. 93 and 94). These works give the appearance of being a combination of the Western geometric style, especially of Mondrian’s works, and the Japanese preference for asymmetry and emptiness. According to Kazuo Yamawaki, the chief curator at Nagoya City Art Museum, Kanayama, in his desire to transcend geometric art, unconsciously integrated in this way Japanese elements in his work.17
The relationship, the equality between the dark narrow shapes and the surrounding white, is characteristic of Oriental calligraphy. Particularly because of their thinness, the forms recall the spareness of calligraphy, and because the small shapes do not divide the surface into strictly geometrical zones, allowing the organic form of the emptiness to dominate, the work retains a typical Japanese sensitivity.
Two Japanese curators of modern art explained in a discussion of a work by Kanayama with two small rectangles on the right-hand edge of the paper, that, being Japanese, the composition did not strike them as unusual. They went on to explain it with reference to the compositions in traditional Japanese painting and Ukiyo-e.18 Westerners would probably not experience Kanayama’s composition as ‘usual’.
Kanayama and Murakami painted on paper and later on linen, so they began with a traditional Japanese ground and went on to a Western one. Atsuko Tanaka experimented with different textiles. Her first works were on linen, but because she wanted to avoid the association with traditional Western painting, she switched to other materials, including cotton.19 In 1955 she began experimenting with nylon, which actually alluded to modern Japan, since nylon was a product of the Japanese industrial revolution. Her main reason for using nylon was that she was trying to renounce traditional aesthetics.20
In 1953 Tanaka embarked on a series of monochromes in which she painted numbers. This was a consequence of her long stay in hospital in 1952 and 1953. There she kept a calendar of the days until she might leave. After her discharge, she began to place rows of numbers in her work. The interesting thing is that the lines actually constitute a repetition of the same number - a row with no beginning and no end.21 The artists of the Far East paint in the same way as they write: ‘in succession’, from one side to another. In the works by Tanaka which are dealt with here, the connection between writing and art is evident, as it was in Kanayama’s work.
Tanaka’s experiments with materials are typical for the modern Western artist. The ‘Japanese spirit’ in her work was to increase after 1955. Then ‘the natural and physical aspect’ which Murakami described as characteristic of Zero, became stronger in both Tanaka’s and Kanayama’s work.
Kazuo Shiraga’s first monochrome paintings were made rather ‘mechanically’ - he applied the paint, in one colour and in a uniform pattern, with a palette knife. His intention was to ignore composition and colour alike. Like his fellow- artists in Zero, he also avoided the used of a paintbrush. Their ambition was ‘to be original’, and consequently they rejected this most traditional of painting tools.
Shiraga aimed at a ‘natural’ and ‘physical’ form of expression, in common with Murakami. In 1953 he started experimenting with painting with his hands. The technique was not new; it had already been applied in China for centuries.22 But the use of oil paints in the process was new. A few months later he developed a method of painting with his feet. That technique had actually been used in the 8th century by a number of Taoists in China. They stood on the paper and applied the paint on the surface with hands and feet, whilst several people sat around them, beating drums.23 In a lecture held in August 1993, Kei Suzuki, a specialist in this I-P’in style, compared Shiraga’s works and those Chinese painters, demonstrating distinct similarities.24 Yet Shiraga does not seem to have known anything about his predecessors.25
Shiraga did not use his feet in a personal, expressionist way, but more ‘mechanically’, as he had his palette knife. He continued to avoid composition, meaning and polychromy. In that way he tried to transcend the subjective element, recalling the Buddhist aim. It is worth noting here that he in fact also became a Buddhist monk. The structure of the movements in a reddish brown monochrome painting made in 1954 has something of the 'mechanically' raked circles in Zen gardens.
So the physical element is an important aspect in Shiraga’s work.26 The Japanese art historians whom I interviewed were of the opinion that Shiraga’s ‘physicality’ ties in with the arts of the Far East. Shiraga also believes that his ‘painting action’ is more akin to the martial arts of Zen, especially Kendo, than to American Action Painting. He believes that feeling, unity with the soul and concentration are related, and also that there is a connection with the directness of other Zen arts like Shō.27 The affinity between traditional Japanese culture and the Zen arts was particularly clear during his action of 1957, in which he performed Sanbaso, a dance in Nō drama; it involved archers shooting a hundred arrows through a white cotton backcloth. The action in the more complicated paintings which he was making from the end of the fifties is, however, more inclined towards Western physical automatism, as they lack the simplicity of the dynamism of the Zen arts.
Shiraga originally started painting monochromes in various colours, such as grey, blue and red. Towards 1954 he had developed a preference for red. We could go so far as to term his work from the second half of the fifties his ‘red period’.28 The red he used is one frequently found in Japanese culture. Originally the Japanese preferred natural colours, but as time went by, increasing use was made of a red imported from China.
The Gutai period
In 1955 the artist Shozo Shimamoto 29 called on the Zero artists to ask if they would like to join the Gutai group. According to Kanayama they knew nothing at that time of the Gutai artists’ philosophy, but their works appealed to them.30 They agreed, and in February 1955 Murakami, Kanayama, Tanaka, Shiraga and his wife Fukio joined the group. According to Shiraga these Zero artists sensed that the Gutai group had the same objectives as they did, and so decided Zero might just as well be abolished.31
It is remarkable that in publications on Gutai the former Zero members’ work is constantly referred to as the most important. Only Shimamoto, who was mentioned earlier, and Sadamasa Motonaga (b. 1922) are considered to have produced work of comparable quality. That is why one must realize that their time in the Zero group was formative for the artists who went on to produce much of the important Gutai work. Shiraga believes that the works of various Gutai artists became more ‘spiritual’ under the influence of their Zero colleagues.32
The Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai, Gutai Art Association, was founded in July 1954. Several members had in fact formed a kind of group in 1951. Jiro Yoshihara (ills. 97 and 98) founded his group with sixteen other artists, who were his pupils or his friends. Together they published a bulletin with the name Gutai. The first number appeared on 1 January 1955.
The Gutai members did not produce a manifesto or pursue an ideology. Yoshihara wrote in the first bulletin, in a short introduction in English, that the bulletin had been produced by seventeen modern artists who lived between Osaka and Kobe. Their aim was to show their work to the world and draw attention to it from people living oversees.33 With respect to the members’ philosophy, he wrote that they all believed that it was important for one’s development to create an independent position. Moreover, they wanted to demonstrate that their spirit was free and that they sought a new impression for every creation.34 The works which were reproduced in the bulletin bear little resemblance to one another, apart from the fact that they were all paintings and nearly all abstract. They vary from works in a calligraphic style to compositions of planes. Some are very busy others austere.
In the second issue of Gutai, which appeared in October 1955 (after the group had linked up with Zero), Yozo Ukita, one of the Gutai artists, listed some of the features of Gutai art. His theory was that abstract expression was based on the direct materialization of perception. He emphasized that several works had been executed using ‘all possible means’, from fingernails to a hair-drier. Art is “how well the individuals can reflect the results of their conception of the very life they lead”. Hence his translation of the word ‘Gutai’ with ‘Embodiment’.35
In actual fact, the literal translation of the word Gutai is ‘concrete’. Yoshihara gave an explanation of the name in ‘the Gutai Manifesto’ which was published in the art magazine Geijutsu Shincho in October 1956.36 Because “purely formalistic abstract art has lost its charm” they wanted to go “beyond the borders of Abstract Art” and so chose the name ‘Gutai-ism’ (Concretism).37 Yoshihara accused traditional art of ‘murdering’ materials, remarking that Gutai art did not change the material, but brought it to life. “In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands” and hence the group’s aim was formulated as “combining human creative ability with the characteristics of the material”.38 The observations bear resemblance to the aim of the Zen Master. Suzuki wrote that the Zen Master tries to create life in his work: “Each brush-stroke must beat with the pulsation of a living being. It must be living too” and “The painter’s business thus is not just to copy or imitate nature, but to give the object something living in its own right”.39 The term ‘Gutai-ism’ (Concretism) calls forth associations with ‘Art Concret’. In 1930 Theo van Doesburg wrote a manifesto in Paris with that title. Interestingly enough, the characteristics which he formulated differ considerably from Yoshihara’s descriptions of Gutai art. Van Doesburg’s prime focus was on intellect and technical perfection. It is possible that Yoshihara had heard of ‘Art Concret’ from Taro Okamoto (b. 1911), who had gone to Paris in 1929 and in 1932 joined the ‘Abstraction-Création’ group, whose ideas closely resembled those of Van Doesburg.40 The Gutai manifesto proves to have more in common with the 1946 ‘Manifesto Bianco’ formulated by Lucio Fontana, in which he set himself the objective of reconciling himself with material and working with the energy it contained.41
Gutai’s aim to ‘go beyond the borders of existing art’ is an especially Western idea of modern art. My conclusion was corroborated by Kazuo Yamawaki, who added that the Gutai artists distorted that Western goal into something familiar, namely the relationship between body, spirit and material.42 Although that relationship can also be found in Western modern art of the fifties, there it related to ‘something new’.43
In July 1955, five months after the Zero artists had associated themselves with Gutai, Jiro Yoshihara organized an open-air exhibition in a pine forest on the banks of the Ashiyakawa river. In October of the same year, they held an exhibition in the Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo. In 1956 two exhibitions were again held in the same locations. In almost all the literature I studied relating to Gutai, the works are dealt with according to event, which might be explained by the fact that the prime interest was in Gutai as a group. After all, the group is often felt in Japanese culture to be more important than the individual. However, it proved more interesting from my point of view to continue to follow the personal development of the four above-mentioned Zero artists during their Gutai period, rather than the actual development of the artists as a group, since they all evolved in different ways.44
Kanayama, who, during the Zero period, was making white monochromes to which he added a few small shapes, began 1955 to develop three-dimensional monochromes, which he then even ‘brought to life’. For Gutai’s first open-air exhibition, he made a white wooden square on which he placed a small red sphere, thus bringing about a spatial note on the white monochrome. Three months later, at the first exhibition in Ohara Hall, he hung a large white balloon from the ceiling, and a little further off a spherical red lamp which filled the area with red light, colouring half of the white balloon red.45 The flat white surface had become ‘spatial’ and the red sphere had acquired light as an extra dimension.
In July 1956 Kanayama exhibited a work entitled ‘Ashiato’: a strip of white vinyl, about 150 metres long, on which he had made footprints. The strip was rolled out on the forest floor and at the end it ran upwards into a tree. In that way Kanayama succeeded in turning a flat painting, resembling in a way a traditional Japanese scroll painting, into something spatial, and making it one with its surroundings. On that occasion. the red lamp had been turned into a railway signal in the woods. Two red lights flashed alternately and added in that way a dynamic element. At the next exhibition in Tokyo he showed a work called ‘Boru’. It was a white rubber balloon, several metres high, covered with little coloured dots. The object pulsated as if it were an enormous heart, and so resembled a living object.46
In Kanayama’s works between 1953 and 1956 we can, therefore, perceive a progression from flat to spatial monochromes, and thence to ‘living’ art. The artist’s reaction to that observation was that it was not deliberate, but a purely natural process.47 That comment approximates one of Zero’s basic principles, as formulated by Murakami, i.e. that ‘naturalness was the only permitted meaning’. Tohru Matsumoto, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, remarked during an interview “we Japanese, in our inner depths, believe that material lives”.48 This Japanese view is related to the ancient cult of animism in the Shinto religion, and, as stated earlier, can also be found in Zen.
