In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work. 

In A.i.A.’s November/December 1968 issue, former Japan Times critic Martin Cohen, writing just 14 years after the movement’s launch, offered a penetrating assessment, both collective and individual, of the avant-garde “antics” of such “madcap” artists as founder Jiro Yoshihara and cohorts Atsuko Tanaka, Akira Kaneda, Sadamasa Motonaga and others. —Eds.

These men anticipated most of the far-out artistic activities of the sixties. Now that the far-out is in all over the world, will Gutai’s high-jinks seem low-yield?

What happens after the happening? Where do the participants doff mask and costume and assume normalcy as most people know it? What happens to art’s enfants terribles when they get older? Some take up chess, some continue as before and thus complacently cease real growth, and some mellow, like the late Leonardo Foujita, who had painted his penis decades before comparable undertakings in the moral turbulence of the 1960s.

It is well over ten years since Gutai members occupied a pine grove near the Ashiya River, not far from Osaka, there to drape the ground and trees with a three-hundred-meter roll of white vinyl stamped with outsize footprints, frame a narrow portion of sky and make it and the passing clouds the artist’s work, fire paint from a homemade cannon onto a ten-meter-square vinyl sheet, and suspend lond tubes of translucent vinyl, holding colored water, from tree to tree. Nothing outstanding today – but Gutai was doing it over a decade ago.

In 1956-57 (and at regular intervals later), Gutai presented stage shows, using structure and music in creating works, carefully voided of literary content, for the stage. The productions were planned and directed by Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s mentor, and featured acts which included Atsuko Tanaka’s appearance in a garment which as far as anyone could see consisted only of a jumble of fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs draped over her body, Akira Kaneda’s inflation of a giant vinyl balloon which soon filled the entire stage, and Sadamasa Motonaga’s inflation of a long plastic phallus which, led by a wire, rose past the proscenium and to the ceiling, puffing red smoke.

Gutai did not then and does not now look upon such antics as being consciously attempted happenings, but they are certainly among the interesting and important early attempts in postwar Japan to shake free of the traditional restrictions that paintings be rectilinear and utilize oil-based pigments and that sculpture be seen and not heard.

This sort of madcap activity drew attention from, as they say in the Far East, the eight directions but especially, at first, from the West, in the form of reportage by Life and, more important, the “discovery” of Gutai by Michel Tapié, who found a strong commonality between Gutai members’ work and that of his “informelle” clique. Tapié wrote an enthusiasti “Homage à Gutai” as an introduction to the catalogue for Gutai’s “L’Aventure Informelle” exhibition in 1957.

Perhaps because the Japanese have been inordinately sensitive to foreigners’ opinions about Japan, especially since Lafcadio Hearn, Gutai group shows in various Japanese cities became more common after Tapié’s endorsement. Outside Japan, in 1958, Gutai works were shown at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. In 1958, 1959 and 1960, Gutai artists showed their works in Turin (“Art Nuova” exhibition), Lissone (“Premio Lissone”) and in Paris at the same time, Gutai was introducing foreign artists to Japan; in the “L’Aventure Informelle” show, among the artists were Burri, Capogrossi, David Smith, Dubuffet, de Kooning, Fontana, Gottlieb, Hoffmann, Kline, Mathieu (who visited Japan with Tapié), Motherwell and Pollock (who had been very interested in Gutai’s activities).

But it wasn’t until 1962 that Gutai had a real headquarters from which to assail tradition, and it was Tapié who gave the musée-manifeste its name: Pinacotheca. In the heart of Osaka, and in the shade of new office buildings, the Pinacotheca is a thoroughly Japanese-appearing building, now out of place amid the frenetic highway and high-rise construction. A rice granary when first built some eighty years ago, the Pinacotheca, if considered to be a museum of modern art, is the only one in Osaka. Gutai members have one-man and group shows there, and foreign artists—Sam Francis being the most recent—also occasionally appear. In a city which, in the name of modernization for Expo 70, has sacrificed some good traditions like the “oyster boats”—fresh-oyster restaurants moored in Osaka’s canals—the antiquated Pinacotheca remains, now a tradition in itself, as combined museum, gallery and clubhouse for a remarkable band of madcap artists.

