A Feverish Era: Art Informel and the Expansion of Japanese Artistic Expression in the 1950s and ’60s

The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

This event has ended.

According to a popular phrase at the time, 1956 marked the end of the postwar era. It was also in that year that a collection of the latest examples of Western art, which had been selected and dubbed “Art Informel” (lit. “unformed art”) by the Paris-based critic Michel Tapie, made its way to Japan. With an emphasis on the traces left by an artist’s actions, striking colors, and materials with a vivid physicality, these works exerted a huge influence on Japanese artists. Later years saw an explosion of “feverish” Informel-style expressions not only in Western-style painting and sculpture, but also in Japanese-style painting, ceramics, and traditional fields like ikebana. This exhibition, consisting of approximately 100 works, brings to life this unprecedented chapter in Japanese art history, notable for its expansive genres and diverse developments.