In 1957 Kanayama converted a toy truck into a painting machine for the third Gutai exhibition in Kyoto. He placed a pot of paint on the truck and sent it off in various directions across a large sheet of paper, causing it to deposit a never-ending trail of paint. The result, because of its formal similarity, seems like an ironic reaction to Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Kanayama’s reaction to that interpretation was just as sobering as many famous dialogues in Zen literature 49: “I had no time to make a painting, so I let the machine do it: it made 10 metres of painting in 2 or 3 hours”. His reply to the question why he used mainly white for his monochromes (which the German Zero artists later did as well) was equally down-to-earth: “I like white”.50
With reference to these works by Kanayama, it is worth noting that the French artist Jean Tinguely exhibited the work ‘Méta-matic 17’ at the first Biennial in Paris, at the Musée d’Art moderne - it was made up of pieces of old iron, a moving roll of paper and a large balloon. This machine made thousands of drawings, assisted by the spectators.
A similar development to that in Kanayama’s work, from static monochromes to ‘living art’, can also be observed in that of Atsuko Tanaka. During the 1955 open-air exhibition she displayed a large pink nylon ‘canvas’, measuring ten by ten metres, about twenty centimetres off the ground, with sunlight reflecting on it. The wind caused a constant wave motion in the cloth, bringing the monochrome she so favoured to life with its vibration. At the exhibition in Tokyo a few months later, she had a similar work on show. It consisted of plain-coloured yellow cloths loosely attached to the wall which swayed slightly in the draught in the room. Another of her works at that exhibition was, in the artist’s words, a sequel to the fluttering cloths. She had placed a series of bells on the floors of the various rooms of the exhibition centre. If someone touched just one bell, a chain reaction of ringing bells was set off: a wave of sound. Her work at the second out-door show comprised seven oversized figures clad in different coloured neon lights, which heightened the visual experience of dynamism. At the next Tokyo exhibition her work literally came to life, as she draped one of these neon garments over her own body and walked through the halls. Her intention was to get as close as possible to her material and even become one with it, although she was in danger of being electrocuted!51
The development in Tanaka’s work from static monochromes to living art is comparable to the process which took place with Kanayama. The motto of the Gutai artists and of Zen Masters ‘to transcend by means of personal experience of the commonplace’ would seem to have been particularly appropriate to Tanaka’s work. A transcendence takes place from the materiality of art to the immateriality of light and sound, in which the limits of ‘spatiality’ are crossed.
Action and space were already features of Murakami’s work in 1954. After he had joined the Gutai group, he continued along that path. At the first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo in 1955 he blocked the entrance with a huge sheet of packing paper, which he had painted gold. Jiro Yoshihara had to break through the paper in order to open the exhibition. Murakami had placed three frames covered with packing paper, one closely behind the other, in the hall: he made six holes straight through the three sheets of paper with his own body. That gave his work the appearance of a ‘spatial’ painting with a ‘craquelure’ surface. At the open-air exhibition of 1956 he shared with the public his experience of space by means of an opening in a shape. That work, entitled ‘Sora’ (air/sky), consisted of a cylinder-shaped tent topped by a truncated zinc cone, which was open at the top. The spectator who stood inside the tent and looked upwards only saw the sky, thus experiencing space directly.
Time, as well as space, held a fascination for Murakami. According to Nakamura it is typically Japanese to live in unity with time and space.52 Murakami demonstrated that literally, by putting a ticking clock in a man-sized paper box. It was his challenge to allow the aspect of time, in the most literal sense, to play a leading role. He then looked for a way to include that aspect in a painting. At the third Gutai exhibition in the Municipal Art Museum in Kyoto, in April 1957, he revealed his solution. He had made several extremely fragile paintings. The paint flaked off with the slightest movement. After a while, the painting altered because the paint gradually fluttered to the floor, generating in that way a ‘living’ painting, comparable with the aforementioned ‘living’ works by Kanayama and Tanaka. Murakami wrote regarding these works that painting until then had never integrated the aspect of time.53 Although Futurism had, in his view, dealt with time, it only related to a pictorial rendering of a theoretical idea, so a depiction of time.54 Murakami saw his own works as a logical consequence of the Gutai group’s basic principles. The enthusiasm of those artists for the quest for a total emotion required the integration of both the time factor and the space factor. He believed that they wanted to convert from immovable time in art to a ‘living time’, and so create a new style of painting.55 Lily Abegg contends in her book Ostasien denkt anders that the concept of time for the Japanese is linked with personal experience, contrary to the traditional Western idea of absolute time.56 According to Shinichiro Osaki, curator of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in Kobe, the aspects of time and space, combined with the extreme physical element, are what make the Gutai works unique.57
‘Living art’ for Shiraga was, more than for Murakami and Tanaka, linked with his own body. From about 1953 onwards Shiraga’s works had become manifestations of the increasing melding of his body with the painting material. Accordingly, he supported a goal of Zero, as formulated by Murakami, purporting that ‘naturalness and physicality should be the only meaning of a work’. As was stated earlier, he originally painted with his hands, then with his feet, meaning that he literally stood ‘in’ the painting. After he joined Gutai, he continued with that technique, adding to it several projects entailing ‘setting foot on’ the work. At the first open-air exhibition in 1955 he placed ten red stakes in a cone shape. The work was called ‘Dozo ohairi kudasai’ (Please enter). When someone did go inside the cone he found himself surrounding by a ‘painting’ which could not be seen from the outside. Shiraga had cut notches in the stakes with an axe and painted them white inside.58
Yet Shiraga seems to have felt that the relationship between body and material could be even more intense. Three months later he dived into a pile of mud, remodelling it with the movements of his body. The physical experience was heightened by the abrasions on his body caused by the presence of chalk and cement fragments in the mud. At the second open-air exhibition he involved the public in his work. He had made two piles of mud - one round, the other oval, and covered them with cellophane to prevent them drying out.59 Visitors were invited to touch and transform the heaps of mud, to enable them to get an idea of how Shiraga had felt nine months before.
One often encounters in the relevant literature terms like ‘the unconscious’ and ‘automatism’ in connection with Shiraga. According to Yoshihiro Nakatani, assistant curator at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the unconscious and automatism in Oriental thinking relate primarily to the relationship, the tension between Man and material (and even the universe), in which there is no clear distinction between subject and object, consciousness and unconsciousness. That is how it differs from Western cultures, with their customary approach to these concepts as opposites.60
During the first half of the nineteen-fifties Japanese artists were still not very well informed about post-war modern art in the West. Art magazines like Geijutsu Shincho only contained the occasional small, black-and-white reproduction of work by artists like Jackson Pollock and Hans Hartung.61 The first personal contacts with Western avant-garde artists got going in September 1957, when Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Toshimitsu Imaī and Sam Francis visited the Gutai artists. The meeting with Tapié was to have repercussions for the Japanese artists and their work. In recent years there have been several publications featuring the effects of that encounter. Gutai definitely has Tapié to thank for the group’s international renown. He considered the Gutai works as a variation on Art Informel, and a confirmation of Art Autre, which he had designated as an international movement in 1952. However, opinions differ as to the idealistic scope of Tapié’s intentions, and the outcome of his visit for the Gutai artists’ works. Shinichiro Osaki was of the opinion that Tapié’s approach was motivated to some extent by self-interest.62 There are suggestions that after Tapié had fallen out with artists like Fautrier and Dubuffet, he dropped in esteem. He may have hoped, with the ‘discovery’ of Gutai, to restore his reputation.63 Some critics, including Barbara Bertozzi, accuse him of having had commercial motives.64 Bertozzi gives the example of Tapié’s reaction to Murakami’s fragile paintings. Murakami had told her that he was disappointed that Tapié had criticized the works because they were not lasting - a sign of his focus on the art market.65
Yamawaki remarked, concerning the exact consequences of Tapié’s opinion of the Gutai works, that the artists would have evolved in the same way even without Tapié’s visit.66 But Shozo Shimamoto believes that Gutai art would have retained greater originality if Tapié had stayed away.67 Tapié’s influence is reflected chiefly in the increasing complexity of the works, in my opinion. In Gutai 9 and 11 of 1958 and 1960, that growing ‘complexity’ is apparent. Study of Gutai works in various museum collections confirmed that observation. Not only were the compositions more complicated, but there were more layers of paint and more overlapping brush-strokes, as well as greater polychromy than before. Murakami, for instance, made several ‘chaotic’ paintings in that period, and Shiraga’s works became more colourful and more elaborate. According to Osaki, Shiraga’s works became lifeless because he had worked on them for too long.68
So were the Gutai artists’ works indeed a form of Art Informel? That question is hard to answer, since Tapié was vague about what the characteristics of Art Informel actually were. Osaki felt that Tapié’s complicated theories had nothing in common with the views of the the Gutai artists. They were entirely ‘practice-oriented’.69 The work of Gutai artists may well have evoked for Tapié the ‘matter art’ of Fautrier and Dubuffet. They, to his mind, were the pioneers of Art Informel. Yoshihara’s Gutai manifesto would seem to confirm the affinity with matter art: “The spirit does not force the material into submission (..) our work is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life”.70 That meant, for Gutai painting, that the work was made in the awareness of the material’s independence. Consequently,in these works the material and the artist’s action must retain a balance. According to Kazuo Yamawaki the Gutai concept means, with hindsight, a reversal of the academic Western view:
“The concept is not expression using the material but expression of the material itself. It reversed the concept of art, which was regarded as expressions of artists’ thoughts and ideas, and attempted to draw into the realm of expression nature liberated from artists’ egos and ideologies”.71
If one compares this Japanese concept with several of Zen’s objectives, one is struck by a number of similarities. Suzuki gives, as the foremost principles of Zen: identification of Self with the creative and artistic spirit of Nature, the absence of egocentric motivation and the removal of the rigidity of the ego, in order to accept everything that comes our way.72
Tapié referred in his book Continuité et Avant-garde au Japon, which was published in 1961, to the presence of Japanese elements in the Gutai works. He drew the reader’s attention in particular to the savoir-vivre and expression of the Zen arts which he perceived in the works in question. Some years earlier he had written in the eighth number of Gutai, which was devoted entirely to his ideas on Art Informel, on the connection between his views and the Japanese works. There Tapié opened his ‘hommage à Gutai’ with a quotation from Nietzsche: “Soyons durs” (Let us be hard), which would appear to refer to Nietzsche’s belief that excellence cannot exist without suffering.73 In the context of Gutai, he probably had in mind the great passion and great physicality.74
Dada fascinated Tapié, a fascination which was apparently shared by the leader of Gutai. Yoshihara is said to have wanted Gutai to play a part comparable with that of Dada after the First World War in Europe and Japan. Gutai’s works would rise up out of the ruins and stir up the world, as Dada had before it.75 The iconoclastic attitude and the combination of different art-forms in Dada were continued in Gutai. However, Yoshihara remarked in his Manifesto that the objectives of the two differed, in that Gutai members were not interested in politics.76 For Tapié, Dada stood for anarchism and a fresh start. In that sense Dada did approximate Yoshihara’s goals.
