is a Japanese avant-garde artist based in Paris and Nishinomiya. Active as a painter since the 1950s, Matsutani's practice has also included object-based sculpture, printmaking and installation. Matsutani was a member of the Gutai Art Association from 1963 until its dissolution in 1972. Gutai leader Jirō Yoshihara prioritized artistic innovation and originality, a lesson that has remained with the artist throughout his career.
Since 1961, Matsutani has used wood glue, what was then a newly available material in post-war Japan, to create organic forms on the surface of the canvas. Fascinated by the variety of evocative shapes that revealed themselves through his manipulation of the glue mixed with paint, the artist regularly returned to these biomorphic forms across a variety of mediums and styles, even adapting them to the context of hard-edge painting in the 1970s.
After receiving a scholarship to study for six months in Paris in 1966, Matsutani chose to settle there permanently. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, he worked primarily as a printmaker. Since the late 1970s, in parallel to his painting practice, Matsutani has been using graphite and paper as the base for large-scale installations, entitled Streams. These works, finalized by a performance of the artist in situ, explore time, energy and transformation in muted tones of black and white.
Matsutani's works are represented in a large number of art museums and collections around the world. In 2002 the artist, who has lived a large part of his childhood in Nishinomiya, received the Nishinomiya City Cultural Award.
Biography
Early life and career Matsutani was born in Osaka in 1937. His interest for the visual arts developed early on, as illustrated by a relatively sophisticated watercolor landscape painting he completed in 1950, when he was only thirteen.Matsutani: Currents, exh. cat., Nishinomiya, Otoni Memorial Art Museum, 2015, p. 88. While the artist maintains that he had a "regular upbringing after the Second World War", he contracted tuberculosis in 1951, a debilitating illness he battled on and off for eight years.Takesada Matsutani, "Searching for a starting point: from any place, from any thing", in Matsutani: Currents, exh. cat., Nishinomiya, Otani Memorial Art Museum, 2015, p. 21-25.
In 1954, his condition stabilized and he was admitted to Osaka Municipal High School of Industrial Arts (Ōsaka Shiritsu Kogei Gakkō) in 1954, where he studied nihonga, traditional Japanese painting.Shinichiro Osaki, "Takesada Matsutani and the Gutai Art Association: A Focus on Early Works", in Takesada Matsutani. Waves, exh. cat., Nishinomiya City, Otani Memorial Art Museum, 2000, p. 100-110, 104. Two years later, he fell seriously ill and was forced to drop out of school and remain in the confines of the hospital and his home. He sketched that which was in his immediate surroundings, notably his plants and his pets, which included a dog, a cat and a bird.Christine Macel, "Be careful not to think slightingly of this one grain of rice", in Takesada Matsutani, exh. cat., Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2019, p. 29-40.
Unable to officially complete his studies, Matsutani took drawing classes organized by the Nishinomiya City Art Association, where he studied under artists like the abstract calligraphers Waichi Tsutaka and Suda Kokuta.Tsutomu Mizusawa and Sawako Inaniwa, "Takesada Matsutani Conversation", in Takesada Matsutani. A Matrix, exh. cat., London, Hauser & Wirth, 2013, p. 16-47. In 1957, he submitted a landscape painting, The Rock's Surface, to the nihonga section of the 8th Nishinomiya City Exhibition. The entry was accepted and attracted the attention of artist juror Shosaku Arao, who invited him to visit his atelier. They soon developed a student-teacher relationship.
Arao, whose cubist style was becoming progressively more abstract, encouraged Matsutani to experiment with abstraction. Matsutani recalls that Arao "seemed to be attempting to find an honest way to express his interior 'image'." At this time, Matsutani was also an avid reader and interested in new currents in contemporary art around the world. He subscribed to the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo, and read translated collections of essays. He notes that he was particularly impressed by Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane.
In the late 1950s, Matsutani produced a series of paintings that, although remaining figurative, employed a more expressionist style and incorporated abstract elements. One such painting is 1959's Life-B, in which a simplified, elongated figure appears to be running forward, arms above his head in a celebratory pose. An abstract shape painted behind the figure appears like a pair of outstretched wings. Matsutani's experimentation was not only pictural but material: for this painting, he mixed sand into his nihonga pigments. The artist has said that the source for such works was the anguish he felt during his years of solitude and illness: "I outwardly expressed my inner conflict and attempted to brush aside this heavy burden. In such ways, I shifted from realism to abstraction via my own interior 'image'."
Participation in Gutai Matsutani was aware of the Gutai Art Association (具体美術協会, Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai, or, short, Gutai) as early as 1956, but explains that he "really felt at odds with this group that was all the rage in Kansai". Admitting that he was initially "disenchanted" by Gutai, whose diverse avant-garde actions were considered by many at the time as bizarre or frivolous, he became first interested in the group thanks to his discussions with Gutai member Sadamasa Motonaga, whom he first met through his Nishinomiya community art classes. Matsutani soon would abandon figurative painting altogether and adopt an Art Informel style, citing Jean Fautrier as one important influence.Ellie Pithers, "At 85, Takesada Matsutani Is Still Preoccupied With the New, and With Glue", The New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2022. He developed the materiality of his paintings by using a variety of media, including oils and acrylics, sand and cement, and creating rich, textured surfaces.
