Tarō Okamoto (岡本 太郎, Okamoto Tarō; February 26, 1911 – January 7, 1996) was a Japanese artist, art theorist, and writer. He is particularly well known for his paintings, public sculptures, and murals, his theorization of traditional Japanese culture, and his avant-garde artistic practices.
Tarō Okamoto was the son of cartoonist Okamoto Ippei and writer Okamoto Kanoko. He was born in Takatsu, in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture.
In 1927, at the age of sixteen, Okamoto began to take lessons in oil painting from the artist Wada Eisaku. In 1929, Okamoto entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (today Tokyo University of the Arts) in the oil painting department.
In 1929, Okamoto and his family accompanied his father on a trip to Europe to cover the London Naval Treaty of 1930. While in Europe, Okamoto spent time in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Paris, where he rented a studio in Montparnasse and enrolled in a lycée in Choisy-le-Roi. After his parents returned to Japan in 1932, he stayed on in Paris until 1940.
Much of Okamoto's formative education occurred during his stay in Paris. In 1932, he began attending classes at the Sorbonne, and enrolled in the literature department where he studied philosophy and specialized in aesthetics. He attended lectures on Hegelian aesthetics by Victor Basch. In 1938, Okamoto, along with many other Parisian artists at the time, began studying ethnography under Marcel Mauss, and he would later apply this ethnographic lens to his analysis Japanese culture.
Okamoto also began to establish himself as a painter in Paris, working with the Parisian avant-garde artists. He was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit (1931) which he saw at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, and in 1932 he began successfully submitting his own paintings for exhibition at the Salon des surindépendants, for which he received some positive reviews. From 1933 to 1936, he was a member of the group Abstraction-Création, and showed works in their exhibitions. He participated in the French intellectual discussion group Collège de Sociologie and joined the secret society founded by Georges Bataille, Acéphale. His painting Itamashiki ude ("Wounded Arm") was notably included in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in 1938.
Okamoto met and befriended many prominent avant-garde art figures in Paris, including André Breton, Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Robert Capa and Capa's partner, Gerda Taro, who adopted Okamoto's first name as her last name.
Okamoto returned to Japan in 1940 because his mother had died, and because of the outbreak of World War II. He found some artistic success in Japan upon his return, winning the Nika Prize at the 28th Nika Art Exhibition in 1942. The same year, he also had a solo exhibition of works he had completed in Europe, at the Mitsukoshi department store in Ginza.
In 1942, Okamoto was drafted into the army as an artist tasked with documenting the war, and left for service in China. He returned to Japan in 1946 after spending several months in a prisoner-of-war camp in Chang’an. During his absence, his family home and all of his works were destroyed in an air raid.
After the war, Okamoto established a studio in Kaminoge, Setagaya, Tokyo. He became a member of the artist association Nika-kai ("Second Section" Society) in 1947 and began regularly showing works at the Nika Art Exhibition. He also began giving lectures on European modern art, and started publishing his own commentaries on modern art. In studies of postwar Surrealism in Japan, Okamoto has been described as an important conduit of information from Paris, where he had lived for over a decade. In 1948, he and the art critic Kiyoteru Hanada established the group Yoru no Kai ("Night Society"), whose members attempted to theorize artistic expression after the war. It dissolved in 1949. Hanada and Okamoto then founded the Abangyarudo Kenkyūkai ("Avant-Garde Research Group") which mentored younger artists and critics such as Tatsuo Ikeda, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, and Yūsuke Nakahara. Eventually these groups inspired younger artists to break off and form their own avant-garde groups.
A prominent name in the art establishment, Okamoto began to have a series of solo exhibitions in the 1950s, at such prestigious venues at the art galleries of Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, and the Takashimaya department store in Osaka. His work was included in the Japanese presentation at the 2nd São Paulo Bienal in 1953 and the 27th Venice Biennale in 1954. Okamoto remained active as a Nika member, while also exhibiting in the non-juried, non-award-granting Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition.
From the 1950s through the end of his career, Okamoto received numerous public commissions to create murals and large sculptures in Japan, including government buildings, office buildings, subway stations, museums, and other locations. Notable examples included ceramic murals for the old Tokyo Metropolitan Office Building in Marunouchi, designed by Kenzō Tange and completed in 1956, and five ceramic murals for Tange's Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
During the 1950s, Okamoto theorized several key aesthetic ideas that helped establish his role as a public intellectual in Japanese society. First, he crafted his theory of "polarism" (taikyokushugi), the declaration of which he read at the opening of the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition in 1950. In 1952, Okamoto published an influential article on Jōmon period ceramics. This article was the beginning of a long engagement with prehistoric Japan, and his argument that Japanese aesthetics should take inspiration from the ancient Jōmon period helped change the public perception of Japanese culture. He continued to write on Japanese tradition and became one of the major thinkers active in the reevaluation of Japanese tradition after World War II. He later traveled around Japan in order to research the essence of Japanese culture, and published Nihon Sai-hakken－Geijutsu Fudoki ("Rediscovery of the Japan－Topography of Art") (1962) and Shinpi Nihon ("Mysteries in Japan") (1964), amply illustrated by photographs he took during his research trips. These works were an extension his ethnographic interest and taking his own photography helped provide strong evidence to his observations.
As part of his travels around Japan, in 1959 and 1966, Okamoto visited Okinawa. He was struck by what he saw as the remnants of a simpler and more indigenous life there. In 1961, he published Wasurerareta Nihon: Okinawa bunka-ron ("Forgotten Japan: On Okinawa culture"), which included many photographs from his trip. The book received the Mainichi Publication Culture Award. Many of Okamoto's photographs revisited Okinawa subject matter already photographed by other Japanese photographers, such as Ihei Kimura and Ken Dōmon. His interest in Okinawa may be seen as part of a larger modern Japanese interest in viewing Okinawa as a lingering repository of tradition, in contrast with the rapidly modernizing Japanese main islands.
In 1967, Okamoto visited Mexico, where he worked on a major mural commission and filmed a program for Japanese television entitled "The New World: Okamoto Tarō explores Latin America." Okamoto was deeply inspired by Mexican painting and saw it as an avenue to refocus the attention of Japan's art world away from Western countries. He imagined a partnership between Japanese and Mexican art worlds to launch a new, non-Western modern art aesthetic, and saw affinities between Japanese Jōmon culture and pre-Columbian art in Mexico. Allusions to Mexican art would appear in his subsequent artworks.
Okamoto continued to travel, write and produce public art works in the 1970s. He also began to produce prints, experimenting with silkscreen and copperplate printing.
Okamoto's most notable achievement of the 1970s was his involvement with 1970 Japan World Exposition in Osaka (Expo ’70), for which he designed and produced the central Theme Pavilion, which included a monumental sculpture entitled Tower of the Sun, an exhibition in and around the tower, and two smaller towers. The distinct appearance of Tower of the Sun was influenced by Okamoto's background in European Surrealism, interest in Mexican art, and Jōmon ceramics. The pavilion was visited by over 9 million people during Expo ’70, and is preserved today in the Expo Commemoration Park.