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Lot Essay
In 1987, the American abstract expressionist artist Robert Motherwell sent a letter to the Japanese art critic Masaomi Unagami. In his letter, Motherwell wrote:
“To my mind, [Yuichi Inoue] is unquestionably one of the small handful of great artists of the second half of the twentieth century. I do not know whether his work has been shown outside Japan, but it certainly should be. He was a marvelous painter of what I call, in my mind, “essences” and I can think of no higher ideal in modern art (which has abandoned storytelling)…”
As a key member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell and his peers pursued pure abstraction as a means to express the traditionally inexpressible, seeking to capture grand themes and emotions in the gestural brushstrokes and splatters that characterized their work. Motherwell had immediately recognized the same qualities in Yuichi Inoue’s calligraphy, praising the Japanese artist’s ability to capture the core essences of human narrative and emotion in his energetic paintings executed with ink and paper.
“To my mind, [Yuichi Inoue] is unquestionably one of the small handful of great artists of the second half of the twentieth century. I do not know whether his work has been shown outside Japan, but it certainly should be. He was a marvelous painter of what I call, in my mind, “essences” and I can think of no higher ideal in modern art (which has abandoned storytelling)…”
As a key member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell and his peers pursued pure abstraction as a means to express the traditionally inexpressible, seeking to capture grand themes and emotions in the gestural brushstrokes and splatters that characterized their work. Motherwell had immediately recognized the same qualities in Yuichi Inoue’s calligraphy, praising the Japanese artist’s ability to capture the core essences of human narrative and emotion in his energetic paintings executed with ink and paper.