Biography
Early life and career
Early postwar years, 1945–1955
After the end of World War II, Yoshihara immediately engaged in the rebuilding of the art scene and cultural life in the Kansai region and beyond. Also, since around 1946 Yoshihara provided designs for posters, products and window displays, and murals, as well as for stage sets of operettas, dance, open-air concerts, theater and fashion shows. Yoshihara was actively involved in the rebuilding of Nika in 1945. He attended meetings of the Tensekikai (Group of Rolling Stones) led by philosopher Tsutomu Ijima, co-founded artists groups such as the Han-bijutsu Kyōkai (Pan-Art Association), the Nihon Avangyarudo Bijutsuka Kurabu (Avant-Garde Artists Club Japan) in 1947, the Ashiya City Art Association in 1948 (a local umbrella group that hosted its own local salon, Ashiya City Exhibition), and the Nihon Absutorakuto Āto Kurabu (Abstract Art Club Japan) and Āto Kurabu (Art Club) in 1953. He also participated in educational activities, mentoring young artists at his home or, from 1949 to 1958, at the Osaka Shiritsu Bijutsu Kenkyūjo (Osaka Art Research Institute, an art school affiliated with Municipal Art Museum). As an established member of the art world, he served as a juror for children's and students’ art exhibitions, such as Dōbiten (Children Art Exhibition, originally ''Jidō sōsaku bitsuten'' Children's Creative Art Exhibition) and Bi’ikuten (Art Education Exhibition), and collaborating with the children's poetry magazine ''Kirin'' (Giraffe). Together with artists such as Shigeru Ueki, Kokuta Suda, Makoto Nakamura, in 1952 Yoshihara founded Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group, commonly known as Genbi), an interdisciplinary forum for Kansai-based artists, critics, scholars and experts to engage in interdisciplinary thematic discussion sessions and joint exhibitions. Among the participants were painters, sculptors, industrial, product and fashion designers, photographers, and in particular avant-garde artists from the traditional arts, such as calligraphy, ceramics, and ikebana, which encompassed members of Bokujinkai (Ink People Society), Sōdeisha (Running Mud Association), Shikōkai (Four Plowmen Group), and the Ohara, Sōgetsu, and Mishō ikebana schools. They shared a strong global aspiration and an enthusiasm for modern abstract art. In addition, Yoshihara participated in roundtable discussions of Bokujinkai and the Ohara school, contributed texts and illustrations to their publications (including ''Bokubi''), and benefitted from the artistic exchanges they hosted with European and US-American abstract painters such as Pierre Soulages,Gutai Art Association, 1955–1972
In 1954 Yoshihara co-founded the Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai (Gutai Art Association) with some of his students and young Genbi participants (Masatoshi Masanobu, Shōzō Shimamoto, Chiyū Uemae, Tsuruko Yamazaki, Toshio Yoshida, his son Michio Yoshihara, and Hideo Yoshihara). The founding of Gutai coincided with Yoshihara's appointment to managing director of Yoshihara Oil Mill company following his father's death in December 1954. Gutai's namesake journal, which was first issued in January 1955, documented the group's activities in 14 issues through 1965, reviving his aspiration with Kyūshitsukai's publication and emulating Bokujinkai's strategy of international networking via its magazine. Over the following months, the group underwent substantial changes. More than half of the founding members left, some frustrated by Yoshihara's prioritization of the journal over actual exhibitions. However, Gutai also gained new members in response to Yoshihara's invitation: they included Akira Kanayama, Saburō Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, and Kazuo Shiraga, who belonged to a small artist group Zerokai (Zero Society) and also affiliated with Shinseisaku Kyōkai (New Creations Association). Yoshihara and the group also recruited Sadamasa Motonaga, Yasuo Sumi and Yōzō Ukita, who also joined later in 1955. Over the next 18 years, Gutai semi-regularly organized Gutai Art Exhibitions and other art exhibitions under Yoshihara's leadership, including unconventional formats of outdoor exhibitions and onstage presentations. Adapting to these unconventional formats, the Gutai members, including Yoshihara himself, explored radically experimental methods of production and presentation, involving performative, ephemeral, and interactive elements. For Gutai's outdoor exhibitions and onstage presentations, Yoshihara contributed several interactive works and installations. Although the group was based on an egalitarian structure, Yoshihara was its de facto leader and spokesperson: he wrote the group's “Gutai Art Manifesto” in 1956 in response to the hype onSolo career, 1955–1972
Yoshihara had been recognized as one of the seminal Japanese painters of the early 1950s, with many of his works both from the early postwar period and his Gutai period included in major national and international contemporary art exhibitions. For example, in 1952, his works were selected for the '' Salon de Mai'' in Paris the ''Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture'' at the Carnegie Museum. He received the Osaka Prefectural Cultural Award in 1951. Yoshihara's paintings were subsequently shown at the ''Nihon Kokusai Bijutsuten'' (''International Art Exhibition Japan'') since 1952, ''Nichibei Chūshō Bijutsuten'' (''Abstract Art Exhibition: Japan and USA'') at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 1955, the ''Pittsburgh International Exhibitions of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture'' at Carnegie Institute in 1958 and 1961, and ''Japanische Malerei der Gegenwart'' that travelled the German cities Berlin, Essen, and Frankfurt in 