Japanese painter and performer Takesada Matsutani (born 1937) was a key member of the Gutai Art Association (1954-1972), Japan's innovative art collective of the postwar era. This comprehensive monograph gathers together rare archival photographs and an interview with the artist.
Accompanying a major survey of Takesada Matsutani?s work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 26 June to 23 September 2019, this catalog fully illustrates the exhibition?s artworks ranging from 1958 to 2019, and features multiple texts. Beginning with an introduction from Centre Pompidou Director Bernard Blistène and President Serge Lasvignes, the book continues with an essay by the museum?s Chief Curator Christine Macel. Valérie Douniaux, who has been working with the artist?s archives since 2014, overviews the ?Stream? works, a series of activated performance pieces begun in 1980. Writer Yves Peyré offers a poetic view of the artist?s practice in relation to Japanese traditions. Finally, Toshio Yamanashi, Director of the Osaka National Museum of Art, contributes an essay focusing on the main gestures in Matsutani?s work.00Exhibition: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (26.06. - 23.09.2019).
Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art. Working with previously unpublished photographs and archival resources, Ming Tiampo considers Gutai’s pioneering transnational practice, spurred on by mid-century developments in mass media and travel that made the movement’s field of reception and influence global in scope. Using these lines of transmission to claim a place for Gutai among modernist art practices while tracing the impact of Japan on art in Europe and America, Tiampo demonstrates the fundamental transnationality of modernism. Ultimately, Tiampo offers a new conceptual model for writing a global history of art, making Gutai an important and original contribution to modern art history.
Published in conjunction with the first United States museum retrospective ever devoted to Gutai, exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Gutai: Splendid Playground surveys the influential collective and artistic movement. This exhibition catalogue aims to demonstrate the range of bold and innovative creativity present in the avant-garde movement, to examine the aesthetic strategies in the cultural, social, and political context of postwar Japan and the West, and to further establish Gutai in an expanded, transnational history and critical discourse of modern art. Organized thematically and chronologically to explore Gutai's unique approach to materials, process and performativity, this publication investigates the group's radical experimentation across a range of media and styles, and demonstrates how individual artists pushed the limits of what art could be or mean in a post-atomic era. The range includes painting (gestural abstraction and post-constructivist abstraction), conceptual art, experimental performance and film, indoor and outdoor installation art, sound art, mail art, interactive or 'playful' art, light art and kinetic art. Illustrating both iconic Gutai and lesser-known works, this catalogue presents a rich survey reflecting new scholarship, especially on so-called 'late Gutai' works dating from 1965 to 1972.
One girl, one painting a day...can she do it? Linda Patricia Cleary decided to challenge herself with a year long project starting on January 1, 2014. Choose an artist a day and create a piece in tribute to them. It was a fun, challenging, stressful and psychological experience. She learned about technique, art history, different materials and embracing failure. Here are all 365 pieces. Enjoy!
Minoru Onoda is best known as a member of Gutai, Japan's first postwar radical artistic movement, which challenged what it saw as the rigid, reactionary ideologies of the art of the time and initiated new ones that redefined the relationships among matter, time, and space. Concurrent to the inception of Gutai, Onoda became enchanted by concepts of repetition, producing paintings and drawings with amalgamations of gradually increasing dots and organically growing shapes. But less is known in the West about Onoda's early and late-career work. At long last, this first full book on Minoru Onoda introduces him as an artist in his own right. Apart from his role with Gutai, the book mines Onoda's sketchbooks and completed works to explore his creative process over time, from his artistic education in the 1960s at the Osaka Institute of Fine Arts and the Osaka School of Art to his later works following the 1972 disbanding of Gutai, which see the artist moving toward a monochrome and more conceptual style. Alongside critical essays by Edward M. Gómez, Astrid Handa-Gagnard, Shoichi Hirai, and Koichi Kawasaki, and Takesada Matsutani are 175 full-color illustrations.
In the decades following World War II, both Japan and Italy were rebuilding after the ravages of war, constructing democratic political systems after a period of fascism and transforming into economic powerhouses, all of which profoundly influenced their respective cultures. Artists in both nations were working in these similar conditions, examining their formidable artistic traditions and seeking a new path forward in the wake of modernism - ways of making art objects that had never been made before. 'Parallel Views' presents a breadth of postwar masters of Italian and Japanese art.
"A humorous book on Zen brushwork and calligraphy. Brush Mind provides insights into the philosophy of art with a collection of writings with only a few simple words. Every other page in the main section of this book shows an imaginative one-stroke painting created in monochrome."--Amazon.com
"One day a writer becomes convinced that the artistic avantgardes of the last five decades present a tapestry of incidents as fascinating and unlikely as any collection of myths or legends. Thinking more of Kafka's Parables than Vasari's Lives of the Artists, he composes a series of micro-narratives celebrating the mystery and ingeniousness of these human activities which, for lack of a better term, we call "contemporary art."-- Back cover.