Gutai’s origin, according to Osaka industrialist Kunijiro Tamaki, a collector of Gutai members’ works, was a matter of natural coalescence, or even spontaneous generation. A number of artists with similar ideas found themselves in one place, Osaka, at one time, 1952; and under the leadership of Jiro Yoshihara the group has continued ever since. Yoshihara himself is generally taciturn and persistently modest when speaking about his connection with Gutai, partly because of his desire to keep his artistic activities distinctly separated from his business activities. There are no secrets; the Pinacotheca is across a narrow street from his Yoshihara Oil Mill, but stockholders might not take well to his association with avant-garde artists. It is also no secret that it has been the oil mill which has allowed him to be Gutai’s patron, by enabling him to provide the Pinacotheca and to defray costs of the annual Tokyo exhibition. Yoshihara is no dictator, but his opinion of members’ work carries the weight of a Supreme Court justice.

A pioneer in modern painting in Japan forty years ago, Yoshihara has abandoned action painting in recent years for Zen-like black and white circles and lines. Asked to define the requirements for membership in the Gutai group, Yoshihara said they have always been that the artist should not imitate anyone but express his own self, that he be involved in a pursuit of creativity and that he make what did not exist before. In practice, applicants and members alike must live in the Kansai area, which includes Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and other cities; a member who moves to Tokyo or elsewhere outside Kansai becomes inactive. Membership has been kept stable at about thirty for several years.

But just how good is Gutai today? The question requires one answer for the group, one answer for individual members. As a group Gutai shows more stability and internal harmony than one might expect, considering the great disparity in methods, materials and basic attitudes shown by members. But critics, including the outsider who knows Gutai best, Yoshiaki Inui, curator-in-chief of Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art, feel that Gutai could be—has been—far better than it now is, even though a number of members can be singled out as doing exciting work. Exhibitions continue almost all year round at the Pinacotheca, and once a year the group comes up to the capital for a big and generally quite good, if eclectic, show. But the daring has grown dim. True, there is no need for Gutai to present what may be called or compared to happenings, or works for the stage; they have done this long ago, and are not apt to repeat themselves. Thus, since the “International Sky Festival” in 1960, when Gutai members and friends overseas had their works hung from balloons over an Osaka department store, no really big project has been attempted. Gutai still has itws own momentum and generates its own energy, but as a group it has become relatively tame. The Pinacotheca today is not only a gallery; it is also, as noted earlier, a clubhouse—and therein is one problem for Gutai.

But if the group has become weak, some individuals have become strong. None, it would seem, live on income from art alone, but then again Gutai is quite uncommercial. The Pinacotheca does not have anyone specifically charged with selling. Largely for this reason, members’ output is low, but there are other reasons, perhaps peculiar to Japan. When his one-man show at the Pinacotheca ended last June, painter Sadaharu Horio was willing to sell his ambitiously scaled works for the cost of materials. Otherwise, he said, he would burn them, because he had now room to keep them. Tokyo gallery owner Paul Watanabe, aghast not only at Gutai members’ low productivity but also at the prospect of needless destruction of the paintings, secured half a dozen and promptly when about selling them. Although some Gutai members have had one-man shows in the Tokyo Gallery in recent years, this is about the sum of their representation in Tokyo. In the case of Kazuo Shiraga, longtime Gutai member, he produces very little, he says, because of current directions in art. “My paintings are hot,” Shiraga says, “and these are cool times.” Shiraga paints with his feet, swinging over the canvas by a rope, to produce action painting packed with power and speed. He will also use a board to spread paint, once twisted his entire body in mud—total involvement!—and, even if his work is not well suited to this particular time, he is one of Gutai’s best.

Horio, twenty-nine, works in mixed media, likes to accordion-pleat strips and pieces of canvas and attach them to ordinary canvas, or give a canvas a navel-like dimple, or tie cloth to a wooden framework, add plaster, white paint and daubs of color to the rags to produce a Gutai-like playfulness. Slender Kumiko Imanaka, a housewife now, was an early op-art sculptor, fabricating vortices of sinuous plastic strips which, because of their two-ply, two-color construction, provided a color-in-motion appearance when one moved in front of them. The idea was commercialized for use in lighting fixtures, and she is now interested in working in a different vein.

