Jiro Yoshihara

Jiro Yoshihara (吉原治良, 1905 — 1972) was the founder and ideological leader of the Gutai Art Association, the postwar Japanese avant-garde collective that became the most internationally recognised Japanese art movement of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Osaka into a wealthy family that owned a successful cooking-oil business (Yoshihara Oil Mill, Ltd.), he occupied an unusual position within Japanese modernism: a self-funded businessman-artist who used his commercial success to underwrite the activities of a generation of younger artists working under his mentorship.

Yoshihara began painting in oils in the 1920s in a style influenced by European modernism — first Surrealism, then abstraction — and from 1934 showed at the Nika Association (Nika-kai) exhibitions through the 1930s and 1940s. After the Second World War he gradually shifted toward a more fully abstract idiom and in 1954 founded the Gutai Art Association in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. He wrote the group's manifesto in 1956, calling for direct, unmediated engagement between artist, material, and viewer — a spirit captured in his instruction to his Gutai colleagues never to imitate others but to "do what has never been done before."

The Gutai group rapidly became internationally visible, partly through the championing of the French critic Michel Tapié, who placed the Japanese artists within his Art Informel framework, and partly through the 'Gutai' journal — first issued in 1955 — which Yoshihara used to document the group's activities for readers abroad. Yoshihara presided over the association's evolution through outdoor exhibitions, performance pieces, and innovative material experimentation by members including Kazuo Shiraga (foot-painting), Atsuko Tanaka (Electric Dress), Sadamasa Motonaga (water sculpture), and Saburo Murakami (paper-tearing performance).

Yoshihara's own painting practice in the late 1950s and 1960s gradually concentrated on a single motif: the calligraphic circle painted on a plain monochrome ground. Beginning around 1962 the circle paintings became his signature, executed in single bold strokes on canvases of varying scale and colour. Yoshihara valued the circle for its very simplicity and ubiquity, which he felt offered endless possibilities, and the gesture also resonated with the ensō of Japanese Zen calligraphy. The motif carried over into a small body of editioned screenprints late in his life, including the 1969 silkscreen 'Untitled' (○ Red), issued the year before his death.

Yoshihara's printmaking, like that of many of the senior Gutai painters, was secondary to his painting practice but is documented through editioned silkscreens of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 'Untitled (○ Red)' screenprint of 1969 carries the circle-on-ground motif at the centre of his late practice into printed form.

Yoshihara died in Ashiya on 10 February 1972 at the age of 67, and the Gutai Art Association dissolved the following month, having survived for eighteen years on the strength of his patronage and ideological leadership. His paintings and prints are held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London, the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou) in Paris, and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, which holds a substantial Gutai archive, among other institutions in Japan and abroad. The reassessment of Gutai by Western institutions accelerated in the 2010s, notably with the retrospective 'Gutai: Splendid Playground' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2013, repositioning Yoshihara as one of the central figures of postwar global abstraction.

Within the postwar Japanese print and painting landscape Yoshihara is the founder-figure whose painting motifs translate cleanly into editioned screenprint form. His circle-paintings on plain monochrome ground are recognised as one of the most distinctive abstract motifs to come out of mid-century Japan, and the editioned screenprints carrying that motif sit at the intersection of his Gutai painting practice, his grounding in Japanese calligraphic tradition, and the international circuit of postwar abstraction.