Shiraga Kazuo

signed in Japanese; dated 1961 on the reverse, framed

Galerie Stadler, Paris
Private Collection
Lombrail-Teucquam, Paris, 20 November 2009, lot 94
Private European Collection

This work is generally in good condition. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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“While I am painting, I experience an expanding exhilaration, as if I were on a slope of pure white virgin snow, a shining silver world spreading out before my eyes where no one has skied before. I want to ski across it with complete freedom.” - Shiraga Kazuo

Skiing Over Virgin Snow
Shiraga Kazuo

Redolent of the liberating and thrilling experience of foot painting, in his essay “Skiing Over Virgin Snow” Shiraga Kazuo describes his unique method of art creation as skiing with “complete freedom.”¹ Suppressed by a politically and artistically totalitarian society and traumatised by the war time experience, Shiraga has, since the post-war era, reacted, painted and left a crucial footprint with a palette of freedom and liberation in the Asian and world history of art. Evocative and alluring, Shiraga’s invasion of the canvas continues to bear the tension of raw spirit and frenzy. Shiraga’s foot painting from the first decade of creation (1954-1963), or a period of the virgin snow, is charged with a pristine sense of creativity, velocity and uniqueness.

On offer this autumn is T53 (Lot 1056), executed in 1961, a fine assemblage of his early style from the important vintage described above. Shiraga found his initial training in Nihonga (traditional Japanese-style painting) “so unfree”² and was hungry for the chance to paint with oil, which possesses a much more viscous, fluid and paste-like materiality. T53 is a work that materialises his early appreciation in a mature style, where the individual body is a source of violence that allows him to freely react to and express the tyranny he tasted and witnessed.

“Whenever I came up with new ideas and techniques, I was immediately labelled as a heretic… I was shocked at the extent of wartime destruction. The naked scars of the war-torn streets and the starving people moved me to paint. I could not control my intense anger and hatred against the war, and the horrors of war became my subjects. Such subjects were almost unheard of in traditional painting, which depicted flowers, birds, and pleasant landscapes. My strong passions are the source of energy for my painting." ³

Shiraga’s art is not merely just an art created with his feet, but a creation that unleashes his inner feelings, to join forces with matter then crashing them onto the canvas. This emancipation is epitomised in the iconic outdoor performance Challenging Mud (fig. 3) in 1955, a year after the inaugural foot painting. Dressed only in a loincloth, Shiraga kicked, rolled, wrestled and tussled violently in mud. The physical body acted as a tool expressing a daring, temporal, site-specific illustration which was in search of the spirituality the artist had experienced through foot painting. Profoundly physical, the artist emerged bruised and covered in filth. Using the body as a paintbrush and invading the canvas with his entire body, his innovation of foot painting was the result of the artist’s quest to radically discover his own spirituality and shishitsu (individual disposition). From this action, Shiraga demonstrated Gutai’s ideal to express abstraction in concrete terms.

Shiraga’s cutting-edge experimentation and direct engagement with material established the artist at the heart of the Gutai Art Association. As a leading voice, the artist frequently published his creative ethos on spirit and self in the group’s journal. Founded in 1954 by Yoshihara Jiro, Gutai is commonly translated as “concrete” or “embodiment”. As a collective, they ingeniously pursued the creation of art with complete freedom and originality unbridled by ideology, medium or social convention. From its inception, Gutai, under the leadership of Yoshihara, was internationally minded and used the Gutai journal as a vehicle for dissemination and interlocutor on the world stage. Consequently, in 1957, the group and in particular Shiraga’s artistic ingenuity caught the attention of art critic Michel Tapié, who saw parallels and common ground between the gestural Art Informel and Gutai, and thus marked a period of exchange and dialogue between Informel and Gutai artists. It was this relationship between Gutai and Tapié that initiated Shiraga into the international contemporary art arena. Particularly important was the relationship, through Tapié, that Shiraga cultivated with Rodolphe Stadler who staged the artist’s first ever overseas solo exhibition in his gallery in 1962. The current work on offer, with the original label from Galerie Stadler, is an important documentation and evidence of Shiraga’s debut abroad.

Against the upheaval of the post-war world, there was an international resistance to narrative meaning. This was embraced by artists such as Pierre Soulages (fig. 2), who like Shiraga, eschewed giving titles to his artworks and entitling them based on medium, dimensions and day in and on which they were made. These artists, through their spontaneous gestures, sought individual autonomy in the face of the political realities of the period.

T53 is representative of a pinnacle in Shiraga’s artistic oeuvre and is among the most desirable works of the artist’s iconic output. Following an intense period of experimentation in the 1950s, Tapié acted as a catalyst in Shiraga’s refinement of his foot painting as he began to add other colours and complex combinations to his paintings. Here, crimson red, effectuates spurts of blood, and is situated at the nucleus of black and white curves that flirt with animosity, rendered in varying textures as undulating layers of thick debris. While bearing Shiraga’s tension of power and violence, the red unassumingly retreats into shades of ochre, and eventually fades into nuanced shadows with flecks and vestiges of ash, icy grey and deep green.

Encompassed in T53 is a beguiling sense of the ephemeral; amidst the enchanting and inventive chaos, an antecedent white tranquility emanates, the uninhibited act culminating in a spiritual revelation. Akin to the aforementioned analogy, it is just as though the artist had skied in black paint with fury and spontaneity over virgin snow; action and body acting as the site, origin and instrument of individual freedom and expression.

1 Japan, Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kazuo Shiraga, 2 June – 22 July, 2001, p. 13

2 Kazuo Shiraga, “A Path to Action Painting,” translated by Reiko Tomii and published in exhibition catalogue, New York, USA, Mnuchin Gallery, Kazuo Shiraga, 10 February – 11 April, 2015, p. 93

3 Ming Tiampo, ‘“Not just Beauty, but Something Horrible”: Kazuo Shiraga and Matsuri Festivals,’ published in exhibition catalogue, New York, USA, Dominique Levy Gallery, Kazuo Shiraga, 29 January – 11 April, 2015, p. 20