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THE WORK OF A SECOND-GENERATION MEMBER OF THE INFLUENTIAL, POST-WORLD WAR II JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE COLLECTIVE IS CELEBRATED IN TOKYO

“Takesada Matsutani”
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
Tokyo Opera City, third floor
3-20-2 Nishi-Shinjuku
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo-to 〒163-1403 Japan
Exhibition on view from October 3 through December 17, 2024

by Edward M. Gómez

TOKYO — Consider the expressive power of the blob.

Then think about gashes in and dramatic drips of color on the bubbly surfaces of an artist’s paintings; and the play of large, boldly colored geometric forms in precisely balanced compositions; and monumental stretches of lustrous, black graphite flowing horizontally and unstoppably across meters-long, broad banners of paper. What’s a viewer to make of such a diverse vocabulary of abstract expressions from a single artist’s fecund — and provocative — imagination?

These technical gestures and this pageant of enigmatic forms, along with the unsinkable creative spirit of the artist who has conjured them up and deployed them in his distinctive, varied oeuvre over a career that has spanned more than 60 years, are the subjects of “Takesada Matsutani,” a retrospective exhibition featuring more than 200 works by the art-maker whom it honors, which recently opened at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

It will remain on view through December 17, 2024 at this high-profile venue at a large performing-arts and cultural center located in Hatsudai, a district in the west-central part of Japan’s capital.

Judiciously selected by the gallery’s senior curator, Osamu Fukushi, and installed with a dramatic sense of rhythm and pacing, this is the largest-ever retrospective exhibition of Takesada Matsutani’s work looking back over the entirety of the artist’s decades-long career. It offers both an in-depth examination of Matsutani’s exploration of the language of abstraction and a valuable recollection of a period of 20th-century, Japanese avant-garde history that contributed significantly to the broader international evolution and diffusion of modern art’s expressions and ideas.

Matsutani was born in 1937 in Osaka, in the south-southwestern region of Kansai on Japan’s main island of Honshū, where he spent much of his childhood in the small city of Nishinomiya. Even as a young teenager producing watercolor works, he displayed a strong interest in art; in 1954, he became a student at the Osaka Municipal High School of Industrial Arts, where he studied nihonga, a traditional genre of Japanese painting whose practitioners use mineral and other kinds of pigments, and sometimes ink, on silk or paper. By the late 1950s, Matsutani, who had been mixing sand into his nihonga pigments, had begun making paintings whose abstracted subject matter reflected his interest in a very different approach to making art.

Like many young artists in the Kansai region at that time, Matsutani was aware of the activities of the Gutai Art Association, which had been founded in Ashiya, in 1954, by the nearly 50-year-old Jirō Yoshihara and seventeen young artists from the Osaka area who regarded him as their mentor and leader. (Ashiya, a small, affluent city, lies immediately to the west of Nishinomiya; both cities are located about midway between the large port cities of Osaka to the east and Kobe to the west.)

Yoshihara, the scion of a family that owned a cooking-oil wholesaling company, was a mostly self-taught artist who had painted in a surrealistic mode but later became interested in abstract art. In a pre-Internet age, having learned about Western modern art from magazines, Yoshihara saw examples of foreign-made abstract paintings in person for the first time in Japan in the early 1950s. Deeply moved by what he recognized as their daring, radical sense of invention, he later issued a firm command to his younger Gutai associates. “Don’t copy anyone! Do something that no one has ever done before!” he demanded.

Yoshihara penned Gutai group’s tradition-busting manifesto, which assailed the blandness of familiar art forms. It declared, “Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops. […] Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art, the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other.”

During the Gutai group’s long run — its activities wound down in 1972, following Yoshihara’s death — its participants presented avant-garde exhibitions and what are now regarded as prototypical action-art and performance-art events. Their venues included conventional auditoriums, a public park, and, one time, even the sky. On that latter occasion, Gutai artists sent their paintings, each one tied to a helium balloon, up into the air from the rooftop of a tall building.

