ARTIST OVERVIEW

Kenzo Okada (1902–1982) was an Asian-American painter who was closely associated with the postwar New York School. Born in Yokohama, Japan, he enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) in 1922. Two years later, he traveled to Paris, where he studied with Tsuguharu Foujita and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, before returning to Japan in 1927. For the next twenty years, Okada painted in the Western figurative tradition and actively exhibited his work. In 1950, he moved to New York and quickly became immersed in the downtown abstract expressionist scene, forming friendships with Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, among others. Okada soon abandoned representation for abstraction, and, by 1953 was exhibiting at Betty Parsons Gallery, one of the leading purveyors of abstract expressionist art.

Okada's paintings from the postwar period represent a bridge between abstract expressionism—specifically seen in their use of all-over, large-scale compositions—and more traditional Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, such as 17th-century screen painting, Zen Buddhism, and Japanese Noh theatre. It was abstract expressionism, with its emphasis on subconscious expression that inspired Okada with the means to embark upon a prolonged meditation on his relationship to Japan. Okada's preference for natural, earth-toned palettes and delicately balanced juxtapositions of mass and void—he sometimes created arrangements of sticks, stones, and paper to work out his compositions prior to painting—closely relates to Japanese rock gardens and landscape. Like the color-field painter Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he has been compared,¹  Okada's paintings reference the physical world, setting his work apart from other postwar abstract expressionist and color-field painters who focused solely on interior states of being.

Okada maintained studios in both New York and Tokyo, splitting his time between the two. By the mid-1950s he had achieved international prominence, representing the U.S. at the São Paulo Bienal in 1955. Three years later he represented Japan at the 29th Venice Biennale. In 1965, he was the subject of a major international traveling retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. He continued to exhibit at Betty Parsons until his death in 1982.

Okada’s work is included in many public collections in the U.S. and Japan, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

1. Carter Ratcliff in Kenzo Okada (exhibition catalogue), Marisa del Re Gallery, 1984.