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 Cooking Oil Company), 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 geometric abstraction — and showed at the Nika Association exhibitions throughout the 1930s and 1940s. After the Second World War he gradually shifted toward a more abstract idiom and in 1954 founded the Gutai Art Association in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. The group launched with a 1956 manifesto that called for direct, unmediated engagement between artist, material, and viewer — captured in Yoshihara's famous instruction to his Gutai colleagues, 'Don't copy others; do what no one else has done.'

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 Yoshihara's own publishing of the bilingual Japanese-French 'Gutai' journal that documented the group's activities to overseas readers. 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 plain monochrome ground. Beginning in 1960 the circle paintings became his signature, executed in single bold strokes on canvases of varying scales and ranges of colour. The choice of the circle was, in Yoshihara's own statement, deliberately anti-philosophical — chosen for its commonness rather than for any complex Zen Buddhist or symbolic meaning, although the gesture inevitably resonated with the calligraphic ensō of Japanese Zen practice. The motif extends into his small body of editioned screenprints from 1969, including the work titled 'Untitled' (○ Red), a screenprint on paper in an edition of 160 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 (52 × 61 cm, edition of 160) is the principal example currently in circulation, capturing the circle-on-ground motif at the centre of his late practice.