Shuji Mukai made a mark for himself by making marks—mostly Xs, pluses, minuses, circles and others signs—not only on canvas and plastic, but all over his clothing and even a junked automobile. Mukai says he has just burned all the works that he had because he now considers them to be worthless. He is at present thinking in terms of electric circuits, flashers, light bulbs. For last summer’s miniature exhibition at the Pinacotheca, he sauntered in with a small white attaché case, ten-watt bulbs in rows covering one side. The attaché case, plugged in, became a signboard, flashing over and over a set sequence of—signs. He had not, after all, cut every link to his past work. But Mukai’s approach from now on, he said, would be different. Today, artists have to use other people’s specialized skills, and, he continued, “I’ve found a tremendous brain”—someone who will build what Mukai wants.

Toshio Yoshida (no relation to Minoru Yoshida) similarly has his bubble machines made to order by a plastics firm. Although he has succeeded in selling several large machines—which produce random sculptures, their forms determined by air currents, the extent that people take a swipe at the bubbles and other factors—he realizes that although the idea and its results are original, they are limited and limiting. He expects to try something else, probably sculpture, before long.

But two other Gutai artists, Minoru Yoshida and George Kikunami, steadfastly stick to the idea that the artist is the one who should make his works. Kikunami, who makes both immobile and moving optical sculpture, painstakingly cuts collars from mirrorlike Tetoron film, a plastic, and mounts them on fine nylon threads, or directly to a board. His moving works, which utilize two or more rotating screens and interior lighting, are hypnotic. Yoshida still creates his characteristic curvilinear, hard-edge paintings, but prefers moving mixtures of plastics and flashing colored lights, as raucous as Kikunami’s works are serene. Wearing round, blue glasses and sporting a spike of a beard, Yoshida looks like the man who made his works, and also lives the way one would expect, requiring taped rock or sitar music, volume up, when he works.

Installation view of ‘Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino,’ currently on view at Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York.

TOM POWEL IMAGING/COURTESY DOMINIQUE LÉVY GALLERY

Gutai, the loose group of Japanese artists known for their work from the 1950s, is having a moment in America. Kazuo Shiraga, the abstract painter known for using his feet and hands in lieu of brushes, is the focus of not one but four American exhibitions in the first half of 2015. Shiraga’s work is currently the subject of a solo show at New York’s Mnuchin Gallery, and shown alongside Satoru Hoshino’s clay sculptures at Dominique Lévy (also in New York) and Sadamasa Montanaga’s paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art. In April, Chelsea’s Fergus McCaffrey will mount a show about Shiraga’s relationship with his assistant and wife, Fujiko Shiraga. With such interest in Shiraga and the Gutai movement, we turn back to our 1958 review of the first Gutai show in America ever, held at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. At the time of the exhibition, Gutai was seen as a copy of Abstract Expressionism, and Thomas B. Hess’s review of the show, which appeared in the “New Names This Month” section, was also negative. (Gutai was not reconsidered in America until recently.) Hess’s thoughts on the show are reproduced in full below.

“Gutai”
By Thomas B. Hess

Gutai [Jackson] group, a number of Japanese artists much influenced by New York Abstract-Expressionism, and much in awe of Europe, were introduced in a fancy exhibition that was generally disapproved of as derivative and trivial. About five years ago, the Gutais sent some copies of their magazine to New York; it illustrated their extra-pictorial activities—creating earth sculpture by dancing and sliding in likes of mud, bustling through layers of paper stretched in front of a door; balloons filled with liquids, the soles of some one’s feet were painted—all highly esthetic in a California 1930s Frat-Rush-Week way. Their paintings showed no such verve, but a similar schizoid approach. The man splits himself in two—one half artist, one half Japanese intellectual. The artist half is kicked out of the personality and set to work flinging or blotting paint, after examples found in black-and-white reproductions from Paris or New York. The intellectual sits back and decides policy questions (a bit less Pollock, a bit more Still, add Kandinsky, what about Tobey… there is even a Mike Goldberg influence, I think). The artist is left to push himself through the wringers. The results are without personality. As such they will be interesting to many interior decorators who seek exactly this sort of chintz. Prices unquoted.

