Kenzo Okada (1902-1982)

Aliases: Kenzô Okada; Kenzō Okada

Professions: Painter

ARTIST: OKADA KENZO TITLE: Girl
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KENZO OKADA
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Kenzo Okada Biography

(b Yokohama, 28 Sept 1902; d Tokyo, 25 July 1982). American painter of Japanese birth. In 1922 he entered the department of Western painting at Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but in 1924 he went to France where he studied with Tsugouharu Foujita and executed paintings of urban subjects. In 1927 he returned to Japan. From 1929 he displayed works at the exhibition of the Nikakai (Second Division Society), of which he became a member in 1937. He went to New York in 1950, settling and working there as a painter. In New York he produced abstract paintings. Undoubtedly stimulated by Abstract Expressionism, these nevertheless display a strong Japanese sensibility and feeling for form; the works Abstraction No. 7 (1953; Purchase, SUNY, Neuberger Mus.) and Memories (1957; New York, Whitney), for example, reveal subtle changes in the natural world through the use of imagery constructed with delicate, sensitive colour tonalities, floating within the compositional space. He also painted numerous works that used as a point of departure the reinterpretation of the decorative effects of traditional Japanese painting (Yamatoe), for example Inlet (1973; Kyoto, N. Mus. Mod. A.) and Orange (1973; Tokyo, N. Mus. Mod. A.).

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