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A JAPANESE ARTIST WHO SPENT MOST OF HER LIFE IN SWITZERLAND FUSED ABSTRACTION WITH MEMORIES OF HER HOMELAND

Published on July 30, 2025

by Edward M. Gómez

TOKYO — Many are the artists who, although they contributed in distinctive, innovative, and notable ways to modern art’s evolution, still remain less well known than they deserve to be. Often, the keepers of modern art’s recognized canon and the mainstream historical narrative that props it up — certain influential art historians, critics, museum curators, and art dealers with reputations to protect (their own or those of the artists they champion) — don’t know what to do with or where to place the life stories and achievements of these other remarkable art-makers.

Unfortunately, when such artists were women and, often, the wives or life partners of better-known male artists who were celebrated by the market and the broader art establishment, they have languished in the shadows of such famous men.

When such male artists die, often their female-artist partners end up shouldering the burden of overseeing, if not personally administering, many aspects of their estates, thereby forsaking the time and attention they normally would be able to devote to their own art-making.

An example of an overlooked modern artist whose work is now emerging and catching the art world’s attention is the late Teruko Yokoi (1924-2020), a Japanese-born painter whose trajectory took her to New York, Paris, and, finally, to Switzerland, where she spent the longest period of her life and where she died, at the age of 96, in Bern, the small, central-European country’s capital.

Now, the art historian Kuniko Satonobu Spirig, a specialist in the work of the French modernist Sonia Delaunay, who has long lived in Geneva, Switzerland, has written Teruko Yokoi: Art in the Making (Zürich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess), a short book about Yokoi’s painting methods and her vocabulary of abstraction. It is also a biography that presents a summary of Yokoi’s life and that of her career as an artist, during which she became best known for her abstract and semi-abstract paintings, some of whose compositions incorporated Japanese calligraphic elements. Yokoi also produced works in gouache or egg tempera on paper.

The book has been published in a bilingual, Japanese-English edition. It can be ordered from the publisher, online, here. The publication of Spirig’s book coincides with her completion of a documentary film of the same name about Yokoi’s life and work.

Yokoi was born in the large commercial city of Nagoya in east-central Japan, which, today, is the hub of the country’s automotive industry. Shortly after Teruko’s birth, her family moved to the much smaller town of Tsushima to the west of Nagoya, a former textile-manufacturing center where the future artist grew up inspired by nature and tradition, including the region’s verdant hills and shimmering waterways. On one of them, the Tenno River, an annual summertime festival takes place featuring wooden boats decorated with glowing lanterns.

At a cultural center in Tsushima in November of last year, Spirig presented her film about Yokoi and answered questions from audience members about the artist’s formative years in their town. She also curated an exhibition of a selection of Yokoi’s paintings and of photos and ephemera related to the artist’s life, which had been loaned by the Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Art Museum in the city of Ena, in Gifu Prefecture, to the northeast of Nagoya. (“Hinageshi” is the Japanese word for a poppy, a motif that turns up often in Yokoi’s compositions, infusing them with shots of bright-red graphic energy.)

By the time she graduated from high school in Tsushima, Yokoi, whose father was a calligrapher and poet, had begun studying oil painting with a private teacher, and in 1949, she moved to Tokyo, where she audited classes at Joshibi Unversity of Art and Design and studied with the painter Takanori Kinoshita.

By 1954, when Yokoi moved to the United States to study on a scholarship at the California School of Fine Arts (which later became the San Francisco Art Institute), she had developed an interest in European modern art. In San Francisco, she became increasingly interested in abstraction.

As Spirig points out in her book, “As a young and successful artist at Takanori Kinoshita’s private art school in Tokyo, [Yokoi] painted realistic landscapes and portraits in a Postimpressionist style. Then she became restless and eager to explore new forms of expression.”

However, as an art student in the U.S., where Abstract Expressionism was enjoying its headline-making heyday, Yokoi “felt ill at ease among peers splashing paint from buckets onto canvases laid flat on the floor. She lost confidence and began to think: ‘It is impossible for me to splash paint onto the floor. […] I am not talented.’ When she surfaced from her depression, she resolved to continue painting just as she had in Japan, with the canvas on an easel and holding her palette like Cézanne or Monet.”

Yokoi’s courage and ambition as one of the rare young, Japanese female artists of her generation who ventured abroad to study and launch their professional careers should not be overlooked. After spending time in San Francisco, again armed with the funds from a study grant she had won, Yokoi moved to New York, where she studied with the German modernist painter-teacher Hans Hoffman.