Founded by Dublin-born Fergus McCaffrey in 2006, McCaffrey Fine Art will now be neighbors with venues like Robert Miller, James Cohan and Lehman Maupin. The renovated facility, which will also host Alexander Gray Associates (currently on the second floor of the same building) and another gallery, as yet unnamed, may open as soon as early March, according to McCaffrey.

“The opening show will be a groundbreaking exhibition of Natsuyuki Nakanishi, one of the most important figures in postwar Japanese art,” said McCaffrey, 42, speaking by phone recently with A.i.A. Nakanishi was a founding member of the collective Hi Red Center, founded about 1963, McCaffrey said. About a dozen Nakanishi works were included in the recent exhibition “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he added.

The 5,000-square-foot second-floor space formerly occupied by Nicole Klagsbrun will serve as a project room, McCaffrey said. He has already leased the space for about 18 months. “We lent space to various galleries after Superstorm Sandy so they had a place to let their art dry out,” he said.

Currently ensconced in modest quarters on East 67th Street—about 1,400 square feet on one floor of a brownstone—McCaffrey primarily shows work by Japanese artists, such as Koji Enokura, Sadamasa Motonaga and Kazuo Shiraga, who are associated with the Gutai group, the Hi Red Center collective and Mono-Ha. “But we’re by no means a Japanese gallery,” he was quick to clarify, explaining that he has been expanding his roster in preparation for his larger facility, adding contemporary European and American artists including Jack Early (former creative partner of Rob Pruitt) and the Glasgow-born Gary Rough.

The Upper East Side offers cheaper rents than Chelsea, according to New York real-estate broker Susan B. Anthony. While storefront space in Chelsea might command $90 to $100 per square foot annually, an uptown brownstone might go for $50-60 per foot. But it’s tougher to get curators and collectors to visit when you’re uptown, McCaffrey acknowledges. So why did he originally choose the Upper East Side location?

“I had worked both uptown and downtown,” McCaffrey said, “in Chelsea, where I worked five years at Gagosian, and the Upper East Side, where I worked four years with Michael Werner. I thought it was perhaps better, since I was working with historical material that was not so well known, to start in a context where more established material is shown. And that has served us incredibly well.

“But the idea of Chelsea has always been at the forefront of my thinking,” he said, “and the new location brings different dimensions of foot traffic and proximity to other galleries. We’ll have great north light and 15½-foot ceilings. We’re delighted to be able to occupy such beautiful space.”

Despite its location in a neighborhood that has undergone such extensive development, the ground floor at 508 has long been underused. The landlord, Gloria Naftali, wanted to put a restaurant there, McCaffrey said, but her plans never came to fruition. While those negotiations dragged on, amazingly, the area around the space rented by Harris Lieberman has remained for years a workshop and a place to store trash before moving it to the sidewalk. The Wolff Building was erected 1926-27 to house the H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Company, and during a recent visit to the space with McCaffrey, A.i.A. spotted an antique printing press standing in the ground-floor space, where a building staffer was assembling an acoustic guitar—as a gift for his grandson, he said.

Kazuo Shiraga, Work II, 1958, oil on paper.
From “Gutai: Splendid Playground.”

HYŌGO PREFECTURAL MUSEUM OF ART, KOBE

In the West, contemporary Asian art is often perceived as having developed in response to globalization and the proliferation of new art centers around the world over the past ten years. But Japan’s contemporary-art history is actually far more complex and long-standing, going back at least as far as the end of World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the U.S. military occupation. Surprisingly (to the Western audience at least), the art that came out of this period was not solely about destruction, but also about rebellion and self-determination.

Too little attention has been paid to Japan’s postwar art in the West, with the exception of the groundbreaking 1994 exhibition “Scream Against the Sky,” organized by the then-director of Japan Society Gallery, Alexandra Munroe, with the Guggenheim Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Japan Foundation, as well as the 2007 show “Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970” at the Getty Museum.

