Beschreibung:

24 Kazuo Shiraga Keishizoku 1961 oil on canvas 76 3/8 x 51 1/2 in. (194 x 130.8 cm) Signed dated and titled "Kazuo Shiraga 1961 [Keishizoku]" on the reverse.
Provenance Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo Private Collection, Osaka Catalogue Essay “The physical constitution with which someone is born is that person’s initial capital for living.” -Kazuo Shiraga 1956 (from Gutaï, no. 5, October 1, 1956) Precipitated by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, ripples of a revolution in painting began to emerge on a global stage by the early 1950s. Abstract Expressionism was propelled by its two of its most visible proponents, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning both individually determined to make the act of painting itself the artistic process: to make the “action” as important as the content within. But while these varied American painters were responding to their received knowledge—consciously rebelling against an institution dominated by the figure—halfway around the world there was an independent movement of singular significance. In Japan, a group of painters that came to be termed the Gutaï group was creating stylistically similar pictures that sprung from a completely disparate yet intertwined influence: the trauma of the Second World War. As the most prominent of these artists, Kazuo Shiraga epitomized a mission of non-figural gestural abstraction more than any other. With Keishizoku, 1961, Shiraga marvelously exhibits his unique contribution, one compositionally and gesturally equal to the New York masters, possessing a spiritual depth that occupies a class of its own. In the wake of the destruction left at the end of the Second World War, Japanese artists who had been trained for many centuries in the same traditional styles suddenly broke with the forms of the past. This was modernism’s encroachment upon the Japanese visual world, when style came to supplant figure as the forms of the past began to lose their once vital meanings. Classical training came to repel the young Shiraga, and, in addition to his additional training in yo-ga (Western-style painting), and he soon began experimenting with the Western-style influence of Jiro Yoshihara. Upon the founding of the Gutaï group in Osaka in 1954, Shiraga began to find new outlets for his gradually abstracted works. Meaning “embodiment,” the dialogue with the artists that would constitute Gutaï helped to propel Shiraga towards his mature style that developed by the end of the decade. Michel Tapie, one of the twentieth century’s great international critics, was instrumental in discovering and promoting the work of the Gutaï for a Western audience, finding their abstract approaches kindred to his own. Upon premiering their work for an American audience at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958, the Gutaï group began to emerge as a society as rooted in their philosophical approaches to painting as in their work itself. Indeed their exploratory processes of merging both psyche and physicality in an artist’s work led to their patronage by such renowned Western artists as Yves Klein who both shared their techniques and elaborated upon them. Though the group was led by the “Gutaï Manifesto”, authored by Yoshihara, Shiraga began to produce writings of his own, centering on the ideal approach for the painter. In the Gutaï journal, Shiraga outlined his personal concept of shishitsu, or the marriage of physicality and mind: “No matter how that person lives and acts, that asset, that constitution, and the sensory psyche related to it make up what I call that person’s shishitsu. That for me requires a more precise interpretation than what is commonly called human nature. The growth and development of that person is the growth and development of his shishitsu, his shishitsu evolves.” (Gutaï, no. 5, October 1, 1956) Shiraga utilized his own life and work as an outgrowth of his theory of perception and the mind. He began to erase the distance between his body and his art, eventually using nothing other than himself as the creative implement, eliminating the trained hand altogether. He showcased this provocative technique in Toky