Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga – Painting studies in traditional confines; serious illness

Kazuo Shiraga was born the only son of a wealthy merchant family in Amagasaki on 12 August 1924, and already showed great interest in oil painting at the age of 14. His father, an avowed art lover, encouraged his son’s inclination, first with a painting course and later the start of painting studies in Kyoto. However, because Japan had provoked the entry of the USA into the war with the attack on Pearl Harbour, Kazuo Shiraga also had to interrupt his studies and join his home country’s armed forces - he underwent basic military training in Osaka, but was never sent to the front. After the end of the Second World War and the surrender of Japan, Shiraga took up his studies again but soon became seriously ill and was confined to bed for six months. During this time, Kanayama Akira brought him two art books by Toyama Usaburo – reading that made a strong impression on the young painting student. 

After the war, a new era began for Japan’s artists

After his recovery, Kazuo Shiraga married Uemura Fukijo and successfully completed his studies, whilst his fellow student, the painter Ito Tsuguro, emboldened him to take part in an exhibition. It was at the beginning of the 1950s that Shiraga possibly first came into contact with the work of Jackson Pollock at the Yomiuir Independent Exhibition in Tokio. In any case, it was at this time that he started turning towards Action Painting. He laid his brush to the side and applied the paint from then on with his bare hands – a turning point in the Japanese artworld. Shiraga had only had the chance of a traditional education as a student, and having always been interested in modern painting, gratefully seized the opportunity to break away from conventional patterns and go his own way. The simultaneous collapse of Japan after the war favoured this new development and enabled numerous young artists to realise their revolutionary ideas, which under other circumstances, would probably not have been granted the same openness in the extremely tradition-conscious country. 

Shiraga’s spectacular Action art made him world famous

Kazuo Shiraga embraced the concept of a zero hour for Japanese art and founded the artists’ association Zero with Saburo Murakami, Kaiko Tanaka and Akira Kanayama, which soon merged with the only slightly older group, Gutai. From the beginning, the orientation was towards Western avant-garde, which in turn soon looked with interest at the Japanese young wild things around Shiraga. With his first participation in a Gutai exhibition, Shiraga staged a spectacle when he rolled in mud for his performance Challenging Mud. With his actionist painting style in which he suspended himself from a rope in order to paint with his bare feet, Kazuo Shiraga laid the foundation for his international fame and impressed artists such as Yves Klein and Georges Mathieu. The French collector Michel Tapié made Shiraga known in Europe and made possible his first solo exhibition outside of Japan, namely in Paris. In the 1970s, Shiraga entered a Buddhist monastery, but remained dedicated to Action Painting. Numerous Japanese and international honours testify to his fame. 

Kazuo Shiraga died on 8 April 2008 in his birth and hometown of Amagasaki.