Now, however, several important museum and gallery exhibitions are shedding new light on the era. In November, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened “Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde,” organized by associate curator Doryun Chong. In February the Guggenheim Museum will open “Gutai: Splendid Playground,” curated by Munroe, now at the Guggenheim, and Ming Tiampo, associate professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Elsewhere, “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962,” an exhibition that featured an international array of artists, including Gutai participants, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles this fall. L.A.’s Blum & Poe gallery organized an exhibition, “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha,” last year, which later traveled to Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. Hauser & Wirth, also in New York, had a show of Gutai paintings in September, and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, New Paltz, New York, presented “Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York,” curated by Hiroki Ikegami with Reiko Tomii.

Works by Gutai—an association of radical artists founded by Jiro Yoshihara, whose practices included shooting paint onto a canvas with a cannon and plunging through laminated rice-paper screens—can sell for as little as $50,000 and as much as $1 million, according to a sales associate at Hauser & Wirth. The group Mono-ha, made up of Minimalist artists who favored sculptures composed of natural materials, has only recently developed a market, with prices running from $300,000 to $500,000. “It’s as if no one in the West had shown arte povera and suddenly it was discovered,” says Tim Blum of Blum & Poe, which recently opened a gallery in Japan. The Korean artist Lee Ufan, who was a key figure in Mono-ha and was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2011, is represented by Blum & Poe and Pace Gallery, where his minimalist canvases can sell for more than $1 million.

“Since the ’90s, Takashi Murakami and Nara have been darlings of the art world, but I don’t think we have seen the full spectrum of art coming out of Japan,” says MoMA curator Chong, whose exhibition includes works by 60 Tokyo artists, architects, and graphic designers who were all active from the late-’50s through the ’60s. “Perhaps now the audience is ready to look at artists from a different part of the world in more historical terms, with movements that grew out of their own national conditions but were informed by international exchanges of ideas.”

A number of factors during the postwar period, Chong explains, made Tokyo in particular a hotbed of artistic activity. First, Japan was recovering from a crushing defeat and an overhaul of deeply embedded cultural ideas—the emperor himself was stripped of his status as a deity. Second, Tokyo and much of the rest of Japan were going through a rapid reconstruction as the country was on its way to becoming an economic world leader. But perhaps most important, Japan already had a long modernist tradition that extended back to the 1870s, when the country opened its doors to the West. In short, Japanese artists had much to react to and comment on while also having a foundation in 20th-century modernist movements.

“Japan’s wholesale reconstruction in the first postwar decade and the period that followed was so thorough that it had to be engaged not only on the social and spatial strata, but also on the levels of the individual and of the body itself,” writes Chong in his catalogue essay. Japanese artists responded to these changes by challenging art forms and exploring exhibition possibilities beyond traditional galleries and museums—showing in theaters, subway stations, and on the street.

While a surrealist style of figurative painting dominated the immediate postwar period, it was soon superceded by experimental performative events created by artists’ collectives. Especially influential at this time was Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), founded in 1951 by 14 people, among them artists, an architect, a lighting designer, an engineer, a composer, and a choreographer. Its inaugural event was The Joy of Life, a ballet set to music by leading European and American 20th-century composers that introduced a modern form of Noh dance. Jikken Kobo, the subject of a retrospective at Bétonsalon in Paris last January, was in constant contact with artists in the West, including John Cage, who came to Japan at Yoko Ono’s invitation in 1961. His visit caused such a sensation in Tokyo that the reaction was coined “Cage Shock.” Other important groups included Hi-Red Center, the Sogetsu Ikebana School, and Tokyo Fluxus.

Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama—two artists who have emerged as international art stars—came of age during this period, but as women and frequent travelers to New York, they stood somewhat apart from this scene. Kusama, known for her stunningly obsessive paintings and environments covered in polka dots, was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum this past year. She lived in the United States from 1957 to 1973. Ono, who originally moved to New York with her family when she was a teenager and attended Sarah Lawrence College, spent two years in Japan in the early ’60s, bringing with her the inspiration and ideas of Fluxus. Ono was the subject of a retrospective, “YES Yoko Ono,” at the Japan Society in 2000–1.

“Bid farewell to these hoaxes piled up on the altars and in the palaces, the drawing rooms, and the antique shops . . . lock up these corpses in the graveyards,” Jiro Yoshihara demanded in his 1956 Gutai Manifesto. Reflecting the evolution of the Japanese people from subjects of a war-oriented totalitarian regime to citizens of a democratic society, the Gutai Art Association created works that defied artistic traditions, through either the use of unconventional materials or the performative and unconventional ways in which they were made. During the early years of the group, Gutai member Kazuo Shiraga would wrestle in mud or hang from a ceiling while painting canvases with his feet; Shozo Shimamoto would crash through paper screens; and Atsuko Tanaka performed in her 1956 Electric Dress, made of lightbulbs.

