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Lot Essay
‘Then, as I ran and ran, believing that I was moving forward, it occurred to me: Why not feet? Why don’t I paint with my feet?’ (Kazuo Shiraga)
With its clashing, marbled ribbons of colour bursting forth against a deep black ground, Kazuo Shiraga’s Yagenko (1989) is a dynamic and sculptural example of Kazuo Shiraga’s foot-paintings. Shiraga made these works from above, hanging from a rope and using his feet to manipulate pools of paint. His gripping, stamping and sliding action emerges vividly in Yagenko’s energised impasto, whose primary hues are shot through with an electric lick of pink. The Japanese title’s characters (夜幻行) can be interpreted to mean ‘a night vision’ or ‘a vision had at night’, complementing its dance of colours and darkness. The painting dates from a period of rising international acclaim for Shiraga. His first museum survey was staged at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe, in 1985, and in 1986 he travelled to Europe for the first time when his work was included in the group exhibition Japon des avant-gardes 1910–70 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1989, the year Yagenko was painted, he received a major retrospective in his birthplace of Amagasaki, west of Osaka.
Shiraga rose to prominence during his involvement with the avant-garde Gutai movement in Japan, which existed from 1954 until 1972. The Gutai artists—urged by their founder Jirō Yoshihara to ‘create what has never been done before’—sought to express their innermost selves through visceral collisions of body and matter. Shōzō Shimamoto threw bottles of paint, Saburō Murakami charged through paper screens and Atsuko Tanaka wore a dress illuminated with electric lights. In the first Gutai exhibition at the Ohara Hall in Tokyo in 1955, Shiraga performed his seminal early work Challenging Mud, in which he wrestled through a thick mound of the viscous substance on his hands and knees. This performance became emblematic of Gutai and remains one of the most important works to emerge from postwar Japan.
While Shiraga’s signature foot-painting developed significantly after Challenging Mud, he had in fact started using this method the previous year. Feeling restricted by the fine pigment layers and pristine surfaces required of traditional Nihonga or Japanese-style painting—which he had been taught in Kyoto—he had broken free by 1953 into monochrome abstraction using crimson lake oil paint, liquid and spreadable from the tube. In 1954, in a flash, it occurred to him to paint with his feet. ‘It felt as though the scales dropped from my eyes’, he said. ‘I felt cheered up, happy, and exhilarated’ (K. Shiraga quoted in R. Tomii, ‘Shiraga Paints: Toward a “Concrete” Discussion’, in Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades, exh. cat. McCaffrey Fine Art, New York 2009, p. 13). Abandoning the brush, Shiraga plunged himself into the arena of the canvas, making work that was between painting and performance art.
After initial attempts in which he slipped on the oily pigment, Shiraga soon hung a rope from his studio ceiling in order to launch himself across the picture plane, smearing and splashing colour in his wake. He framed the artistic struggle between material and body in primal terms, with violence and beauty closely intertwined. An initial group of works were named for the 108 warrior outlaws of the fourteenth-century Chinese novel Suikoden (Water Margin), and his red-drenched paintings of the 1950s have been seen in relation to the trauma of the Second World War. In later years he began to work more freely, deploying acrobatic, criss-crossing strokes that blended red with blue, black, white and other colours. Yagenko stems from a period of still greater mastery. In the early 1970s, following austere mental and physical training, Shiraga had been initiated as a lay monk in the esoteric Tendai Buddhist sect. He incorporated sutra chanting into his process, and came to understand the paintings’ automatist genesis in spiritual, meditative terms.
Shiraga had been introduced to contemporary Western art practices in 1951, when the third Yomiuri Independent Exhibition travelled to Osaka. He was fascinated by the works of Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet. At a time when Japan was discovering a new identity in the years after the Second World War, he identified with their freshness and individualism. While he and other Gutai artists were soon championed in Europe by the Art Informel theorist Michel Tapié, Shiraga later reflected that Western ‘action painting’ had only minimal impact upon his own practice. Where Pollock, for example, dripped from pierced paint tins, and Yves Klein would direct the action of female models to make his Anthropométries, Shiraga went further than these artists, fusing himself, body and spirit, with the very fibre of his work. ‘Thirty-five years since I invented my foot painting,’ wrote Shiraga on the occasion of his 1989 retrospective, ‘the art world has seen many new things, many stylistic storms. However, 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’ (K. Shiraga, ‘A Path to Action Painting’, 1989, reproduced in ibid., p. 68).
