白髪 一雄, Shiraga Kazuo, known professionally as Kazuo Shiraga, was born on August 12, 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan. Best known for his involvement with the Gutai group and his innovative technique of painting with his feet, Shiraga graduated from the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting in 1948.
Shiraga joined the Gutai group in 1954, the year it was founded by fellow artists Shozo Shimamoto and Jiro Yoshihara. The first radical, avant-garde artistic group in Japan, the name Gutai is translated into English as “embodiment” or “concrete,” highlighting the group’s key tenant of pushing the boundaries of abstraction through experimentation with materials and techniques. The group was first introduced to American audiences in a show organized at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958, of which Shiraga was included.
Shiraga first embarked upon his experiments with foot painting in 1954, on a quest to articulate a radical individualism as a rejection of Japan’s wartime militarism. Throwing away his brushes and rejecting his hands as too trained, Shiraga began painting with his feet, which enabled a fresh and direct mode of expression. Starting with paper or canvas laid out on the floor, the artist would deposit copious amounts of oil paint on the surface, and paint with the movements of his bare feet, sometimes hanging from the ceiling by a rope. Shiraga went on to employ this method of painting for the rest of his career, declaring, “I have never doubted that ‘action painting’ is my expression, never stopped it. I will single-mindedly continue to paint my painting with a sincere desire that the pleasure of making a painting will be communicated to those who see it.” While the palette and mood of these works evolved over time, they are united by a vigorous energy and a facture so dramatically rich and textured as to be almost sculptural.
Shiraga is known not only for his innovations in action painting but also for his groundbreaking performances, such as “Challenging Mud” (1955), which predated Allan Kaprow’s Happenings in the United States and Europe. Shiraga’s work featured prominently in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2012-2013 exhibitions, “Tokyo 1955 – 1970: A New Avant-Garde” and in the Guggenheim’s 2013 exhibition, “Gutai: Splendid Playground”, co-curated by Dr. Tiampo.
Today, the artist’s works are included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Hiroshima City Museum of Art, among others. Retrospectives of his work have taken place at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Ville de Toulouse (1993); Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe (2001); Yokosuka Museum of Art (2009); and the Dallas Museum of Art (2015).
Kazuo Shiraga died on April 8, 2008 in Amagasaki, Japan.
IN AVANT-GARDE art, as in polar exploration, it’s getting there first that counts. The history of modernism is often viewed as a series of discoveries with the glory going to whomever made the next conceptual breakthrough. As that story is usually told, for the first half of the 20th century the innovative centre was Europe, before the old world was overtaken in the aftermath of the second world war by America.
THE GUTAI GROUP may be the cicadas of postwar art—forever cycling through visibility and obscurity, suddenly bursting into view every ten years or so. Buoyed by the attentions of critic and curator Michel Tapié, the group formed in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954, and made their New York debut at the Martha Jackson Gallery just four years later, only to be summarily dismissed as latecomers to the Abstract Expressionist party. Nearly a decade later, they resurfaced in New York again, in “New Japanese Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, but that too proved a short-lived spotlight, one whose wattage owed more to Cold War–inflected interest in pre-Olympics Japan than to the works actually shown. In the mid-1980s and in the second half of the ’90s, a spate of group exhibitions in Europe and Japan proved promising, among them the Gutai retrospective at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1999.
The avant-garde movement called Gutai has received a belated recognition and a new appreciation of perhaps its most brilliant member, Shiraga. While an ethnocentric, aesthetic chauvinism in the American artworld has downplayed the significance of this movement, a newly revisionist spirit is driving a wedge into the monolithic canon, upsetting an entrenched view of the West’s monopoly on reinventing art.
Shiraga, who died in 2008, has had a dedicated following in Europe for the past 50 years. Born into a prosperous family in 1924, he was associated with Gutai in 1955, a year after the group was founded. In 1954, as part of his performance-based artistic output, he began creating works by suspending himself over the canvases with a rope and painting with his feet.
Many great painters exploit the undiscovered possibilities of their chosen medium – think of van Gogh treating brushstrokes like woodcarving, or J.M.W. Turner creating the illusion of space from thin washes of color. Add Kazuo Shiraga, one of the leaders of Japan’s postwar generation of artists, to this list: He was the first to come to grips with the inherent slipperiness of paint.
A member of Japan’s Gutai group of avant-garde artists, Shiraga (1924-2008) developed during his six-decade career the singular technique of painting suspended from a rope, using his feet to make violently abstract, thickly impasted canvases. It has only been since the artist’s death, however, that the conceptual originality and visual power of these “foot paintings” have been recognized by Western curators and collectors, particularly in the United States.
Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008) has steadily gained historical momentum as Gutai's biggest name. He's celebrated right now in a big exhibition at the Dallas Art Museum alongside fellow Gutai great Sadamasa Motonaga, and has dueling shows of his feverishly handsome canvases at Mnuchin and Dominique Lévy galleries in New York; in the latter case, juxtaposed with some nice ceramic sculptures by Satoru Hoshino. Upcoming, too, on April 30, at Fergus McCaffrey Gallery in New York, is a joint show of the work Kazuo and Fujiko Shiraga. There is a lot of interest in the artist, clearly.