In New York, Yokoi met Kenzo Okada, a Japanese-born Abstract-Expressionist painter who had moved to the city in 1950. In 1957, she also met the American abstract painter Sam Francis, whom she married two years later and with whom she had a daughter. In 1960, Francis, Yokoi, and their child moved to Paris.

In Teruko Yokoi: Art in the Making, Spirig writes, “As a young mother, Yokoi could not take part in the city’s vibrant social scene or join the artists gathering in cafés. As she later recalled, ‘I didn’t enjoy life in Paris. As a mother, I was always exhausted.  just survived.’ Even so, she managed to find a babysitter and [in 1960] alone produced some 20 large oils on canvas.” In these paintings, Spirig observes, Yokoi “developed the diamond form that was to become her signature motif, making her time in Paris one of the richest periods in her artistic evolution.”

Although Yokoi struggled in Paris, 1960 also brought her an encounter that would decisively affect the direction of her life and career. It was during that same year that Arnold Rüdlinger, then the director of the Kunsthalle Basel, in northern Switzerland, traveled to Paris to look for paintings for a certain art collector. After visiting Sam Francis at the artist’s studio, Rüdlinger joined him at his home, where he met Yokoi and, as Spirig writes, “notice[d] some large paintings propped up in the room next to the dining room.”

The Swiss museum director examined her works with interest and invited her to send some of them to Basel, where he would help find buyers for her coldly colored paintings. In her book, Spirig writes, “Recalling this discovery of her work many years later, Yokoi summed it up with the laconic comment, ‘Rüdlinger appeared. Everything changed.’”

Eventually, Yokoi and Francis separated, and in 1962, the Japanese artist and her young daughter moved to Bern, which would become he home base until the end of her life. In 1964, Rüdlinger presented the first major museum exhibition of Yokoi’s art at the Kunsthalle Basel. (He died just a few years later, in 1967, at the young age of 48.)

Both in her book and in her film about Yokoi, Spirig calls attention to the different, main motifs and themes that characterized the artist’s works over the course of her art-making career, including, for example, her muscular diamond forms; her highly abstracted, flowing Japanese calligraphy elements; and her emulation of what she called the “dots” that appeared in the calligraphic works of the 18th-century, Sōtō Zen Buddhist monk Ryōkan Taigu.

In 2004, Yokoi’s longtime friend Shingo Kamata founded the Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Art Museum in Gifu Prefecture, which became a showcase for his personal collection of the artist’s works. Yokoi had met Kamata in 1982 when, as a young man, he was traveling through Europe and, while stopping in Switzerland, found himself running out of funds and forced to reach out for help.

Yokoi spotted him at a train station and offered him food and lodging; the artist and the young man, who pledged to acquire her paintings as soon as he became a successful businessman back in Japan, became friends. In time, Kamata’s confectionary company did well, and with his earnings, he amassed a large collection of Yokoi’s works.

In 2008, in Fujinomiya, in Shizuoka Prefecture, the Kawaguchi family, which owns a paper mill and also had assembled a collection of Yokoi’s works, opened the Teruko Yokoi Fuji Museum of Art to display their holdings. More recently, New York’s well-known Marlborough Gallery had begun working with Yokoi’s estate and presenting the artist’s works. Unfortunately, the gallery closed for good in June of last year.

In early 2020, Yokoi’s dream came true when a career-spanning retrospective exhibition of her work opened at the Kunstmuseum Bern, the leading fine-arts museum in her adopted hometown. Spirig wrote an essay for that survey’s catalog, and footage from her film was used within the exhibition. The artist died later in 2020, at the end of October of that year.

(View a brief video of the Kunstmuseum Bern exhibition here.)

Yokoi did not leave behind any diaries, journals, unpublished writings, or personal papers that could have been helpful to Spirig as she carried out the research for her book and her film, but she did have an opportunity to meet the artist and to gain a sense of her personality, artistic sensibility, and way of looking at the world. Interestingly, Yokoi chose to speak in English when being interviewed on and off camera.

In her book, Spirig observes, “Yokoi passed away peacefully […] three months after the retrospective that she had dreamed of for decades closed its doors, leaving us with these words:

‘I long or dream to reach some higher stage, even about
the beauty, which pleases me. And my paintings are like
this [,…] always, one day, one day, one day, the day comes.
This is my life.’”