Although Matsutani's work was included in Gutai exhibitions from 1959 onwards, this did not grant the young artist entry into the group. Jirō Yoshihara, a local artist and Gutai's sole leader, had steadfastly proclaimed since the group's formation that Gutai artists were to "create what [had] never been done before".Jirō Yoshihara, "Gutai Gurūpu no 10 nen: sono ichi" [10 years of the Gutai Group: part one], Bijutsu Jyānaru 38, March 1963. Reprinted in Gutai Shiryōshū : Dokyumento Gutai, 1954–1972 / Document Gutai, Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, Ashiya, 1993, p. 324. Thus, Yoshihara expressed little interest in Matsutani's art informel-influenced canvases, telling the artist that "this kind of thing already exists".
Works made with glue Confronted by the challenge of creating something original enough to impress Yoshihara, Matsutani reflected on the type of artwork he wished to make: "I wanted to do something organic, something three-dimensional. Something that would have volume and hang like icicles or stalactites." Matsutani also cites as inspiration the experience of seeing cell samples under a microscope, thanks to a friend in medical school.
In 1961, the artist began experimenting with polyvinyl acetate glue, commonly known as wood glue or Elmer's glue in the United States, a new product available in post-war Japan. The artist dripped glue onto the surface of the canvas, which he then proceeded to turn over and let dry. He recounts that, as it was a windy day, the glue dried in unexpected patterns: "some parts ended up looking like blisters and others took on a transparent nipple-shaped form [...] My sensibilities towards organic forms that existed deep within my consciousness had been awakened." The artist, mixing vinyl glue with paint, would also blow into the forms created by the glue, inflating them, creating bulges on the canvas that sometimes popped open.Toshio Yamanashi, "The Method of Black", in Matsutani Takesada. Stream, cat. exh, Kamakura, The Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 11-14.
Matsutani showed his new works to members of Gutai, who encouraged him to present them to Yoshihara. Yoshihara was indeed pleased, and Matsutani was officially granted membership to Gutai in 1963. Matsutani had his first solo exhibition in October of that same year at the Gutai Pinacotheca, a converted warehouse in Nakanoshima, Osaka, that served as an exhibition space.
Matsutani's works with glue call to mind the human body with suggestions of both violence and sexual reproduction. His first works with glue employed rounded, bruise-like forms in blues, purples and greens. The three-dimensionality of the new material, with its folds and ripples rising from the surface, evokes flesh and pustules. For his first solo exhibition, Matsutani presented a series of paintings with a contrasting color palette of whites and reds that mimic skin and blood. French art historian Germaine Viatte commented that "there reigned [in the exhibition] a random violence in the hatching of these incised forms, painted on the inside with a raw red."Germaine Viatte, "Permanences et métamorphoses dans l'œuvre de Takesada Matsutani", in Matsutani. Currents, exh. cat., Nishinomiya, Otani Memorial Art Museum, 2015, p. 58-67.
The openings, swellings and flesh tones of Matsutani's works lend themselves just as easily to erotic interpretation, of which Matsutani is aware: "At the time, a lot of people were repelled. Even now, women often say so. They say it looks like buttocks, or genitals, or the belly of a pregnant woman." Sexual references abound in many of Matsutani's paintings from this period, such as Work '65, in which sperm cell-like forms appear to swim towards a white opening in the shape of a vulva. Other paintings, like Work 66 Life, with its egg-like form and yolky center, bring to mind an embryo at its earliest stages. Art historian Jean-Michel Bouhours has also commented upon the "powerful analogies" between semen and vinyl glue.Jean-Michel Bouhours, "Matsutani", in Matsutani Takesada. Stream, cat. exh, Kamakura, The Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 22-24.
Gutai specialist Ming Tiampo has characterized the singularity of Matsutani's production during the 1960s as "[contesting] the legacy of abstract expressionism and Art Informel, but also [resisting] what he retrospectively characterized as the 'dry' quality of American hard-edged painting and minimalism."Ming Tiampo, "Lived Time: Takesada Matsutani", in Takesada Matsutani. A Matrix, exh. cat., London, Hauser & Wirth, 2013, p. 8-15, 14.
Although Matsutani relocated to Paris in 1966, he continued to participate in Gutai exhibitions by sending prints made in France to his fellow artists.Toshio Yamanashi, "Pouring, Inflating, Filling in: 'Without these the work is not mine', in Takesada Matsutani, exh. cat., Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2019, p. 189-202. His participation ceased in 1972 with the disbanding of the group after Yoshihara's death.
Relocation to Paris While Germaine Viatte recounts that Matsutani had never thought to leave Japan, he found himself awarded in 1966 a scholarship to study for six months in Paris after having entered a contest organized by the Mainichi Shinbun and the Institut Frano-Japonais of Kyoto. Matsutani arrived in Paris without any desire to enroll at either the Sorbonne or the École des Beaux-Arts, and only signed up for obligatory French language courses. Instead, after visiting the Parisian museums, he asked himself: "where does this culture and this approach to life come from? Where is its past?" and took off traveling for a month, visiting Egypt, Greece and Italy.