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Paper short abstract:

Okamoto Tarō is known as one of the most prominent avant-garde artists in postwar Japan. He is also considered as a pioneer who revaluated prehistoric Jōmon pottery. In this proposed paper, I will review how Okamoto contrasts Jōmon pottery with conventional “Japanese-style tradition”.

Paper long abstract:

Okamoto Tarō (1911-1996), who formed Yoru no Kai (Night Society) with Hanada Kiyoteru and other artists and intellectuals, is known as one of the most prominent avant-garde artists in postwar Japan. He is also considered as a pioneer who revaluated prehistoric Jōmon pottery, which had been neglected until then in Japanese art history. He was first impressed by it when visiting the Tokyo National Museum. Then, he wrote “Jōmon doki-ron: Yojigen to no taiwa (On Jōmon earthenware: A dialogue with the Fourth Dimension)” for the art magazine Mizue in 1952, in which he praised the aesthetic value of Jōmon pottery, since then studied only as archeological artifacts—he especially appreciated the vitality and dynamism of the “Flame-rimmed” pottery in the middle Jōmon period.

This discovery of Jōmon pottery by Okamoto Tarō was probably influenced by his acquaintance with Marcel Mausse (1872-1950)’ and Georges Bataille(1897-1962)’s ethnology—he had frequented both scholars during his stay in Paris. The revaluation of Jōmon pottery was the first step in Okamoto’s work on such theme. With Nihon no dentou (Tradition of Japan)(1956) and other writings, Okamoto started to study the local customs and rituals rooted in various regions of Japan, such as Okinawa and Tohoku, and tried to highlight the cultural diversity in Japan instead of its unified image as a nation-state.

In this context, scholarship focuses on Okamoto as a theoretician, while insufficient attention has been paid yet to the aesthetic and artistic value he sought to express through Jōmon pottery. In fact, Okamoto’s perspective was based on a critical reading of Western avant-gardes, as his rediscover of Jōmon pottery seemed to be consciously based on that of l’art-nègre by Pablo Picasso(1881-1973). In this proposed paper, by analyzing not only Okamoto’s texts but also his artworks and the photographs that he took himself, I will review how Okamoto contrasts Jōmon pottery with conventional “Japanese-style tradition”. Through these considerations, I aim to reveal his controversial view of art, which, steeped in avant-garde as well as a radical anti-modernist principles, is a thorough critique of the idea of progress.