Matsutani began showing his early abstract works along with these avant-gardists in 1959 and joined their collective four years later, becoming a so-called second-generation Gutai artist. Recently, on the night of the opening of his exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Matsutani recalled those heady days at the beginning of his professional career.

He told me, “I’ve never forgotten Yoshihara’s dictum and, even today, every time I start to create a new painting or other work of art, I think about Gutai’s fundamental principles. Gutai’s attitude and spirit continue to motivate and inspire me.”

Matsutani and his wife Kate Van Houten, an American painter, sculptor, and creator of artist’s books, had traveled from their main home in Paris for the big Tokyo event. For many years, they have also maintained Matsutani’s old family home in Nishinomiya as a residence and their art-making base in Japan. (In late 2015, “Matsutani: Currents,” a smaller retrospective exhibition, was presented at the Ōtani Memorial Art Museum in Nishinomiya.)

The current exhibition in Tokyo trots out some very rarely seen works from the earliest period of Matsutani’s long career, such as “Work” (1960; oil paint, cement, and mixed media on plywood), in which a black-outlined oval shape seems to gently writhe against the earth-toned, cracked, crusty surface on which it lies, and “Work-C” (1961, oil paint, large metal staples, and cement on plywood), a vertical-format painting in which a richly textured, more lightly colored rectangle juts out from the physical picture plane of a composition with a dark-teal background.

And then there are Matsutani’s signature blobs, made with vinyl glue, which the artist blew into bubbles using a straw and then allowed to dry and collapse under their own weight as they hardened; he also used an electric fan and a hair dryer to help direct the flow of glue on his mixed-media works’ support surfaces and to shape his bubble-like protrusions. Coloring the bizarrely textured surfaces of such creations with a limited palette of red, black, white, and washes of black-gray, Matsutani gave form to odd compositions whose elements brought to mind big blisters, breasts, pods, mouths, eggs, and maybe also genitalia.

Like Van Houten, Matsuntani, who first traveled to France in 1966 as the recipient of an artist’s fellowship, made prints at Atelier 17 in Paris, an art school and studio run by the British painter and master printmaker Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988). The current Tokyo exhibition features a large selection of Matsutani’s silkscreen prints from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which brightly colored, sensuous geometric shapes appear to filter the spirit of Pop through the discipline of elegant, minimalist compositions.

Matsutani went on to develop a signature mode of art-making that would characterize the long, latter phase of his career. In minimalist-abstract creations made with little more than graphite on paper, or with graphite used to color the bulbous, drippy forms appearing in his mixed-media, sculptural “paintings,” and also with works made with dark-black ink on paper or canvas, Matsutani stripped his art-making techniques down while still remaining faithful to Gutai’s focus on recognizing and revealing the expressive power of his materials.

After the opening of his exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Matsutani told me, “When I look at my earliest works, I can still feel the rush of excitement I felt as a young artist. My colleagues and I, we all strove to produce something fresh and new; our urgent desire to create was as much the subject of our art as whatever we ended up presenting in or expressing through the works we produced. Even after all these years, I still feel that urgent creative impulse.”

A longtime resident of Paris, Matsutani is now represented by the Zürich-based gallery Hauser & Wirth, which has branches in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Hong Kong, and other locations. Matsutani now has a Paris-based foundation that awards annual prizes to emerging artists and whose activities include the assembling of his archives and the promotion of his legacy.

I dared to ask the veteran art-maker if he ever worries about running out of ideas or if he might now be feeling that his long career could be winding down.

His eyes beaming through thin-framed, round eyeglasses, he retorted, “Never! I just came up to Tokyo from Nishinomiya, where Kate and I have been working and resting, working and resting. We both will show works in a group exhibition that’s opening soon in the Kansai area. As much as I enjoy coming to Japan every year, I’m also always eager to get back to my studio in Paris, where I always have projects in progress.”

Matsutani paused to sip a glass of wine and added, “I’m going to keep on making art until I can no longer hold a paintbrush. Now that’s the spirit of Gutai!”