Zen seems to have had a subliminal influence on the work of Zero and Gutai artists, in view of its formative role in Japanese culture.77 Some artists prove to have had a conscious interest in Zen. In 1952 an essay by Yoshihara on Nantembō was published in the periodical Bokubi. And Shimamoto noted that Yoshihara took his pupils several times to the Kaisei temple in Nishinomiya, in 1953 and later. He showed them calligraphic works and ink paintings made by the Zen Master Nantembō. Yoshihara apparently frequently impressed on the Gutai artists that Nantembō’s works should be considered as modern and contained solutions for modern Japanese art. He did not intend the works to be copied, but their characteristics should serve as an example.78 The fact that characteristics such as the connection between body and material, spontaneous expression, original style, simplicity and immediacy are found in Nantembō’s and in the Gutai artists’ works suggests a connection with Zen.79 Because Zen chiefly inspired Japanese artists ‘from their own cultural background’, Shimamoto feels that their work is more akin to Zen than the work of Western artists ‘which is inspired by literature on Zen’.80
In post-war Japanese art magazines an interest was displayed in Zen, and in the Zen arts in particular. Leading art magazines like Geijutsu Shincho, regularly placed photographs of details of Zen gardens and Zen temples beside articles on and reproductions of modern Western and Japanese art. Much attention was also given to Zen arts like Shō, Nō and Raku.81 However, it is unclear whether the editors intended to highlight parallels between Zen arts and modern, avant-garde art with this combination of articles.
In addition, it is worth noting that Suzuki was quite well known in Japan, as a writer of Japanese books on Zen. In the nineteen-forties Suzuki also held lectures in Japan on Zen, as he did several years later in New York. His books were, however, evidently not even easy to read for his fellow countrymen.82
The question still has not been answered how Japanese or how Western the works of Zero and Gutai actually were in the fifties. Many curators in Japanese museums of modern art were asked that same question.83 Their answers varied from ‘very Japanese’ to ‘very Western’, with all the gradations in between. I found a possible explanation for the differing views in the studies I conducted in the West. The Western works often proved to combine developments in the history of painting - in which nineteenth century Japonisme played an important part - the West’s new outlook on the world which was related to the outlook of the Far East, and new sources from Japan, such as Zen. The Western and the Japanese elements had become a homogeneous blend in the course of the fifties, in various works in the West.84 And a similar process had taken place in Japan. Several Western elements had already been adopted in Japanese painting in the nineteenth century. In the course of the twentieth century the artist’s attitude changed, and consciously or subconsciously, he began to mix Western elements with his own cultural heritage, to form a homogeneous whole. The differing opinions on the degree of Japanese-ness or Western-ness of these artists would seem to be due to the difficulty in analysing the ‘mixture’.
For instance, we can conclude with respect to the materials used that the use of oils is purely Western. When traditional Japanese painting materials like ink and paper were used, immediacy played a vital role. That aspect is not necessarily present with oil paints, since the artist can continue to make alterations for quite some time when painting in oils. The experiments the artists in question conducted with their materials show that they preferred a direct approach, even with oils.
The objectives of ‘bringing the material to life’ and ‘the close relationship between body and material’ prove to be primarily Japanese, although, as we saw earlier, Western artists also began to pursue the same aims. Masaharu Ono, the curator of the National Museum of Art in Osaka, did, however, stress that ‘experimenting’ with materials was typically Western.85
The Zero and Gutai artists’ pursuit of an entirely original style of painting is Western in character, since Japan has no tradition of innovation in art or of an individual style. These artists would mainly seem to have adopted ‘originality’ - in the sense of differing from what was made in the past.86 According to Shimamoto there was an important difference between the Gutai group and other modern Japanese artists, especially those in Tokyo. The latter for the most part copied Western art, whereas the members of Gutai were more inclined to adopt the Western attitude to modern art.87
Although there is no tradition of individual-related original art in Japan, it was much appreciated in the history of Japanese art if an artist, after many years of copying, ended up developing an original style. Famous Zen Masters like Sesshū, Hakuin and Nantembō did have a personal style. One does wonder whether ‘original’ and ‘self’, as in terms like ‘self-expression’, have the same meaning in Japan as in the West. Shinji Kohmoto, a curator at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, explained that, in his opinion, the Japanese terms ‘self-expression’, and ‘original’ or ‘personal’ painting were different from in the West. In Japan ‘self’, ‘original’ and ‘personal’ do not refer to individuality in a Western sense, but to the personal experience of a world on which one is dependent, knowing that “a person does not live on his own, but by the grace of Nature”.88 Hajime Nakamura wrote concerning the difference between the Japanese and Western meanings of ‘individuality’ that it is incorrect to think that individuality does not exist for the Japanese. For them it means the focus on direct experience.89 Nihei Nakamura observed that the academic Western artist looked for his own personality by setting his ‘ego’ off against the outside world. The tradition in the Far East entails the artist seeking an ‘archetype’, turning in his search to the depths of Nature and the Self.90 The Japanese meaning of both self and individuality can also be found in the works of the Zero and Gutai artists. They do not express the ‘individual story’ in the Western sense, but ‘the direct experience of the Self’ in the Japanese sense.
Several of the Gutai projects suggest that the artists were in the process of liberating themselves. Take, for instance, Murakami’s actions, which implied he was beating a path for himself through screens, towards freedom. The focus of the artists in question appears to have been to liberate themselves by surpassing the self. That in turn resembles the view of Zen on release. It is interesting to see that Japanese artists believe that they experience the concept of ‘freedom’ differently from their Western colleagues. According to Murakami, the Japanese artists did not use the idea of freedom in the Western sense of ‘individual freedom’, because they were not familiar with it, but in the sense of transcending cerebral limitation.91
NOTES
1. Introduction by the directors of the Penrose Institute in the catalogue The Gutai Group 1955/56, TOKYO 1993, p. 11. Alexandra Munroe calls Gutai in the catalogue Japanese Art after 1945. Scream against the Sky, YOKAHAMA 1994, p. 185: “Japan’s most significant, influential, and arguably first international avant-garde movement in the postwar art”. This catalogue provides a good overview of modern Japanese art after 1945. I do not wish to express an opinion on the text relating to art after 1960, but concerning the Gutai text, I have to conclude that the catalogue does not shed new light on the group.
2. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993. He added that the meetings were held at his house, and sometimes at Kanayama’s. The Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo has a list of members who attended the meetings.
3. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993. Akira Kanayama, another member of the group, remarked that it was worth remembering that Murakami had studied philosophy, thus intending to emphasize that the name Zero was not without significance. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on the same day.
4. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), p. 375.
5. Shiraga did, however, comment that the same trend could be found in international art. One wonders whether Suzuki might not have been right with his remark that every human being longs for simplicity.
6. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993. It is remarkable that in Germany, though admittedly six years later, a group was also founded with the name Zero. Although Günther Uecker, who was discussed in the chapter on Germany, belonged to the Zero group, his ideas were different from those of the founders Otto Piene and Hans Mack. Their ideas were not discussed in more detail, in view of the already extensive scope of the present study.
7. This exhibition was held in the Sogo department store in Osaka.
8. Later in this chapter the views of Yoshihara and some works of Shimamoto will be discussed.
9. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
10. Saburo Murakami in Gutai 4, 1956. The English translation of this article is published in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 399.
11. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
12. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), pp. 62-63.
13. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on 31 August 1993. This opinion on the attitude of the citizens of Osaka can also be found in various books on Gutai.
14. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
15. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
16. Murakami joined the Gutai group in 1955. That period will be discussed later in this chapter.
17. ‘Japanese elements’ refer to the predominating emptiness and extreme asymmetry. Interview with Kazuo YAMAWAKI in Nagoya on 15 September 1993. These aspects can also be found in Western works. Often, as in Mondrian’s paintings, there is some allusion to the artist’s interest in the Far East. Mondrian, for instance, was an adherent of Theosophy. Kanayama knew his work from art magazines. Masaharu ONO emphasized in an interview in Osaka on 16 September 1993 that ‘geometric abstraction’ had not had much influence in Japan because it was too rational for the Japanese character.
18. Interview with Yuko HASEGAWA and Masako SHIMIZU, curators at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo, on 26 November 1993.
19. Interview with Atsuko TANAKA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
20. Interview with Atsuko TANAKA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
21. In Soun-Gui KIM, 1986, p.227 one can read an essay on the difference between Chinese and Japanese art that the theme of repetition, of echoes combined with ‘emptiness’, is typically Japanese.
22. Teng Kuei, Mark Tobey’s Chinese friend (see the chapter ‘The unity between West and East. American artists and Zen’) also used that technique.
23. Interview with Hajime SHIMOYAMA in Shizuoka-shi on 10 October 1993.
24. Interview with Hajime SHIMOYAMA in Shizuoka-shi on 10 October 1993.
25. Interview with Hajime SHIMOYAMA in Shizuoka-shi on 10 October 1993.
26. It is striking that in that period there was also a ‘physical automatism’ in the West. Asger Jorn, an artist of the Cobra group, defined it in 1949 as expressing oneself in the form of a physical action which materializes in thought. So mental automatism is organically linked to physical automatism. JORN 1949, p. 8, STOKVIS 1990 (1974), p. 84. The American artist Jackson Pollock also worked in a similar way, partly under the influence of his interest in non-Western cultures. See the chapter ‘The unity between West and East. American artists and Zen’.
27. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993.
28. Interview with Shinichiro OSAKI in Kobe on 1 September 1993.
29. Shimamoto was not only active as an artist in Gutai. He also edited and published the Gutai bulletin. Like his counterparts in the Zero movement, he was painting monochromes in the first half of the fifties. In 1950 he made a work comprising several layers of newspaper which he then painted with white enamel. The surface acquired a texture of small holes and cracks, which the artist claims took place by chance. The weight of the thick layers of paint caused holes in the paper. He liked the texture and exhibited the work in 1952. He went on to produce several works in which he deliberately made slashes. In around 1955 Yoshihara showed Shimamoto a reproduction in a magazine of a painting by Lucio Fontana with knife cuts, advising Shimamoto to stop making cuts in his work and undertake new experiments. At Gutai’s first open-air event, Shimamoto placed a zinc wall, which was white on one side and dark blue on the other. He had made holes in several places through which trees could be seen. From a distance, the holes resembled points of light, because the sun shone through them. The work was a visualization of the title of the exhibition: ‘An open-air exhibition of modern art to challenge the summer sun’. The white side of the surface reflected the sun and on the dark side the sun shone through the holes, and in that way the work was a ‘two-sided’ monochrome.
30. Moreover, they also knew that Jiro Yoshihara, the group’s leader, was a good organizer.
31. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993.
32. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993.
33. Jiro Yoshihara in Gutai 1, p. 27.
34. Jiro Yoshihara in Gutai 1, p. 27. In this first edition of Gutai works were reproduced by the following members: Sadani Azuna, Yutaka Funai, Masakoshi Masanobu, Hiroshi Okada, Hajime Okamoto, Yoshio Sekina, Shozo Shimamoto, Taniko Ueda, Chiyu Uemae, Toshio Yoshida and Michio Yoshihara.
35. Jozo Ukita in Gutai 2, 1955
36. It is odd that the Gutai group only published their manifesto after two years. It looks as if they did so to give the group international credibility, since they apparently did not feel the need to draw up a manifesto before that - in the same way as Zen did not feel the need for rules either. The manifesto was published in English in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991.