“Gutai was acknowledged as coming first by all of the great heroes of avant-garde history, including Allan Kaprow in his groundbreaking 1966 book, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings,” says Munroe, who was the first American curator to bring Gutai works to the United States. According to Munroe, Gutai’s early period was a celebration of individuality, but its work in the 1960s challenged the blatant commercialism of Japanese society during its economic expansion, leading up to Expo ’70. Gutai was also engaged in international dialogue with its peers in the West. The group distributed a highly influential journal to artists, critics, and curators throughout Europe and the United States, which led to the group being discovered by French critic Michel Tapié, a proponent of art informel. He met Yoshihara in 1957 in Japan and brought Gutai artworks to the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, now the home of Hauser & Wirth. “Our own history of modern art,” Munroe points out, “needs to have a wider conversation, because, in fact, if we look deeper into it, we find many intersections with Gutai, but they have been dismissed and forgotten.”

“The struggle for freedom was uniquely felt in Japan at that time after World War II, and Jiro Yoshihara in his manifestos spoke about the spirit of freedom,” says independent curator Midori Nishizawa, who organized Hauser & Wirth’s show of Gutai paintings last fall. Often confused with Abstract Expressionism and sometimes criticized as being overly influenced by art informel, “Gutai artists’ work challenges us to think about our own selves: how free are we?” says Nishizawa. “It speaks beyond the confines of art, and over the 15 years of their existence, they continually challenged the notion of freedom.”

As former L.A. MOCA curator Paul Schimmel, who featured Gutai artists in the show “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void,” observes, “As unique as the experience of the war and the bomb is to Japan, Gutai also shares a common language with the kind of destruction that was happening all over Europe, and, frankly, with the impact it had on artists.” Schimmel believes it is a mistake to think of Gutai’s paintings and other artworks as being derivative of Western art. Shiraga, painting with his feet, preceded Yves Klein’s use of the body by several years. (Indeed, Klein visited Japan at the time.) And both Shimamoto and Saburo Murakami chose to puncture screens almost simultaneously with Lucio Fontana’s slicing of canvases.

Works like these represent a radical departure for a country “that revered two-dimensional screen painting,” says Schimmel. Visitors to his show must step through Entrance (1955), a work created by delivering a karate chop to a thick paper screen. It must be re-created each time it is presented, and the artist, who is still alive but cannot travel, gave Schimmel permission to enact the work. “My first attempt was not successful,” Schimmel recalls. “The paper was much harder than I had imagined, and I kind of bounced off it initially. This time, I made sure I hit it with all my force.”

Preserving such work and marketing it is a challenge, one faced by Blum of Blum & Poe, whose spring exhibition revived interest in a movement founded at the height of student protests in Japan in the late-’60s. Working with basic materials, such as stone, wood, glass, and raw industrial steel, Mono-ha artists made minimalist works that beg to be contemplated, placing the experiential over the visual. “Mono-ha artists were dealing with a fundamental reevaluation of what art is and what material is,” says Hirshhorn Museum curator Mika Yoshitake, who helped organize the show and wrote the catalogue essay. “It was a time when Japan was really trying to follow everything that was going on in the United States, from Pop art to Assemblage. But at this time, there was also questioning of Japan’s relationship to the U.S. and Japan’s role in the Vietnam War.”

In keeping with an antimaterialistic ethos, many Mono-ha artists made works meant to deteriorate or be destroyed. Blum had to re-create Noriyuki Haraguchi’s 1970 untitled sculpture made of an industrial eyebeam that tilts back and is kept in place by only a steel wire anchored to a boulder; he also had to redo Nobuo Sekine’s Phase Mother Earth (1969/2012), an eight-foot-wide cyclinder of earth bored out of the ground and left standing beside the eight-foot-wide hole. In order to make such projects saleable, Blum drafted a manual for each work with instructions for assembly in the future. These were provided to new owners, such as the Dallas Museum of Art, which, in collaboration with Texas collectors Howard Rachofsky and Deedie Rose, bought several works from the exhibition.