1961. He was awarded the Hyogo Prefecture Cultural Prize in 1963. However, the pressure of producing new, original artworks increased and was complicated by Yoshihara's lack of time due to his work for his family's business, as well as by the critical and commercial success of the first-generation Gutai members and the freedom of the younger members. His ''Circle'' series, which he developed from 1962 onward, gained him renewed national and international recognition, with continued exposures including the ''Contemporary Japanese Painting & Sculpture'' exhibition that travelled through several cities in the US in 1963, the Guggenheim International Award in 1964, the ''Contemporary Japanese Art'' exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1964, ''The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture'' show at the San Francisco Museum of Art and other venues in 1965, the ''Japan Art Festivals'' from 1966 to 1968, and were awarded the gold medal at the ''2nd India Triennial World Art'' in 1971.Death
Yoshihara died in Ashiya on February 10, 1972, due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Forllowing his death, Gutai dissolved in March 1972. Yoshihara was posthumously awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette.Work
Early paintings, 1920s to mid-1930s
Yoshihara's paintings from the 1920s and early 1930s consisted in still-lives inspired by European Baroque still-lives and landscapes, post-impressionist painting, and Japanese oil painters such as Yuichi Takahashi. Around 1930, his paintings, which often depicted maritime motifs, adopted a visual language that echoed Giorgio De Chirico's metaphysical paintings. In the following years Yoshihara developed a Surrealist style, painting landscapes that were disintegrated and distorted, which prefigured his transition to abstraction.First abstract phase, mid-1930s to 1940
Around 1934, Yoshihara began creating organically geometric abstract paintings—arrangements of rectangular fields containing biomorphic forms—and experimented with techniques such as collage and montage. Yoshihara's works from the latter half of the 1930s show a broad range of styles. Some of his abstract paintings produced between 1936 and 1938 referred stylistically to works by European and British abstract artists such as Hans Erni,War years, 1940–1945
In the late 1930s, the Japanese government intensified war efforts in Asia and increased pressure on artists to contribute patriotic works. Avant-garde artists, especially those engaging in Surrealism, were threatened by these oppressive measures. Yoshihara, who was spared from military service and evacuated, struggled with the state's demands to deliver war paintings, and seclusively created Surrealistic landscapes and genre paintings.Return to figuration, 1946–1950
In the years following the end of World War II, Yoshihara produced paintings depicting blurred human faces, bodies, and birds, with the fore- and backgrounds blending into one another, many of which were segmented by rigid grid of lines. Around 1948, the human bodies and faces were increasingly distorted and fragmented into geometric forms, and with Yoshihara's reduction of the backgrounds to black monochrome surfaces, appeared archaic.Postwar abstraction, 1950–1954
After 1950 Yoshihara continued to pursue this archaic, sandy and sign-like imagery with regard to the surface texture, now scratching the contour lines of his motifs into thick paint layers. In a further step towards abstraction, Yoshihara created paintings with geometric archaic sign-like figures on monochrome opaque backgrounds, and later transitioned to purely abstract compositions of lines and planar forms, which transitioned into each other. In his exploration of abstraction in these years, Yoshihara drew inspiration from the expressivity of non-figurative children's art, Zen calligraphy and painting, particularly the works of the 20th century Zen priest Nakahara Nantenbō, which Yoshihara saw at the Kaiseiji Temple in Nishinomiya, and his exchanges with the avantgarde-calligraphers Shiryū Morita and Yuichi Inoue in the early 1950s, and US-American abstract artists. Yoshihara's growing interest in lines has also been associated with the artist's visit to ''Gendai sekai bijutusten'' in Tokyo 1950, which included recent works by European abstract artists such asInformel phase and Gutai works, 1955–1962
Coinciding with the early years of Gutai, Yoshihara, from1955 to the early 1960s, a period that is often described as his Informel phase, intensified his exploration of the materiality of paint and created paintings applying several layers of oil paint with traces of dynamic gestural paint application. These works emerged from the synergy with Gutai and its activities, including Gutai's experimental exhibitions as well as Gutai's collaboration with Michel Tapié. Aside from painting, Yoshihara also contributed interactive three-dimensional works and installations for Gutai's outdoor exhibitions and stage shows, such as his ''Light Art'' (1956), which were columns with lamps, ''Rakugakiban'' (''Please draw freely'') (1956), a board on which visitors were invited to scribble, or ''Muro'' (Room) (1956), a labyrinth walk-in installation.Circles and hard edge, 1962–1972
Around 1962, Yoshihara began work on a series of paintings of singular circles on monochromatic backgrounds, inspired both by ''ensō'' circles from Zen painting and hard-edge painting of the 1960s. He was impressed by the powerful calligraphy of Zen monk Nantenbō and Nantenbō's own creations of ''ensō'', circles symbolizing enlightenment in Zen. Yet, while ''ensō'' were painted in one stroke in ink on paper, Yoshihara's circles were applied in oil or acrylic paint. As Reiko Tomii hints, “This deliberate maneuver resulted in a form neither East nor West, sublimating the calligraphic gesture that he so admired in Pollock and Nantebō and the minimalism that brought out the best of his formalism.” These new circle paintings finally resulted in a renewed success for Yoshihara: ''Painting'' was selected for the 1964 Guggenheim International Award, and for ''White Circle on Black'' and ''Black Circle on White'' he was awarded the gold medal at the ''2nd India Triennial World Art'' in 1971.Other works