37. YOSHIHARA, 1956, pp. 202-205.
38. YOSHIHARA, 1956, pp. 202-205. This aim resembles that of several Western artists in the same period, including the previously mentioned members of the Cobra group, Action Painters in America and artists like Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapiès, who created ‘matter art’.
39. SUZUKI, 1970 (1953), p. 351 and SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), p. 36.
40. After a few years Okamoto switched to a Surrealist style of painting. See note 9. Kazu Kaido wrote about Okamoto in the catalogue Reconstructions, OXFORD 1985, p. 14: “His role in the development of the Japanese avant-garde was extremely important as he not only linked pre-war European avant-garde art to that of post-war Japan but also managed to establish a sense of persona of the artist as it is understood in the Western avant-garde”.
41. BALLO, 1971 (1970), p. 188.
42. Interview with Kazuo YAMAWAKI in Nagoya on 15 September 1993.
43. In the West, artists derive inspiration from works of non-Western cultures as well as works made by the mentally-handicapped and by children. For more information on these subjects, when not relating to the Far East, readers are referred to literature dealing with Primitivism and Art Brut. Developments in psychology in the first half of the twentieth century were also relevant for the Western artist’s alternative perception of his environment. See the previous chapters concerning the roles of Freud and Jung.
44. Literature on Gutai describes the works on show.
45. Description of the work by Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 33.
46. NAKAMURA, 1992, p. 58, believes, as we saw earlier in this chapter, that it is typical of Japanese artists that they do not ‘process’ the material, but that the material is allowed to lead its own life, with a character of its own.
47. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
48. Interview with Tohru MATSUMOTO in Tokyo on 13 October 1993. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), p. 363 and DUMOULIN 1989 (1976), p. 83 wrote about this aspect in Japanese culture. The new position on ‘matter’ in the Western world is dealt with earlier in this chapter and in preceding chapters.
49. This can be illustrated with the following Zen anecdote. A man saw a Zen monk praying in front of a statue of Buddha and the next day, to his surprise, saw the monk burning the same statue. The monk’s response was: “Now I’m cold”.
50. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
51. Interview with Atsuko TANAKA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
52. NAKAMURA , 1992, p. 58.
53. Murakami in Gutai 7, 1957, which was published three months after the exhibition.
54. Murakami in Gutai 7, 1957. An English translation was published in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, pp. 401-402.
55. Murakami in Gutai 7, 1957. An English translation was published in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, pp. 401-402.
56. ABEGG, 1970, p. 336. The absence of time in Western art had already been noted by the philosopher Kitaro Nishida in 1934, in his comparison of Western and Eastern art. He believed that the Greeks had begun with the denial of the concept of time. CHARLES, 1986. p 190.
57. Shinichiro Osaki in the catalogue Giappone all’avanguardia, ROME 1990, pp. 31-33.
58. The description of the work is given by Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 22.
59. Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 26.
60. Interview with Yoshihiro NAKATANI in Kyoto on 14 September 1993.
61. In addition, in the first half of the fifties several exhibitions of Western art were held in Tokyo. See the Introduction to this chapter. The Zero artists from the Kansai district, far from Tokyo, did not visit the exhibitions.
62. Shinichiro Osaki in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 70.
63. Interview with Toshimitsu IMAI in Tokyo on 8 October 1993 and interview with Koichi KAWASAKI in Ashiya on 10 September 1993.
64. Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 50.
65. Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 50. Tapié had only exhibited the paintings by Gutai artists in the West, which gave them the impression that Westerners were only interested in that kind of work. When the Dutch art group Nul organized an exhibition together with the German Zero for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (which took place in May 1965), the Gutai artists were asked to participate. The organizers were dismayed when they discovered that only paintings and not the expected ‘installations’ had been sent from Japan. In Amsterdam a few old projects were reconstructed at the last minute by several Gutai members. Within the framework of the present study, it is interesting to note that Yves Klein (who was mentioned earlier) who also took part in the exhibition, was initially against Gutai participation, because he feared the public might think that Western artists had been influenced by Gutai. This information was supplied by Henk Peeters, one of the organizers of the exhibition and noted during one of our conversations in 1993.
66. Interview with Kazuo YAMAKAWI in Nagoya on 15 September 1993.
67. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993. See note 72 for more information on this artist.
68. Interview with Shinichiro OSAKI in Kobe on 1 September 1993.
69. Shinichiro Osaki on the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 71.
70. YOSHIHARA, 1956, pp. 202-205. The following remark must be made in the context of the differences between Tapié and Gutai, concerning the name ‘Art Informel’, which literally stands for ‘art without form’. In that sense it appears to be a reaction to the art of geometric abstraction. However, Toshimitsu Imaī noted that ‘informel’ is situated between form and non-form, and that it was connected with ‘becoming form’. According to Imaī he had often spoken to Tapié about Zen, in particular about Suzuki’s books, and Tapié had understood Zen at that time (Interview with Toshimitsu IMAI in Tokyo on 8 October 1993). However, I am of the opinion that there is an important difference: Tapié's aim is to ‘work in a field between form and non-form’, and Zen’s aim is ‘the tension between form and non-form’. In Zen ‘becoming form’ is related to the imperfection of forms: “Perfect forms are felt to draw the attention to the form rather than to its inner truth” (NAKAMURA, 1992, p. 290). In that area Zen and Tapié would seem to have more in common. Many works by French artists of the Art Informel movement certainly make a more ‘formless’ impression than many of the Zero and Gutai groups’ pieces. It is odd that Zero’s basic principles: “no meaning, no composition, no colour” do not include “no form”.
71. Yamawaki in the catalogue The Gutai Group 1955/56, TOKYO 1993, p. 50. A view which was comparable to that of Gutai regarding material was to be found in the previously mentioned ‘Manifesto Bianco’ by Fontana and in an expression like ‘the dialogue with the material’ by Asger Jorn in Cobra no. 2, 1949. JORN in Cobra no. 2, 1949. The so-called ‘matter painters’ like Antoni Tapiès emphasize the role of matter in their work. In her thesis STOKVIS, 1973, p. 102 ff., links the interest of the Cobra artists in matter with the dialectic materialism of Marx and the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard.
72. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), pp. 258, 164 and 144.
73. SPRIGGE, 1990 (1985), p. 106 and p. 96 believes that, according to Nietzsche, an artistic creation is, above all else, the motive to impose one’s own personality on the crude material, which is then transformed, a dominance over things through the suffering of pain. It is not clear from Tapié’s texts whether he agreed with Nietzsche in that respect.
74. SPRIGGE, 1990 (1985). p. 100.
75. ROBERTS, 1992, pp. 114, 155. ‘Dada’ was known in Japan thanks to Tomoyoshi Murayama, who had studied in Berlin and founded a ‘Dada’ group in Japan called ‘MAVO’.
76. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
77. This opinion was confirmed frequently during interviews with Japanese art historians.
78. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
79. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
80. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
81. In the fifties the following were important art magazines: Geijitsu Shincho, Mizue, Bijutsu Hihyo and Bijutsu Techo.
82. The artist Toshimitsu IMAI recounted during an interview in Tokyo on 8 October 1993 that when he was a schoolboy he had heard lectures by Suzuki. His headmaster was a friend of Suzuki’s. According to Prof. Y. IWATA, in an interview on 2 May 1995, the English translations of Suzuki’s books are currently popular in Japan.
83. My reference here is to the list of interviews conducted in Japan.
84. See preceding chapters.
85. Interview with Masaharu ONO in Osaka on 16 September 1993.
86. Yoshihara learned the importance of originality from his teacher Fujita. During his period in Paris Fujita had been influenced by Western views on art. The Western idea of developing a new style had also been introduced in Japan by Okamoto. Catalogue Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan, OXFORD 1985, p. 14. As Gutai’s leader, Yoshihara stimulated this attitude among the Gutai members. The fact that Yoshihara advised them to sign their works with ‘Gutai’ rather than their own names, suggests that ‘individual-related original art’ was not important for him. And at some exhibitions the works were indeed signed ‘Gutai’.
87. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
88. Interview with Shinji KOHMOTO in Kyoto on 21 September 1993.
89. Nakamura in MOORE, 1967, p. 195.
90. NAKAMURA, 1992, p. 91.
91. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI on 31 August 1993.
Published at the occasion of the exhibition Gutai: Painting with Time and Space exhibition, held at Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano., 2010.
The Zero period
In Tokyo nearly all the avant-garde artists in the fifties were very much geared to Western modern art movements, and the styles which best matched the Japanese character were followed very carefully. In the Kansai district, the region in which both Kyoto and Osaka are located, the culture of the fifties was more traditional than in Tokyo, in both a material and a non-material sense. That in itself would seem to be a significant explanation of the fact that modern art in Kansai displayed more Japanese characteristics.
In around 1950 the artists of what was called the ‘Shinseisaku Kyokai’ (those making new art), a group of some twelve artists, regularly met to criticize one another’s work.2 The meetings resulted in the formation of Zero no kai (Zero group) - Zero, or ‘0’ as it was generally written. The name was an idea of Saburo Murakami, one of the members. He chose it to refer to the members’ basic principles. As he observed: “Zero means ‘nothing’: start with nothing, completely original, no artificial meaning. The only meaning is: natural, my body”.3 This comment is reminiscent of something Suzuki said:
“When we speak of being natural, we mean first of all being free and spontaneous in the expression of our feelings, being immediate and not premeditating in our response to environment (..) to be like a child, though not necessarily with a child’s intellectual simplicity or its emotional crudity”.4
The Zero artist Kazuo Shiraga emphasized that in traditional Japanese arts there was a tendency to ‘simplification’, as in the art of the tea ceremony. He was of the opinion that Zero had a similar tendency.5 He also added another meaning of the group’s name: a point of neutrality, of balance between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ abstraction (the two different preferences of the the group’s members). Another, but less important meaning was a new start, from point 0, following the Second World War.6
The Zero group was disbanded after less than three years, and held only one group exhibition.7 The artists met once a week or sometimes only once a month, and discussed ‘new art’. The artists Saburo Murakami, Akira Kanayama, Atsuko Tanaka and Kazuo Shiraga have been chosen for further examination in this chapter. They turned out to be the most important members of the group. Moreover, they joined the Gutai group of artists in 1955, to become the foremost members there, alongside the founder Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972) and Shozo Shimamoto (b. 1928).8
The style of the Zero works varied considerably, yet there are similarities. To start with, all the works were ‘minimal’: paintings with very slight differences in tone and colour, and very simple in composition. In 1953 Murakami made a series of works by bouncing a ball smeared with black ink against sheets of paper. The ball’s imprint on the paper resembles an explosion of black ink. The name Haboku (splashed ink) would have been appropriate - that was actually the name of the painting style of the famous sixteenth century Zen Master Sesshū. Not that Murakami made a typical Zen painting. He worked with the same material and comparable spontaneity, yet his work was primarily ‘Zero’. He believed that it was typical for Zero to start with nothing: no subject, no paintbrush, no composition, no tonal values (just black ink on white paper) and completely original (the first time a painting had been made with a ball). Nor was any artificial meaning involved. He merely called the works ‘Boru’ (ball). The only meaning that, according to Murakami, was permitted, was ‘the natural, the physical’ - to be found in the physical action of throwing the ball.9 To my mind, this ‘Ball’ series can be seen as an original integration of Western and Japanese elements, since it combines the characteristics of traditional Japanese ink painting with the Western artist’s ‘striving for something new’.