With its clashing, marbled ribbons of colour bursting forth against a deep black ground, Kazuo Shiraga’s Yagenko (1989) is a dynamic and sculptural example of Kazuo Shiraga’s foot-paintings. Shiraga made these works from above, hanging from a rope and using his feet to manipulate pools of paint. His gripping, stamping and sliding action emerges vividly in Yagenko’s energised impasto, whose primary hues are shot through with an electric lick of pink. The Japanese title’s characters (夜幻行) can be interpreted to mean ‘a night vision’ or ‘a vision had at night’, complementing its dance of colours and darkness. The painting dates from a period of rising international acclaim for Shiraga. His first museum survey was staged at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe, in 1985, and in 1986 he travelled to Europe for the first time when his work was included in the group exhibition Japon des avant-gardes 1910–70 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1989, the year Yagenko was painted, he received a major retrospective in his birthplace of Amagasaki, west of Osaka.
Shiraga rose to prominence during his involvement with the avant-garde Gutai movement in Japan, which existed from 1954 until 1972. The Gutai artists—urged by their founder Jirō Yoshihara to ‘create what has never been done before’—sought to express their innermost selves through visceral collisions of body and matter. Shōzō Shimamoto threw bottles of paint, Saburō Murakami charged through paper screens and Atsuko Tanaka wore a dress illuminated with electric lights. In the first Gutai exhibition at the Ohara Hall in Tokyo in 1955, Shiraga performed his seminal early work Challenging Mud, in which he wrestled through a thick mound of the viscous substance on his hands and knees. This performance became emblematic of Gutai and remains one of the most important works to emerge from postwar Japan.
While Shiraga’s signature foot-painting developed significantly after Challenging Mud, he had in fact started using this method the previous year. Feeling restricted by the fine pigment layers and pristine surfaces required of traditional Nihonga or Japanese-style painting—which he had been taught in Kyoto—he had broken free by 1953 into monochrome abstraction using crimson lake oil paint, liquid and spreadable from the tube. In 1954, in a flash, it occurred to him to paint with his feet. ‘It felt as though the scales dropped from my eyes’, he said. ‘I felt cheered up, happy, and exhilarated’ (K. Shiraga quoted in R. Tomii, ‘Shiraga Paints: Toward a “Concrete” Discussion’, in Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades, exh. cat. McCaffrey Fine Art, New York 2009, p. 13). Abandoning the brush, Shiraga plunged himself into the arena of the canvas, making work that was between painting and performance art.
After initial attempts in which he slipped on the oily pigment, Shiraga soon hung a rope from his studio ceiling in order to launch himself across the picture plane, smearing and splashing colour in his wake. He framed the artistic struggle between material and body in primal terms, with violence and beauty closely intertwined. An initial group of works were named for the 108 warrior outlaws of the fourteenth-century Chinese novel Suikoden (Water Margin), and his red-drenched paintings of the 1950s have been seen in relation to the trauma of the Second World War. In later years he began to work more freely, deploying acrobatic, criss-crossing strokes that blended red with blue, black, white and other colours. Yagenko stems from a period of still greater mastery. In the early 1970s, following austere mental and physical training, Shiraga had been initiated as a lay monk in the esoteric Tendai Buddhist sect. He incorporated sutra chanting into his process, and came to understand the paintings’ automatist genesis in spiritual, meditative terms.
Shiraga had been introduced to contemporary Western art practices in 1951, when the third Yomiuri Independent Exhibition travelled to Osaka. He was fascinated by the works of Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet. At a time when Japan was discovering a new identity in the years after the Second World War, he identified with their freshness and individualism. While he and other Gutai artists were soon championed in Europe by the Art Informel theorist Michel Tapié, Shiraga later reflected that Western ‘action painting’ had only minimal impact upon his own practice. Where Pollock, for example, dripped from pierced paint tins, and Yves Klein would direct the action of female models to make his Anthropométries, Shiraga went further than these artists, fusing himself, body and spirit, with the very fibre of his work. ‘Thirty-five years since I invented my foot painting,’ wrote Shiraga on the occasion of his 1989 retrospective, ‘the art world has seen many new things, many stylistic storms. However, 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’ (K. Shiraga, ‘A Path to Action Painting’, 1989, reproduced in ibid., p. 68).