Throughout his life, Yoshihara was committed to interdisciplinary collaboration aside from his paintings. From the beginning of his artistic career, he contributed illustrations to poetry magazines and children's books. After the end of World War II, he went on to create murals, posters, advertisements, product designs, shop window displays, and stage designs for operettas, dance performances, theater pieces, concerts, fashion shows in the Kansai region. These included ''donchō'' stage drop curtains, as well as stage designs for the fashion designer Chiyo Tanaka between 1952 and 1954, and stage designs for Festival Noh from 1962 until his death. Yoshihara was also a prolific writer and contributed reviews and articles to newspapers and art magazines.Reception and legacy
Yoshihara substantially shaped the course of postwar Japanese art, both as an artist in his own right and as a facilitator of new experimental art. As an artist, he left an extensive oeuvre that underwent development through a broad range of stylistic phases. On the basis of Yoshihara's profound practical and theoretical knowledge of Japanese and Western arts, his works engaged with both Japanese traditional arts and modern painting as well as the most up-to-date global artistic developments, and, through his continuous pursuit of new art, sought to overcome their boundaries and limitations. Through his involvement with children's art exhibitions and children's books and magazines, Yoshihara contributed to the revaluation of children's art in Japan in the postwar years and the broader recognition/acceptance of a liberal art educational approach that fostered radically free expressive creativity, in opposition to the widely spread training approach. Projects that Yoshihara co-founded and engaged in became forceful factors for the vitalization of the arts and culture in the Kansai region. Genbi, for instance, inspired the participating established and emerging artists to push the boundaries of their arts. Other initiatives turned out to be long-lasting and influential events, such as the ''Dōbiten'' (Children Art Exhibition), which continues to provide a venue for free creative art by children, or Ashiya City Art Association's ''Ashiyashiten'' (''Ashiya City Exhibitions''), which became an important venue for generations of vanguard artists across the Kansai region. His most influential achievement is Gutai, which Yoshihara led and held together with his artistic instinct, organizational and strategic savviness for 18 years, and which became a fixture in Japanese as well as global art history. Yoshihara actively identified new members with artistic potential, and facilitated and encouraged radically experimental works from its members that anticipated the approaches later adopted or paralleled by European and US-American artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Fueled by his global ambition to achieve “international common ground”,Tiampo, ''Gutai: Decentering Modernism'', pp. 2–3, 76–77. i.e., to be internationally recognized by contemporaries worldwide, Yoshihara used and encouraged artistic, communicative and promotional strategies to help Gutai become one of the most internationally known Japanese postwar art groups. Although criticized for its too close collaboration with Tapié and Informel or the group's reticence from overtly socio-politically critical statements, Yoshihara was instrumental in making Gutai an unprecedented case in Japanese art history as a Japanese art group that directly and actively involved in global art discourses.References
Further reading
*吉原治良と具体のその後 / ''Jiro Yoshihara and Today’s Aspects of the “Gutai”'', exhib. cat., Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe: Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1979. *吉原治良展: 没後20年 / ''Jiro Yoshihara'', exhib. cat., Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, 1992. *Munroe, Alexandra, "To Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun: The Gutai Group", in: ''Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky'', ed. id., exhib. cat., Yokohama Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, pp. 83–124. *発見!吉原治良の世界 : 清らかな詩心をつらぬく造形の軌跡 / ''Jiro Yoshihara 1905–1972'', exhib. cat., ATC Museum, Osaka, Osaka: Osaka City Museum of Modern Art (planning office), 1998. *Lucken, Michael, "Yoshihara Jirō: l’envers de l’épopée", in: ''Gutai'', exhib. cat., Jeu de Paume, Paris, Paris: Éditions du Jeu de Paume, Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999, pp. 17–23. *吉原治良研究論集 (Yoshihara Jirō studies), ed. Yoshihara Jirō kenkyūkai (Yoshihara Jirō study group), Ashiya: Yoshihara Jirō kenkyūkai, 2002. *吉原治良展 ''/ Jiro Yoshihara: A Centenary Retrospective'', exhib. cat., ATC Museum, Osaka; Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai; Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 2005. *"Yoshihara, Jiro", in: ''Benezit Dictionary of Artists,'' Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2021-06-04. *Munroe, Alexandra, “All the Landscapes: Gutai’s World”, in: exhib. cat. ''Gutai: Splendid Playground'', exhib. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013, pp. 21–43. *未知の表現を求めて: 吉原治良の挑戦 ''/ Jiro Yoshihara: Leader of Gutai'' ''– Seeking for the New'', exhib. cat., Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, 2015.External links