Art is Magic

 

“Art is Magic.” It was the mid-1960s when Taro Okamoto made this pronouncement.

 

It was also at around this time that Taro’s artistic style underwent a major change, the bright, primary colors spreading across canvas with various characters depicted using delicate brushstrokes that he produced during the 1950s giving way to dark, abstract motifs somewhat reminiscent of characters from the Sanskrit alphabet. The bright, picture-book-like narrative style, represented by “Law of the Jungle” (1950), became overshadowed by a dark, eerie, world created by these works resembling Buddhist talismans.

 

This transformation probably sprang from his discovery of Jōmon-period (c. 14,000–300 BC) culture. The Jōmon people struggled against nature while simultaneously living in harmony with it, and through his encounter with the artifacts they created Taro realized that they possessed both freedom and dignity, leading him to believe that the Jōmon period represented the “true Japan.” This conviction was later confirmed when he traveled throughout Japan from 1957 to the mid-1960s. In the Tohoku region he was able to catch a glimpse life as it had been in primitive Japan, while in Okinawa, he witnessed the spirit of Japan being passed down from generation to generation, allowing him to sense the presence of a magic that communicates with the “unseen.”

 

This exhibition will see the return of his “Premonition” (1963) to Aoyama after an absence a quarter of a century, where it will be exhibited for the first time, together with works presenting a bird’s-eye view of “TARO during the 1960s” with their abundance of black motifs. We hope that you will come and experience this “art as magic.”

 

Akiomi Hirano

Director,

Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum of Art