岡本太郎

Born in Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa-ken in 1911 as the eldest son of Okamoto Ippei and Kanoko. His father being a manga artist, painter, and writer, and his mother a novelist and poet, Tarō grew up in a household where artistic activities were given the utmost priority. Via Keio Yochisha Elementary School and Keio Futsubu School, in 1929, Tarō entered the Western-style Painting Department of Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo Fine Arts School). In 1929, the family went to Europe, where his father was sent to cover the London Naval Conference as a correspondent for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Okamoto remained in France, and direct contact with artists and thinkers in Paris during the 1930s began. This experience provided the foundations for him to display his prominent individuality as an artist in Japan from the 1950s onward. Wanting to grasp a solid sense of France, like the French, he began studying as a boarder at a lycée on the outskirts of Paris in order to learn the French language and lifestyle. In 1932, he attended a lecture on Hegelian aesthetics at the University of Paris. Seeing “Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit” (1931, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) by Pablo Picasso, Okamoto was deeply moved by the expression transcending existing styles and began working on art on a full scale. He began by submitting his work to the Salon des Surindépendants. In 1933, aged twenty-two, Okamoto took part in Abstraction-Création, an association whose members included Jean Arp and Wassily Kandinsky and which pursued abstract expressions. He associated with the members both professionally and privately (but withdrew from the group in 1936). “Itamashiki ude (Wounded Arm)” (no longer in existence, a 1949 reproduction can be found at Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki), a leading example of Okamoto’s early works which he submitted to the Salon des Surindépendants of 1936, blends a figurative motif into abstraction and spirituality. This painting was acknowledged by André Breton and submitted to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris) in 1938. In 1937, his first collection of paintings entitled “OKAMOTO” was published by G.L.M. Furthermore, studying under Marcel Mauss at the University of Paris, Okamoto became an ardent admirer of ethnology, which approaches the basis of the human existence. This was to lead to reexamination of the contemporary worth of tradition, which Okamoto was to develop in Japan after World War II. In 1938, recommended by Georges Bataille, Okamoto participated in the secret society Acéphale, where he was to have rare experiences of taking part in cultural movements unfolded by internationally renowned intellectuals and artists until he returned to Japan in June 1940 due to the spread of the war in France. In January 1942, Okamoto responded to a call-up for military service and went to the Chinese front as a new conscript. Until he was demobilized in June 1946, life took a sudden turn from the liberty centered on Parisian art and culture to continuous experiences of absurdity in wartime military life. Moreover, his prewar works left in his studio in Tokyo were all burnt in an air raid. Such experiences led Okamoto to believe that a deadlock is precisely where one should seek potentials. Based on the avant-garde artists’ method of confronting the world, he began to attempt unifying art and life. After World War II, Okamoto began advocating and practicing “taikyoku shugi” (polarism), in which the two opposite systems of the rationality of abstraction and the irrationality of Surrealism confront each other connoting their contradictions as is. However, his opinion was not accepted immediately. Although he proposed to form Taikyoku Shugi Bijutsu Kyōkai (Polarist Art Association) at the 2nd Japan Independent Exhibition (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) in 1950, he was unable to obtain approval. Even so, Okamoto continued working with opposition to the authoritarian art world, which had got cut off from international trends, as his linchpin. In 1948, he formed the Night Society (Yoru no Kai) with Hanada Kiyoteru and others. Together with Haniya Yutaka, Noma Hiroshi, Shiina Rinzō, and others who took part in that society, he began an avant-garde art movement. That year, he formed the Avant-garde Art Study Group together with Hanada. In 1953, he founded Gendai Geijutsu Kenkyūjo (Institute of Esthetic Research) at his studio (the present Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum) which was completed in Aoyama, Tokyo. Aiming at collaborations with diverse fields including art, design, architecture, literature, theater, and cinema and at enlightening young people aspiring to become artists, he exerted his presence as an organizer of many art movements from the 1940s to the 1950s. Such efforts bore fruit in the installment in 1956 of “Hi no kabe (Wall of the Sun)” (no longer in existence, the original drawing is kept at Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, Tokyo) and other ceramic plaques on the walls of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building designed by Tange Kenzō, and in 1964 for the National Yoyogi 1st Gymnasium also designed by Tange. His cross-genre activities and collaborations with experts from other fields also led to “Taiyō no tō (Tower of the Sun)” in 1970. At the same time, he was also active as an introducer of modern and contemporary art trends in foreign countries by introducing many Art Informel artists at “Exposition Internationale de l’art Actuel” (Nihombashi Takashimaya, Tokyo) planned by the International Art Club (of which Okamoto served as representative of the Japan Head Office) in 1956, publishing “Seishun Pikaso (Young Picasso)” (Shinchōsha), based on his chance encounter with Pablo Picasso in 1953, etc. At