Murakami wrote in 1956, in the Gutai magazine (issued by the group of the same name) something about the will required in the context of the modern Japanese artist’s intention: “I set this will free in my way, an empty ‘I’ is created as a basis for a new will. (..) It is a good thing to let the will thrive limitless. A weak will is crushed by a strong one. A small but precise will resists an incapable will, and the surviving will certainly gets a shape”.10
This quotation brings to mind the vols (will) to which the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre often referred in his existentialist writings. And that is not by chance. Murakami had become interested in Sartre’s Existentialism when he was studying philosophy. Sartre’s theories were very popular with students in Japan in the fifties. For Murakami ‘will’ stood for the will an artist must find to create a distance between himself and art history, and in particular between himself and the art-work.11 It is interesting that in Zen especially there is a connection between ‘will’ and ‘self-denial’ (as between ‘will’ and ‘distance from the self’ with Murakami). According to Suzuki, Zen is “a religion of will-power, related to the Zen discipline, which is self-reliant and self-denying”.12 The similarity between ‘nothingness’ in Zero art and that of Zen will be discussed at a later stage.
The members of Zero claimed that the group’s practical principles, which amounted to members having neither an idealistic nor a political intent, reflected the area from which they originated: Osaka and surroundings. Osaka was primarily a city of merchants, so people with a practical orientation.13
One of the topics on which Zero members debated was the relationship between art and the ‘pure attitude of children to work’.14 A series of works by Murakami which he began making in 1954 clearly reflects that connection. The series came about as a result of an incident which occurred with his son: after a minor quarrel Murakami shut the two-year old outside. The child was angry and banged so hard against the fusuma (sliding partition made of paper with an interior wooden frame) that he broke through it. This event inspired Murakami to produce square wooden frames across which he had stretched paper. He then proceeded to make holes in them with the same physical spontaneity with which he had made the ‘Boru’ series.15 When Murakami joined the Gutai group, the experiments with materials became even more ‘event-like’.16
Akira Kanayama painted monochromes in a completely different style from Murakami. Yet they too coincided with Zero’s basic principles. He took a rectangular white ground, and painted several narrow little rectangles at the edge, the effect of which was to give the large empty space of the paper a central place (ills. 93 and 94). These works give the appearance of being a combination of the Western geometric style, especially of Mondrian’s works, and the Japanese preference for asymmetry and emptiness. According to Kazuo Yamawaki, the chief curator at Nagoya City Art Museum, Kanayama, in his desire to transcend geometric art, unconsciously integrated in this way Japanese elements in his work.17
The relationship, the equality between the dark narrow shapes and the surrounding white, is characteristic of Oriental calligraphy. Particularly because of their thinness, the forms recall the spareness of calligraphy, and because the small shapes do not divide the surface into strictly geometrical zones, allowing the organic form of the emptiness to dominate, the work retains a typical Japanese sensitivity.
Two Japanese curators of modern art explained in a discussion of a work by Kanayama with two small rectangles on the right-hand edge of the paper, that, being Japanese, the composition did not strike them as unusual. They went on to explain it with reference to the compositions in traditional Japanese painting and Ukiyo-e.18 Westerners would probably not experience Kanayama’s composition as ‘usual’.
Kanayama and Murakami painted on paper and later on linen, so they began with a traditional Japanese ground and went on to a Western one. Atsuko Tanaka experimented with different textiles. Her first works were on linen, but because she wanted to avoid the association with traditional Western painting, she switched to other materials, including cotton.19 In 1955 she began experimenting with nylon, which actually alluded to modern Japan, since nylon was a product of the Japanese industrial revolution. Her main reason for using nylon was that she was trying to renounce traditional aesthetics.20
In 1953 Tanaka embarked on a series of monochromes in which she painted numbers. This was a consequence of her long stay in hospital in 1952 and 1953. There she kept a calendar of the days until she might leave. After her discharge, she began to place rows of numbers in her work. The interesting thing is that the lines actually constitute a repetition of the same number - a row with no beginning and no end.21 The artists of the Far East paint in the same way as they write: ‘in succession’, from one side to another. In the works by Tanaka which are dealt with here, the connection between writing and art is evident, as it was in Kanayama’s work.
Tanaka’s experiments with materials are typical for the modern Western artist. The ‘Japanese spirit’ in her work was to increase after 1955. Then ‘the natural and physical aspect’ which Murakami described as characteristic of Zero, became stronger in both Tanaka’s and Kanayama’s work.
Kazuo Shiraga’s first monochrome paintings were made rather ‘mechanically’ - he applied the paint, in one colour and in a uniform pattern, with a palette knife. His intention was to ignore composition and colour alike. Like his fellow- artists in Zero, he also avoided the used of a paintbrush. Their ambition was ‘to be original’, and consequently they rejected this most traditional of painting tools.
Shiraga aimed at a ‘natural’ and ‘physical’ form of expression, in common with Murakami. In 1953 he started experimenting with painting with his hands. The technique was not new; it had already been applied in China for centuries.22 But the use of oil paints in the process was new. A few months later he developed a method of painting with his feet. That technique had actually been used in the 8th century by a number of Taoists in China. They stood on the paper and applied the paint on the surface with hands and feet, whilst several people sat around them, beating drums.23 In a lecture held in August 1993, Kei Suzuki, a specialist in this I-P’in style, compared Shiraga’s works and those Chinese painters, demonstrating distinct similarities.24 Yet Shiraga does not seem to have known anything about his predecessors.25
Shiraga did not use his feet in a personal, expressionist way, but more ‘mechanically’, as he had his palette knife. He continued to avoid composition, meaning and polychromy. In that way he tried to transcend the subjective element, recalling the Buddhist aim. It is worth noting here that he in fact also became a Buddhist monk. The structure of the movements in a reddish brown monochrome painting made in 1954 has something of the 'mechanically' raked circles in Zen gardens.
So the physical element is an important aspect in Shiraga’s work.26 The Japanese art historians whom I interviewed were of the opinion that Shiraga’s ‘physicality’ ties in with the arts of the Far East. Shiraga also believes that his ‘painting action’ is more akin to the martial arts of Zen, especially Kendo, than to American Action Painting. He believes that feeling, unity with the soul and concentration are related, and also that there is a connection with the directness of other Zen arts like Shō.27 The affinity between traditional Japanese culture and the Zen arts was particularly clear during his action of 1957, in which he performed Sanbaso, a dance in Nō drama; it involved archers shooting a hundred arrows through a white cotton backcloth. The action in the more complicated paintings which he was making from the end of the fifties is, however, more inclined towards Western physical automatism, as they lack the simplicity of the dynamism of the Zen arts.
Shiraga originally started painting monochromes in various colours, such as grey, blue and red. Towards 1954 he had developed a preference for red. We could go so far as to term his work from the second half of the fifties his ‘red period’.28 The red he used is one frequently found in Japanese culture. Originally the Japanese preferred natural colours, but as time went by, increasing use was made of a red imported from China.
The Gutai period
In 1955 the artist Shozo Shimamoto 29 called on the Zero artists to ask if they would like to join the Gutai group. According to Kanayama they knew nothing at that time of the Gutai artists’ philosophy, but their works appealed to them.30 They agreed, and in February 1955 Murakami, Kanayama, Tanaka, Shiraga and his wife Fukio joined the group. According to Shiraga these Zero artists sensed that the Gutai group had the same objectives as they did, and so decided Zero might just as well be abolished.31
It is remarkable that in publications on Gutai the former Zero members’ work is constantly referred to as the most important. Only Shimamoto, who was mentioned earlier, and Sadamasa Motonaga (b. 1922) are considered to have produced work of comparable quality. That is why one must realize that their time in the Zero group was formative for the artists who went on to produce much of the important Gutai work. Shiraga believes that the works of various Gutai artists became more ‘spiritual’ under the influence of their Zero colleagues.32
The Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai, Gutai Art Association, was founded in July 1954. Several members had in fact formed a kind of group in 1951. Jiro Yoshihara (ills. 97 and 98) founded his group with sixteen other artists, who were his pupils or his friends. Together they published a bulletin with the name Gutai. The first number appeared on 1 January 1955.
The Gutai members did not produce a manifesto or pursue an ideology. Yoshihara wrote in the first bulletin, in a short introduction in English, that the bulletin had been produced by seventeen modern artists who lived between Osaka and Kobe. Their aim was to show their work to the world and draw attention to it from people living oversees.33 With respect to the members’ philosophy, he wrote that they all believed that it was important for one’s development to create an independent position. Moreover, they wanted to demonstrate that their spirit was free and that they sought a new impression for every creation.34 The works which were reproduced in the bulletin bear little resemblance to one another, apart from the fact that they were all paintings and nearly all abstract. They vary from works in a calligraphic style to compositions of planes. Some are very busy others austere.
In the second issue of Gutai, which appeared in October 1955 (after the group had linked up with Zero), Yozo Ukita, one of the Gutai artists, listed some of the features of Gutai art. His theory was that abstract expression was based on the direct materialization of perception. He emphasized that several works had been executed using ‘all possible means’, from fingernails to a hair-drier. Art is “how well the individuals can reflect the results of their conception of the very life they lead”. Hence his translation of the word ‘Gutai’ with ‘Embodiment’.35
In actual fact, the literal translation of the word Gutai is ‘concrete’. Yoshihara gave an explanation of the name in ‘the Gutai Manifesto’ which was published in the art magazine Geijutsu Shincho in October 1956.36 Because “purely formalistic abstract art has lost its charm” they wanted to go “beyond the borders of Abstract Art” and so chose the name ‘Gutai-ism’ (Concretism).37 Yoshihara accused traditional art of ‘murdering’ materials, remarking that Gutai art did not change the material, but brought it to life. “In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands” and hence the group’s aim was formulated as “combining human creative ability with the characteristics of the material”.38 The observations bear resemblance to the aim of the Zen Master. Suzuki wrote that the Zen Master tries to create life in his work: “Each brush-stroke must beat with the pulsation of a living being. It must be living too” and “The painter’s business thus is not just to copy or imitate nature, but to give the object something living in its own right”.39 The term ‘Gutai-ism’ (Concretism) calls forth associations with ‘Art Concret’. In 1930 Theo van Doesburg wrote a manifesto in Paris with that title. Interestingly enough, the characteristics which he formulated differ considerably from Yoshihara’s descriptions of Gutai art. Van Doesburg’s prime focus was on intellect and technical perfection. It is possible that Yoshihara had heard of ‘Art Concret’ from Taro Okamoto (b. 1911), who had gone to Paris in 1929 and in 1932 joined the ‘Abstraction-Création’ group, whose ideas closely resembled those of Van Doesburg.40 The Gutai manifesto proves to have more in common with the 1946 ‘Manifesto Bianco’ formulated by Lucio Fontana, in which he set himself the objective of reconciling himself with material and working with the energy it contained.41
Gutai’s aim to ‘go beyond the borders of existing art’ is an especially Western idea of modern art. My conclusion was corroborated by Kazuo Yamawaki, who added that the Gutai artists distorted that Western goal into something familiar, namely the relationship between body, spirit and material.42 Although that relationship can also be found in Western modern art of the fifties, there it related to ‘something new’.43
In July 1955, five months after the Zero artists had associated themselves with Gutai, Jiro Yoshihara organized an open-air exhibition in a pine forest on the banks of the Ashiyakawa river. In October of the same year, they held an exhibition in the Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo. In 1956 two exhibitions were again held in the same locations. In almost all the literature I studied relating to Gutai, the works are dealt with according to event, which might be explained by the fact that the prime interest was in Gutai as a group. After all, the group is often felt in Japanese culture to be more important than the individual. However, it proved more interesting from my point of view to continue to follow the personal development of the four above-mentioned Zero artists during their Gutai period, rather than the actual development of the artists as a group, since they all evolved in different ways.44
Kanayama, who, during the Zero period, was making white monochromes to which he added a few small shapes, began 1955 to develop three-dimensional monochromes, which he then even ‘brought to life’. For Gutai’s first open-air exhibition, he made a white wooden square on which he placed a small red sphere, thus bringing about a spatial note on the white monochrome. Three months later, at the first exhibition in Ohara Hall, he hung a large white balloon from the ceiling, and a little further off a spherical red lamp which filled the area with red light, colouring half of the white balloon red.45 The flat white surface had become ‘spatial’ and the red sphere had acquired light as an extra dimension.