“The tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima are quite pertinent in terms of public interest in Japan, but all of these projects have been underway for a number of years,” says Munroe, whose catalogue for “Scream Against the Sky” provided the first textbook, in English or Japanese, on the postwar period of art production. Representing a new generation of scholarship are people like Miwako Tezuka, newly appointed director of the Japan Society, and Reiko Tomii, who together founded PoNJA-GenKon in 2003, a listserv and network between scholars working on post-1945 Japanese art. “We’re a new generation who are coming out of our research phase and finally presenting these works just now,” says the Hirshhorn’s Yoshitake.

For MoMA’s Chong, Japan is the obvious choice for scholarship and exhibitions. “Japan has had the longest uninterrupted history of modern art, and in order to understand the histories of Indian or Chinese art, you have to have a grasp of what happened in Japan,” says Chong. “The scholarship is really growing, and I think Western institutions like ours will have to turn our attention and work back to these histories.”

Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

Six large, paint-laden gestural abstractions made a ferociously muscular appearance in New York recently, constituting, along with photos and films, a compact account of a leading participant in Japan’s postwar avant-garde. Kazuo Shiraga (1924-2008) was an early member of the Gutai Art Association, which was active from 1954 to 1972, primarily in and around Osaka. A scant decade after Japan’s WWII defeat, young Gutai artists, determinedly international in their thinking and activities, were intent on revivifying Japanese art. Vehemently rejecting traditional art forms, they published their ideas and images in Gutai magazine and mailed it to far-flung kindred spirits, including Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson in New York, the Paris critic and Informel proponent Michel Tapié, and many art professionals around the globe.

This was Shiraga’s first solo in the U.S. Taken alone, the selection of paintings, dating from 1961 to 2001, could suggest a hyper-energetic variant of Abstract Expressionism. The photographic material, however, documents something more complicated. As early as 1954, urged on by Jiro Yoshihara, the group’s leader, Shiraga and his colleagues devised various radically direct, performative approaches to raw materials. Refinement was not their game. A 1955 film shows Shiraga sprawled on the ground, half naked, wrestling with a viscous mixture of clay and concrete. This full-body engagement led to a versatile technique of painting with his bare feet. Other artists leaped through paper screens, fired paint at canvases with guns or made provocative use of ordinary objects.

The canvases at McCaffrey rewarded close examination. Several involve varied intensities of single colors, while others unleash multiple hues. Pictorial activity, whether swirled, lumpy or furrowed, may be allover, or centered and thinning toward the edges. Shiraga often worked while suspended from a rope above canvas (or paper) placed on the floor. The airborne attack yielded long, sinuous passages retaining the parallel tracks of his toes. His expressive range is considerable. Recurrent floods of blood-red pigment suggest violence. Elsewhere, footprint traces subtly allude to dance. Shiraga—like others in the group—was influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, who had exhibited in Japan in 1951. But the performance/action aspect of Gutai work, starting as early as 1954, anticipated and/or influenced Allan Kaprow’s

Happenings, Yves Klein’s Anthropometries and much that followed. In the ’60s, Gutai drew many international avant-gardists to Osaka. When Gutai disbanded in ’72, a period of eclipse followed. Subsequently, many shows in Europe and the U.S. have re-established the group’s significance. A selection of Gutai work appeared at the 2009 Venice Biennale (emphasizing its proto-Fluxus aspect), while a small, fascinating show that opened last July at the Pollock-Krasner Center in East Hampton comprised paintings and archives. The Guggenheim held a Gutai symposium in November. Individual Gutai participants are finally receiving attention here, as well, but many individual careers remain to be explored, and a full-scale Gutai exhibition in a U.S. museum is surely overdue.

[The Pollock-Krasner show, titled “Under Each Other’s Spell: The Gutai and New York,” is at UB-Anderson Gallery, University of Buffalo, Mar. 27-Aug. 22.]

Photo: Kazuo Shiraga: Funryu¯, 1973, alkyd paint on canvas, 715⁄8 by 893⁄8 inches; at McCaffrey.