39 Facts About Jiro Yoshihara

Jiro Yoshihara was a Japanese painter, art educator, curator, and businessman.

Jiro Yoshihara was a key figure of postwar Japanese art and culture through his work as painter, art educator, promoter of the arts, and networker between the arts, commerce, and industry in the Kansai region and beyond, and, especially, as the leader of the postwar avant-garde art collective Gutai Art Association, which he co-founded in 1954.

Jiro Yoshihara showed artistic talent and interest in painting as a child, acquiring his skill in oil painting auto-didactically.

Jiro Yoshihara was deeply impressed by the humanist idealism of the literary movement of Shirakabaha, which promoted post-Impressionist artists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Renoir.

Jiro Yoshihara attended the Kitano Secondary School in Osaka and studied commerce at the Kwansei Gakuin University's business college.

Jiro Yoshihara participated in the exhibitions of the painters' group Soenkai, and in 1926 became a member of the Kwansei Gakuin University's painting club Gengetsukai.

Fujita's observation that Jiro Yoshihara's works showed too much influence of other artists left a lasting impact, urging him to pursue originality.

In 1929, Jiro Yoshihara married Chiyo Okuda, with whom he had four sons.

Jiro Yoshihara worked as an auditor, then as a board director beginning in 1941, and in 1955 became president of Jiro Yoshihara Oil Mill, Ltd.

Around 1936, Jiro Yoshihara began experimenting with the visual language of organic and geometric abstraction, inspired by European and British abstract artists.

In 1938, together with other avant-garde members of Nika who were pursuing abstraction and Surrealism, Jiro Yoshihara founded the Kyushitsukai, which organized its own exhibitions.

In 1944, Jiro Yoshihara, spared from military service due to a recurrence of tuberculosis, evacuated to Ozocho, Hyogo Prefecture.

Also, since around 1946 Jiro 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.

Jiro Yoshihara was actively involved in the rebuilding of Nika in 1945.

Jiro Yoshihara attended meetings of the Tensekikai led by philosopher Tsutomu Ijima, co-founded artists groups such as the Han-bijutsu Kyokai, the Nihon Avangyarudo Bijutsuka Kurabu in 1947, the Ashiya City Art Association in 1948, and the Nihon Absutorakuto Ato Kurabu and Ato Kurabu in 1953.

Jiro Yoshihara participated in educational activities, mentoring young artists at his home or, from 1949 to 1958, at the Osaka Shiritsu Bijutsu Kenkyujo.

Together with artists such as Shigeru Ueki, Kokuta Suda, Makoto Nakamura, in 1952 Jiro Yoshihara founded Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai, an interdisciplinary forum for Kansai-based artists, critics, scholars and experts to engage in interdisciplinary thematic discussion sessions and joint exhibitions.

In 1954 Jiro Yoshihara co-founded the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai with some of his students and young Genbi participants.

For Gutai's outdoor exhibitions and onstage presentations, Jiro Yoshihara contributed several interactive works and installations.

In 1958 Jiro Yoshihara travelled to New York to present a Gutai exhibition advised by Tapie at the Martha Jackson Gallery, and subsequently visited Europe.

Around this time, Jiro Yoshihara began to reorient Gutai In part to free Gutai from the grip of Informel by engaging in new collaborations and actively recruiting new younger members to bring new artistic approaches.

In 1965, Gutai was invited to participate in NUL 1965, an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, to which Jiro Yoshihara travelled with his son Michio.

Jiro 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.

Jiro Yoshihara received the Osaka Prefectural Cultural Award in 1951.

Jiro Yoshihara's paintings were subsequently shown at the Nihon Kokusai Bijutsuten since 1952, Nichibei Chusho Bijutsuten 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.

Jiro Yoshihara was awarded the Hyogo Prefecture Cultural Prize in 1963.

Jiro Yoshihara died in Ashiya on February 10,1972, due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage.

Jiro Yoshihara was posthumously awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette.

Some of his abstract paintings produced between 1936 and 1938 referred stylistically to works by European and British abstract artists such as Hans Erni, Naum Gabo, Jean Helion, Arthur Jackson, Fernand Leger, and Ben Nicholson of the 1930s, which Jiro Yoshihara might have seen in European publications.

Works he showed at the Kyushitsukai exhibitions consisted of abstract canvasses covered with layers of smeared and spread oil paint, in which Jiro Yoshihara experimented with different textures as well as with the tools and methods used for its application, anticipating his postwar abstract canvases.

Jiro 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.

Jiro Yoshihara's growing interest in lines has been associated with the artist's visit to Gendai sekai bijutusten in Tokyo 1950, which included recent works by European abstract artists such as Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, his exchange with calligraphers, and his interest in US-American abstract expressionist painting, in particular the works of Jackson Pollock.

Around 1962, Jiro Yoshihara began work on a series of paintings of singular circles on monochromatic backgrounds, inspired both by enso circles from Zen painting and hard-edge painting of the 1960s.

Jiro Yoshihara was impressed by the powerful calligraphy of Zen monk Nantenbo and Nantenbo's own creations of enso, circles symbolizing enlightenment in Zen.

Yet, while enso were painted in one stroke in ink on paper, Jiro Yoshihara's circles were applied in oil or acrylic paint.

Jiro Yoshihara was a prolific writer and contributed reviews and articles to newspapers and art magazines.

Jiro 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.

Projects that Jiro Yoshihara co-founded and engaged in became forceful factors for the vitalization of the arts and culture in the Kansai region.

Jiro 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.