In July 1956 Kanayama exhibited a work entitled ‘Ashiato’: a strip of white vinyl, about 150 metres long, on which he had made footprints. The strip was rolled out on the forest floor and at the end it ran upwards into a tree. In that way Kanayama succeeded in turning a flat painting, resembling in a way a traditional Japanese scroll painting, into something spatial, and making it one with its surroundings. On that occasion. the red lamp had been turned into a railway signal in the woods. Two red lights flashed alternately and added in that way a dynamic element. At the next exhibition in Tokyo he showed a work called ‘Boru’. It was a white rubber balloon, several metres high, covered with little coloured dots. The object pulsated as if it were an enormous heart, and so resembled a living object.46
In Kanayama’s works between 1953 and 1956 we can, therefore, perceive a progression from flat to spatial monochromes, and thence to ‘living’ art. The artist’s reaction to that observation was that it was not deliberate, but a purely natural process.47 That comment approximates one of Zero’s basic principles, as formulated by Murakami, i.e. that ‘naturalness was the only permitted meaning’. Tohru Matsumoto, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, remarked during an interview “we Japanese, in our inner depths, believe that material lives”.48 This Japanese view is related to the ancient cult of animism in the Shinto religion, and, as stated earlier, can also be found in Zen.
In 1957 Kanayama converted a toy truck into a painting machine for the third Gutai exhibition in Kyoto. He placed a pot of paint on the truck and sent it off in various directions across a large sheet of paper, causing it to deposit a never-ending trail of paint. The result, because of its formal similarity, seems like an ironic reaction to Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Kanayama’s reaction to that interpretation was just as sobering as many famous dialogues in Zen literature 49: “I had no time to make a painting, so I let the machine do it: it made 10 metres of painting in 2 or 3 hours”. His reply to the question why he used mainly white for his monochromes (which the German Zero artists later did as well) was equally down-to-earth: “I like white”.50
With reference to these works by Kanayama, it is worth noting that the French artist Jean Tinguely exhibited the work ‘Méta-matic 17’ at the first Biennial in Paris, at the Musée d’Art moderne - it was made up of pieces of old iron, a moving roll of paper and a large balloon. This machine made thousands of drawings, assisted by the spectators.
A similar development to that in Kanayama’s work, from static monochromes to ‘living art’, can also be observed in that of Atsuko Tanaka. During the 1955 open-air exhibition she displayed a large pink nylon ‘canvas’, measuring ten by ten metres, about twenty centimetres off the ground, with sunlight reflecting on it. The wind caused a constant wave motion in the cloth, bringing the monochrome she so favoured to life with its vibration. At the exhibition in Tokyo a few months later, she had a similar work on show. It consisted of plain-coloured yellow cloths loosely attached to the wall which swayed slightly in the draught in the room. Another of her works at that exhibition was, in the artist’s words, a sequel to the fluttering cloths. She had placed a series of bells on the floors of the various rooms of the exhibition centre. If someone touched just one bell, a chain reaction of ringing bells was set off: a wave of sound. Her work at the second out-door show comprised seven oversized figures clad in different coloured neon lights, which heightened the visual experience of dynamism. At the next Tokyo exhibition her work literally came to life, as she draped one of these neon garments over her own body and walked through the halls. Her intention was to get as close as possible to her material and even become one with it, although she was in danger of being electrocuted!51
The development in Tanaka’s work from static monochromes to living art is comparable to the process which took place with Kanayama. The motto of the Gutai artists and of Zen Masters ‘to transcend by means of personal experience of the commonplace’ would seem to have been particularly appropriate to Tanaka’s work. A transcendence takes place from the materiality of art to the immateriality of light and sound, in which the limits of ‘spatiality’ are crossed.
Action and space were already features of Murakami’s work in 1954. After he had joined the Gutai group, he continued along that path. At the first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo in 1955 he blocked the entrance with a huge sheet of packing paper, which he had painted gold. Jiro Yoshihara had to break through the paper in order to open the exhibition. Murakami had placed three frames covered with packing paper, one closely behind the other, in the hall: he made six holes straight through the three sheets of paper with his own body. That gave his work the appearance of a ‘spatial’ painting with a ‘craquelure’ surface. At the open-air exhibition of 1956 he shared with the public his experience of space by means of an opening in a shape. That work, entitled ‘Sora’ (air/sky), consisted of a cylinder-shaped tent topped by a truncated zinc cone, which was open at the top. The spectator who stood inside the tent and looked upwards only saw the sky, thus experiencing space directly.
Time, as well as space, held a fascination for Murakami. According to Nakamura it is typically Japanese to live in unity with time and space.52 Murakami demonstrated that literally, by putting a ticking clock in a man-sized paper box. It was his challenge to allow the aspect of time, in the most literal sense, to play a leading role. He then looked for a way to include that aspect in a painting. At the third Gutai exhibition in the Municipal Art Museum in Kyoto, in April 1957, he revealed his solution. He had made several extremely fragile paintings. The paint flaked off with the slightest movement. After a while, the painting altered because the paint gradually fluttered to the floor, generating in that way a ‘living’ painting, comparable with the aforementioned ‘living’ works by Kanayama and Tanaka. Murakami wrote regarding these works that painting until then had never integrated the aspect of time.53 Although Futurism had, in his view, dealt with time, it only related to a pictorial rendering of a theoretical idea, so a depiction of time.54 Murakami saw his own works as a logical consequence of the Gutai group’s basic principles. The enthusiasm of those artists for the quest for a total emotion required the integration of both the time factor and the space factor. He believed that they wanted to convert from immovable time in art to a ‘living time’, and so create a new style of painting.55 Lily Abegg contends in her book Ostasien denkt anders that the concept of time for the Japanese is linked with personal experience, contrary to the traditional Western idea of absolute time.56 According to Shinichiro Osaki, curator of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in Kobe, the aspects of time and space, combined with the extreme physical element, are what make the Gutai works unique.57
‘Living art’ for Shiraga was, more than for Murakami and Tanaka, linked with his own body. From about 1953 onwards Shiraga’s works had become manifestations of the increasing melding of his body with the painting material. Accordingly, he supported a goal of Zero, as formulated by Murakami, purporting that ‘naturalness and physicality should be the only meaning of a work’. As was stated earlier, he originally painted with his hands, then with his feet, meaning that he literally stood ‘in’ the painting. After he joined Gutai, he continued with that technique, adding to it several projects entailing ‘setting foot on’ the work. At the first open-air exhibition in 1955 he placed ten red stakes in a cone shape. The work was called ‘Dozo ohairi kudasai’ (Please enter). When someone did go inside the cone he found himself surrounding by a ‘painting’ which could not be seen from the outside. Shiraga had cut notches in the stakes with an axe and painted them white inside.58
Yet Shiraga seems to have felt that the relationship between body and material could be even more intense. Three months later he dived into a pile of mud, remodelling it with the movements of his body. The physical experience was heightened by the abrasions on his body caused by the presence of chalk and cement fragments in the mud. At the second open-air exhibition he involved the public in his work. He had made two piles of mud - one round, the other oval, and covered them with cellophane to prevent them drying out.59 Visitors were invited to touch and transform the heaps of mud, to enable them to get an idea of how Shiraga had felt nine months before.
One often encounters in the relevant literature terms like ‘the unconscious’ and ‘automatism’ in connection with Shiraga. According to Yoshihiro Nakatani, assistant curator at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the unconscious and automatism in Oriental thinking relate primarily to the relationship, the tension between Man and material (and even the universe), in which there is no clear distinction between subject and object, consciousness and unconsciousness. That is how it differs from Western cultures, with their customary approach to these concepts as opposites.60
During the first half of the nineteen-fifties Japanese artists were still not very well informed about post-war modern art in the West. Art magazines like Geijutsu Shincho only contained the occasional small, black-and-white reproduction of work by artists like Jackson Pollock and Hans Hartung.61 The first personal contacts with Western avant-garde artists got going in September 1957, when Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Toshimitsu Imaī and Sam Francis visited the Gutai artists. The meeting with Tapié was to have repercussions for the Japanese artists and their work. In recent years there have been several publications featuring the effects of that encounter. Gutai definitely has Tapié to thank for the group’s international renown. He considered the Gutai works as a variation on Art Informel, and a confirmation of Art Autre, which he had designated as an international movement in 1952. However, opinions differ as to the idealistic scope of Tapié’s intentions, and the outcome of his visit for the Gutai artists’ works. Shinichiro Osaki was of the opinion that Tapié’s approach was motivated to some extent by self-interest.62 There are suggestions that after Tapié had fallen out with artists like Fautrier and Dubuffet, he dropped in esteem. He may have hoped, with the ‘discovery’ of Gutai, to restore his reputation.63 Some critics, including Barbara Bertozzi, accuse him of having had commercial motives.64 Bertozzi gives the example of Tapié’s reaction to Murakami’s fragile paintings. Murakami had told her that he was disappointed that Tapié had criticized the works because they were not lasting - a sign of his focus on the art market.65
Yamawaki remarked, concerning the exact consequences of Tapié’s opinion of the Gutai works, that the artists would have evolved in the same way even without Tapié’s visit.66 But Shozo Shimamoto believes that Gutai art would have retained greater originality if Tapié had stayed away.67 Tapié’s influence is reflected chiefly in the increasing complexity of the works, in my opinion. In Gutai 9 and 11 of 1958 and 1960, that growing ‘complexity’ is apparent. Study of Gutai works in various museum collections confirmed that observation. Not only were the compositions more complicated, but there were more layers of paint and more overlapping brush-strokes, as well as greater polychromy than before. Murakami, for instance, made several ‘chaotic’ paintings in that period, and Shiraga’s works became more colourful and more elaborate. According to Osaki, Shiraga’s works became lifeless because he had worked on them for too long.68
So were the Gutai artists’ works indeed a form of Art Informel? That question is hard to answer, since Tapié was vague about what the characteristics of Art Informel actually were. Osaki felt that Tapié’s complicated theories had nothing in common with the views of the the Gutai artists. They were entirely ‘practice-oriented’.69 The work of Gutai artists may well have evoked for Tapié the ‘matter art’ of Fautrier and Dubuffet. They, to his mind, were the pioneers of Art Informel. Yoshihara’s Gutai manifesto would seem to confirm the affinity with matter art: “The spirit does not force the material into submission (..) our work is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life”.70 That meant, for Gutai painting, that the work was made in the awareness of the material’s independence. Consequently,in these works the material and the artist’s action must retain a balance. According to Kazuo Yamawaki the Gutai concept means, with hindsight, a reversal of the academic Western view:
“The concept is not expression using the material but expression of the material itself. It reversed the concept of art, which was regarded as expressions of artists’ thoughts and ideas, and attempted to draw into the realm of expression nature liberated from artists’ egos and ideologies”.71
If one compares this Japanese concept with several of Zen’s objectives, one is struck by a number of similarities. Suzuki gives, as the foremost principles of Zen: identification of Self with the creative and artistic spirit of Nature, the absence of egocentric motivation and the removal of the rigidity of the ego, in order to accept everything that comes our way.72
Tapié referred in his book Continuité et Avant-garde au Japon, which was published in 1961, to the presence of Japanese elements in the Gutai works. He drew the reader’s attention in particular to the savoir-vivre and expression of the Zen arts which he perceived in the works in question. Some years earlier he had written in the eighth number of Gutai, which was devoted entirely to his ideas on Art Informel, on the connection between his views and the Japanese works. There Tapié opened his ‘hommage à Gutai’ with a quotation from Nietzsche: “Soyons durs” (Let us be hard), which would appear to refer to Nietzsche’s belief that excellence cannot exist without suffering.73 In the context of Gutai, he probably had in mind the great passion and great physicality.74
Dada fascinated Tapié, a fascination which was apparently shared by the leader of Gutai. Yoshihara is said to have wanted Gutai to play a part comparable with that of Dada after the First World War in Europe and Japan. Gutai’s works would rise up out of the ruins and stir up the world, as Dada had before it.75 The iconoclastic attitude and the combination of different art-forms in Dada were continued in Gutai. However, Yoshihara remarked in his Manifesto that the objectives of the two differed, in that Gutai members were not interested in politics.76 For Tapié, Dada stood for anarchism and a fresh start. In that sense Dada did approximate Yoshihara’s goals.