the Nika Association, to which he was recommended as member in 1947, putting his “polarism” into practice, he presented “Heavy Industry” (Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki) at the 34th Nika Art Exhibition in 1949 and “Mori no okite (Law of the Jungle)” (Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki) at the 35th Nika Art Exhibition in 1950. In these works, things opposite in character were placed side by side leaving the contradiction as is. At the 40th Nika Art Exhibition held in 1955, Room 9, in which works by young artists who Okamoto had gathered, was named “Taro’s Room.” However, feeling the limits of working within a group, in 1961, Okamoto withdrew from the Nika Association. After that, his works of the 1960s were characterized by a combination of calligraphy-like black lines indefinite in shape and sorcerous in impression and primary colors as exemplified in “Presentiment” (1963, Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki). The source of Okamoto’s ideas were his studies on Japanese traditions. He published the impact of his discovery of the aesthetic worth of Jōmon pottery, which people had not paid attention to until then, as “On Jōmon Pottery” in the February 1952 issue of the art magazine “Mizue.” He identified trends of Buddhist, centralized, or aristocratic art and a dynamism inexplicable in terms of “wabi-sabi” aesthetics in the genealogy of the arts of the Jōmon period and the Tohoku and Okinawa areas, and advocated the diversity of traditions. The fruit of such research was unfolded in photographic works taken by Okamoto in person and publications such as “Nihon no dentō (Japanese Tradition)” (Kōbunsha, 1956), “Nihon sai-hakken—geijutsu fudoki (Rediscovery of the Japan—Topography of Art)” (Shinchōsha, 1958), and “Wasurerareta Nippon—Okinawa bunkaron (Forgotten Japan—Treatise on Okinawan Culture)” (Chūōkōronsha, 1961). By thoroughly criticizing existing Japanese traditions as an avant-garde artist, he discovered “new traditions” which would make life in the present day more creative. This identified the significance of freely unfolding avant-garde art based on the West in Japan. In 1954, he published an essay on art in daily life in words which even a fourteen-year-old could understand. Entitled “Kon’nichi no geijutsu—jidai o sōzō suru mono wa dareka (Art Today—Who Creates the Age?)” (Kōbunsha), it became a best seller. “Art today shouldn’t be good. It mustn’t be beautiful. Neither should it be comfortable.” Using paradoxical, provocative words and introducing the artists’ viewpoints, spiritual nature, and behavior, he explained how anybody among the general public could make life creative. From then on, Okamoto was to play the role of illuminating art generated from the inside among the public. In 1952, Okamoto created “Sōsei (Creation),” a mosaic tile mural in the underground passage at Nihombashi Takashimaya, marking the beginning of the genealogy of public art, which he focused on as a means to popularize art. In due course, the number of three-dimensional works soaring on the street such as “Wakai tokeidai (Young Clock Tower)” (1966, Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo) increased and culminated in “Taiyō no tō (Tower of the Sun)” (1970, Expo ’70 Commemorative Park, Osaka). In 1967, Okamoto was commissioned as producer of the Theme Pavilion of the 1970 Japan World Exposition in Osaka. Regarding the theme “Progress and Harmony” as irony, infusing anti-modernism and anti-traditionalism, he aimed at overcoming the fear of the artificial sun, i.e., nuclear weapons, which human beings made by science, and resurrecting the unanalyzed, unsegmented primeval sun in the present day with a mask of art. The approximately sixty-minute-long experience in the inside and outside of the Theme Pavilion was designed to have an impact on the general public unaware of the presuppositions. There are numerous works such as “Asu no shinwa (Myth of Tomorrow)” (1969), which was created around the same time, and “Men Aflame” (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), which was based on the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) Incident and submitted to the 3rd International Art Exhibition of Japan (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) in 1955, treating the atomic and hydrogen bombs, which Okamoto regarded as a symbol of the issues to be overcome by the modern society by means of art, as the motif. As reforms of the society were not achieved from Expo ’70 onward, in addition to artworks and publications, in 1953, Okamoto began appearing on television. Particularly from 1980 onward, media exposure of Okamoto himself as an artist increased. This contributed to forming the image of an “artist” in the postwar Japanese society. Although Okamoto continued to produce monuments all over Japan in his later years, he contracted Parkinson’s disease and passed away due to acute respiratory failure aged eighty-four on January 7, 1996. Even after Okamoto’s death, as if in response to demands of the time and the people, diverse trends which might be referred to as an “Okamoto Tarō boom” emerged. Publications were reissued, “Myth of Tomorrow,” which had become missing, was discovered in Mexico and installed in a passageway at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, and “Tower of the Sun” was renovated and the interior was once again opened to the public. Such reappreciation was led largely by the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, which was opened in 1998 by the artist’s secretary and adopted daughter Okamoto Toshiko, the Taro OKAMOTO Memorial Award for Contemporary Art, and the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki, which opened in 1999 having received a donation of many works by Okamoto and has continued to commend his achievements. (Sunohara Fumihiro / Translated by Ogawa Kikuko)( Published online: 2024-07-29)