Zen seems to have had a subliminal influence on the work of Zero and Gutai artists, in view of its formative role in Japanese culture.77 Some artists prove to have had a conscious interest in Zen. In 1952 an essay by Yoshihara on Nantembō was published in the periodical Bokubi. And Shimamoto noted that Yoshihara took his pupils several times to the Kaisei temple in Nishinomiya, in 1953 and later. He showed them calligraphic works and ink paintings made by the Zen Master Nantembō. Yoshihara apparently frequently impressed on the Gutai artists that Nantembō’s works should be considered as modern and contained solutions for modern Japanese art. He did not intend the works to be copied, but their characteristics should serve as an example.78 The fact that characteristics such as the connection between body and material, spontaneous expression, original style, simplicity and immediacy are found in Nantembō’s and in the Gutai artists’ works suggests a connection with Zen.79 Because Zen chiefly inspired Japanese artists ‘from their own cultural background’, Shimamoto feels that their work is more akin to Zen than the work of Western artists ‘which is inspired by literature on Zen’.80
In post-war Japanese art magazines an interest was displayed in Zen, and in the Zen arts in particular. Leading art magazines like Geijutsu Shincho, regularly placed photographs of details of Zen gardens and Zen temples beside articles on and reproductions of modern Western and Japanese art. Much attention was also given to Zen arts like Shō, Nō and Raku.81 However, it is unclear whether the editors intended to highlight parallels between Zen arts and modern, avant-garde art with this combination of articles.
In addition, it is worth noting that Suzuki was quite well known in Japan, as a writer of Japanese books on Zen. In the nineteen-forties Suzuki also held lectures in Japan on Zen, as he did several years later in New York. His books were, however, evidently not even easy to read for his fellow countrymen.82
The question still has not been answered how Japanese or how Western the works of Zero and Gutai actually were in the fifties. Many curators in Japanese museums of modern art were asked that same question.83 Their answers varied from ‘very Japanese’ to ‘very Western’, with all the gradations in between. I found a possible explanation for the differing views in the studies I conducted in the West. The Western works often proved to combine developments in the history of painting - in which nineteenth century Japonisme played an important part - the West’s new outlook on the world which was related to the outlook of the Far East, and new sources from Japan, such as Zen. The Western and the Japanese elements had become a homogeneous blend in the course of the fifties, in various works in the West.84 And a similar process had taken place in Japan. Several Western elements had already been adopted in Japanese painting in the nineteenth century. In the course of the twentieth century the artist’s attitude changed, and consciously or subconsciously, he began to mix Western elements with his own cultural heritage, to form a homogeneous whole. The differing opinions on the degree of Japanese-ness or Western-ness of these artists would seem to be due to the difficulty in analysing the ‘mixture’.
For instance, we can conclude with respect to the materials used that the use of oils is purely Western. When traditional Japanese painting materials like ink and paper were used, immediacy played a vital role. That aspect is not necessarily present with oil paints, since the artist can continue to make alterations for quite some time when painting in oils. The experiments the artists in question conducted with their materials show that they preferred a direct approach, even with oils.
The objectives of ‘bringing the material to life’ and ‘the close relationship between body and material’ prove to be primarily Japanese, although, as we saw earlier, Western artists also began to pursue the same aims. Masaharu Ono, the curator of the National Museum of Art in Osaka, did, however, stress that ‘experimenting’ with materials was typically Western.85
The Zero and Gutai artists’ pursuit of an entirely original style of painting is Western in character, since Japan has no tradition of innovation in art or of an individual style. These artists would mainly seem to have adopted ‘originality’ - in the sense of differing from what was made in the past.86 According to Shimamoto there was an important difference between the Gutai group and other modern Japanese artists, especially those in Tokyo. The latter for the most part copied Western art, whereas the members of Gutai were more inclined to adopt the Western attitude to modern art.87
Although there is no tradition of individual-related original art in Japan, it was much appreciated in the history of Japanese art if an artist, after many years of copying, ended up developing an original style. Famous Zen Masters like Sesshū, Hakuin and Nantembō did have a personal style. One does wonder whether ‘original’ and ‘self’, as in terms like ‘self-expression’, have the same meaning in Japan as in the West. Shinji Kohmoto, a curator at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, explained that, in his opinion, the Japanese terms ‘self-expression’, and ‘original’ or ‘personal’ painting were different from in the West. In Japan ‘self’, ‘original’ and ‘personal’ do not refer to individuality in a Western sense, but to the personal experience of a world on which one is dependent, knowing that “a person does not live on his own, but by the grace of Nature”.88 Hajime Nakamura wrote concerning the difference between the Japanese and Western meanings of ‘individuality’ that it is incorrect to think that individuality does not exist for the Japanese. For them it means the focus on direct experience.89 Nihei Nakamura observed that the academic Western artist looked for his own personality by setting his ‘ego’ off against the outside world. The tradition in the Far East entails the artist seeking an ‘archetype’, turning in his search to the depths of Nature and the Self.90 The Japanese meaning of both self and individuality can also be found in the works of the Zero and Gutai artists. They do not express the ‘individual story’ in the Western sense, but ‘the direct experience of the Self’ in the Japanese sense.
Several of the Gutai projects suggest that the artists were in the process of liberating themselves. Take, for instance, Murakami’s actions, which implied he was beating a path for himself through screens, towards freedom. The focus of the artists in question appears to have been to liberate themselves by surpassing the self. That in turn resembles the view of Zen on release. It is interesting to see that Japanese artists believe that they experience the concept of ‘freedom’ differently from their Western colleagues. According to Murakami, the Japanese artists did not use the idea of freedom in the Western sense of ‘individual freedom’, because they were not familiar with it, but in the sense of transcending cerebral limitation.91
NOTES
1. Introduction by the directors of the Penrose Institute in the catalogue The Gutai Group 1955/56, TOKYO 1993, p. 11. Alexandra Munroe calls Gutai in the catalogue Japanese Art after 1945. Scream against the Sky, YOKAHAMA 1994, p. 185: “Japan’s most significant, influential, and arguably first international avant-garde movement in the postwar art”. This catalogue provides a good overview of modern Japanese art after 1945. I do not wish to express an opinion on the text relating to art after 1960, but concerning the Gutai text, I have to conclude that the catalogue does not shed new light on the group.
2. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993. He added that the meetings were held at his house, and sometimes at Kanayama’s. The Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo has a list of members who attended the meetings.
3. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993. Akira Kanayama, another member of the group, remarked that it was worth remembering that Murakami had studied philosophy, thus intending to emphasize that the name Zero was not without significance. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on the same day.
4. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), p. 375.
5. Shiraga did, however, comment that the same trend could be found in international art. One wonders whether Suzuki might not have been right with his remark that every human being longs for simplicity.
6. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993. It is remarkable that in Germany, though admittedly six years later, a group was also founded with the name Zero. Although Günther Uecker, who was discussed in the chapter on Germany, belonged to the Zero group, his ideas were different from those of the founders Otto Piene and Hans Mack. Their ideas were not discussed in more detail, in view of the already extensive scope of the present study.
7. This exhibition was held in the Sogo department store in Osaka.
8. Later in this chapter the views of Yoshihara and some works of Shimamoto will be discussed.
9. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
10. Saburo Murakami in Gutai 4, 1956. The English translation of this article is published in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 399.
11. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
12. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), pp. 62-63.
13. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on 31 August 1993. This opinion on the attitude of the citizens of Osaka can also be found in various books on Gutai.
14. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
15. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
16. Murakami joined the Gutai group in 1955. That period will be discussed later in this chapter.
17. ‘Japanese elements’ refer to the predominating emptiness and extreme asymmetry. Interview with Kazuo YAMAWAKI in Nagoya on 15 September 1993. These aspects can also be found in Western works. Often, as in Mondrian’s paintings, there is some allusion to the artist’s interest in the Far East. Mondrian, for instance, was an adherent of Theosophy. Kanayama knew his work from art magazines. Masaharu ONO emphasized in an interview in Osaka on 16 September 1993 that ‘geometric abstraction’ had not had much influence in Japan because it was too rational for the Japanese character.
18. Interview with Yuko HASEGAWA and Masako SHIMIZU, curators at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo, on 26 November 1993.
19. Interview with Atsuko TANAKA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
20. Interview with Atsuko TANAKA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
21. In Soun-Gui KIM, 1986, p.227 one can read an essay on the difference between Chinese and Japanese art that the theme of repetition, of echoes combined with ‘emptiness’, is typically Japanese.
22. Teng Kuei, Mark Tobey’s Chinese friend (see the chapter ‘The unity between West and East. American artists and Zen’) also used that technique.
23. Interview with Hajime SHIMOYAMA in Shizuoka-shi on 10 October 1993.
24. Interview with Hajime SHIMOYAMA in Shizuoka-shi on 10 October 1993.
25. Interview with Hajime SHIMOYAMA in Shizuoka-shi on 10 October 1993.
26. It is striking that in that period there was also a ‘physical automatism’ in the West. Asger Jorn, an artist of the Cobra group, defined it in 1949 as expressing oneself in the form of a physical action which materializes in thought. So mental automatism is organically linked to physical automatism. JORN 1949, p. 8, STOKVIS 1990 (1974), p. 84. The American artist Jackson Pollock also worked in a similar way, partly under the influence of his interest in non-Western cultures. See the chapter ‘The unity between West and East. American artists and Zen’.
27. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993.
28. Interview with Shinichiro OSAKI in Kobe on 1 September 1993.
29. Shimamoto was not only active as an artist in Gutai. He also edited and published the Gutai bulletin. Like his counterparts in the Zero movement, he was painting monochromes in the first half of the fifties. In 1950 he made a work comprising several layers of newspaper which he then painted with white enamel. The surface acquired a texture of small holes and cracks, which the artist claims took place by chance. The weight of the thick layers of paint caused holes in the paper. He liked the texture and exhibited the work in 1952. He went on to produce several works in which he deliberately made slashes. In around 1955 Yoshihara showed Shimamoto a reproduction in a magazine of a painting by Lucio Fontana with knife cuts, advising Shimamoto to stop making cuts in his work and undertake new experiments. At Gutai’s first open-air event, Shimamoto placed a zinc wall, which was white on one side and dark blue on the other. He had made holes in several places through which trees could be seen. From a distance, the holes resembled points of light, because the sun shone through them. The work was a visualization of the title of the exhibition: ‘An open-air exhibition of modern art to challenge the summer sun’. The white side of the surface reflected the sun and on the dark side the sun shone through the holes, and in that way the work was a ‘two-sided’ monochrome.
30. Moreover, they also knew that Jiro Yoshihara, the group’s leader, was a good organizer.
31. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993.
32. Interview with Kazuo SHIRAGA in Amagasaki on 11 November 1993.
33. Jiro Yoshihara in Gutai 1, p. 27.
34. Jiro Yoshihara in Gutai 1, p. 27. In this first edition of Gutai works were reproduced by the following members: Sadani Azuna, Yutaka Funai, Masakoshi Masanobu, Hiroshi Okada, Hajime Okamoto, Yoshio Sekina, Shozo Shimamoto, Taniko Ueda, Chiyu Uemae, Toshio Yoshida and Michio Yoshihara.
35. Jozo Ukita in Gutai 2, 1955
36. It is odd that the Gutai group only published their manifesto after two years. It looks as if they did so to give the group international credibility, since they apparently did not feel the need to draw up a manifesto before that - in the same way as Zen did not feel the need for rules either. The manifesto was published in English in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991.
37. YOSHIHARA, 1956, pp. 202-205.
38. YOSHIHARA, 1956, pp. 202-205. This aim resembles that of several Western artists in the same period, including the previously mentioned members of the Cobra group, Action Painters in America and artists like Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapiès, who created ‘matter art’.
39. SUZUKI, 1970 (1953), p. 351 and SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), p. 36.
40. After a few years Okamoto switched to a Surrealist style of painting. See note 9. Kazu Kaido wrote about Okamoto in the catalogue Reconstructions, OXFORD 1985, p. 14: “His role in the development of the Japanese avant-garde was extremely important as he not only linked pre-war European avant-garde art to that of post-war Japan but also managed to establish a sense of persona of the artist as it is understood in the Western avant-garde”.
41. BALLO, 1971 (1970), p. 188.
42. Interview with Kazuo YAMAWAKI in Nagoya on 15 September 1993.
43. In the West, artists derive inspiration from works of non-Western cultures as well as works made by the mentally-handicapped and by children. For more information on these subjects, when not relating to the Far East, readers are referred to literature dealing with Primitivism and Art Brut. Developments in psychology in the first half of the twentieth century were also relevant for the Western artist’s alternative perception of his environment. See the previous chapters concerning the roles of Freud and Jung.
44. Literature on Gutai describes the works on show.
45. Description of the work by Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 33.
46. NAKAMURA, 1992, p. 58, believes, as we saw earlier in this chapter, that it is typical of Japanese artists that they do not ‘process’ the material, but that the material is allowed to lead its own life, with a character of its own.
47. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
48. Interview with Tohru MATSUMOTO in Tokyo on 13 October 1993. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), p. 363 and DUMOULIN 1989 (1976), p. 83 wrote about this aspect in Japanese culture. The new position on ‘matter’ in the Western world is dealt with earlier in this chapter and in preceding chapters.
49. This can be illustrated with the following Zen anecdote. A man saw a Zen monk praying in front of a statue of Buddha and the next day, to his surprise, saw the monk burning the same statue. The monk’s response was: “Now I’m cold”.
50. Interview with Akira KANAYAMA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
51. Interview with Atsuko TANAKA in Kobe on 31 August 1993.
52. NAKAMURA , 1992, p. 58.
53. Murakami in Gutai 7, 1957, which was published three months after the exhibition.
54. Murakami in Gutai 7, 1957. An English translation was published in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, pp. 401-402.
55. Murakami in Gutai 7, 1957. An English translation was published in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, pp. 401-402.
56. ABEGG, 1970, p. 336. The absence of time in Western art had already been noted by the philosopher Kitaro Nishida in 1934, in his comparison of Western and Eastern art. He believed that the Greeks had begun with the denial of the concept of time. CHARLES, 1986. p 190.
57. Shinichiro Osaki in the catalogue Giappone all’avanguardia, ROME 1990, pp. 31-33.
58. The description of the work is given by Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 22.
59. Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 26.
60. Interview with Yoshihiro NAKATANI in Kyoto on 14 September 1993.
61. In addition, in the first half of the fifties several exhibitions of Western art were held in Tokyo. See the Introduction to this chapter. The Zero artists from the Kansai district, far from Tokyo, did not visit the exhibitions.
62. Shinichiro Osaki in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 70.
63. Interview with Toshimitsu IMAI in Tokyo on 8 October 1993 and interview with Koichi KAWASAKI in Ashiya on 10 September 1993.
64. Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 50.
65. Barbara Bertozzi in the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 50. Tapié had only exhibited the paintings by Gutai artists in the West, which gave them the impression that Westerners were only interested in that kind of work. When the Dutch art group Nul organized an exhibition together with the German Zero for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (which took place in May 1965), the Gutai artists were asked to participate. The organizers were dismayed when they discovered that only paintings and not the expected ‘installations’ had been sent from Japan. In Amsterdam a few old projects were reconstructed at the last minute by several Gutai members. Within the framework of the present study, it is interesting to note that Yves Klein (who was mentioned earlier) who also took part in the exhibition, was initially against Gutai participation, because he feared the public might think that Western artists had been influenced by Gutai. This information was supplied by Henk Peeters, one of the organizers of the exhibition and noted during one of our conversations in 1993.
66. Interview with Kazuo YAMAKAWI in Nagoya on 15 September 1993.
67. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993. See note 72 for more information on this artist.
68. Interview with Shinichiro OSAKI in Kobe on 1 September 1993.
69. Shinichiro Osaki on the catalogue Gutai, DARMSTADT 1991, p. 71.
70. YOSHIHARA, 1956, pp. 202-205. The following remark must be made in the context of the differences between Tapié and Gutai, concerning the name ‘Art Informel’, which literally stands for ‘art without form’. In that sense it appears to be a reaction to the art of geometric abstraction. However, Toshimitsu Imaī noted that ‘informel’ is situated between form and non-form, and that it was connected with ‘becoming form’. According to Imaī he had often spoken to Tapié about Zen, in particular about Suzuki’s books, and Tapié had understood Zen at that time (Interview with Toshimitsu IMAI in Tokyo on 8 October 1993). However, I am of the opinion that there is an important difference: Tapié's aim is to ‘work in a field between form and non-form’, and Zen’s aim is ‘the tension between form and non-form’. In Zen ‘becoming form’ is related to the imperfection of forms: “Perfect forms are felt to draw the attention to the form rather than to its inner truth” (NAKAMURA, 1992, p. 290). In that area Zen and Tapié would seem to have more in common. Many works by French artists of the Art Informel movement certainly make a more ‘formless’ impression than many of the Zero and Gutai groups’ pieces. It is odd that Zero’s basic principles: “no meaning, no composition, no colour” do not include “no form”.
71. Yamawaki in the catalogue The Gutai Group 1955/56, TOKYO 1993, p. 50. A view which was comparable to that of Gutai regarding material was to be found in the previously mentioned ‘Manifesto Bianco’ by Fontana and in an expression like ‘the dialogue with the material’ by Asger Jorn in Cobra no. 2, 1949. JORN in Cobra no. 2, 1949. The so-called ‘matter painters’ like Antoni Tapiès emphasize the role of matter in their work. In her thesis STOKVIS, 1973, p. 102 ff., links the interest of the Cobra artists in matter with the dialectic materialism of Marx and the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard.
72. SUZUKI, 1993 (1938/1927), pp. 258, 164 and 144.
73. SPRIGGE, 1990 (1985), p. 106 and p. 96 believes that, according to Nietzsche, an artistic creation is, above all else, the motive to impose one’s own personality on the crude material, which is then transformed, a dominance over things through the suffering of pain. It is not clear from Tapié’s texts whether he agreed with Nietzsche in that respect.
74. SPRIGGE, 1990 (1985). p. 100.
75. ROBERTS, 1992, pp. 114, 155. ‘Dada’ was known in Japan thanks to Tomoyoshi Murayama, who had studied in Berlin and founded a ‘Dada’ group in Japan called ‘MAVO’.
76. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
77. This opinion was confirmed frequently during interviews with Japanese art historians.
78. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
79. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
80. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
81. In the fifties the following were important art magazines: Geijitsu Shincho, Mizue, Bijutsu Hihyo and Bijutsu Techo.
82. The artist Toshimitsu IMAI recounted during an interview in Tokyo on 8 October 1993 that when he was a schoolboy he had heard lectures by Suzuki. His headmaster was a friend of Suzuki’s. According to Prof. Y. IWATA, in an interview on 2 May 1995, the English translations of Suzuki’s books are currently popular in Japan.
83. My reference here is to the list of interviews conducted in Japan.
84. See preceding chapters.
85. Interview with Masaharu ONO in Osaka on 16 September 1993.
86. Yoshihara learned the importance of originality from his teacher Fujita. During his period in Paris Fujita had been influenced by Western views on art. The Western idea of developing a new style had also been introduced in Japan by Okamoto. Catalogue Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan, OXFORD 1985, p. 14. As Gutai’s leader, Yoshihara stimulated this attitude among the Gutai members. The fact that Yoshihara advised them to sign their works with ‘Gutai’ rather than their own names, suggests that ‘individual-related original art’ was not important for him. And at some exhibitions the works were indeed signed ‘Gutai’.
87. Interview with Shozo SHIMAMOTO in Nishinomiya on 18 September 1993.
88. Interview with Shinji KOHMOTO in Kyoto on 21 September 1993.
89. Nakamura in MOORE, 1967, p. 195.
90. NAKAMURA, 1992, p. 91.
91. Interview with Saburo MURAKAMI on 31 August 1993.
Published at the occasion of the exhibition Gutai: Painting with Time and Space exhibition, held at Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano., 2010.
