Inoue Yūichi

One of the great artists of postwar Japan, Yūichi’s early experiments were shown in New York six decades ago in the summer of 1954, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted the exhibition " Japanese Calligraphy." This was one of two special shows (the other featured Japanese pottery) held around the opening of Yoshimura Junzō’s Japanese House, an event that ushered in modernist New York’s prolonged love affair with all things Japanese. Forty years later Yūichi’s searing masterpiece "Ah," Yokokawa National School (1978), a work inspired by the horrors of wartime bombing, provoked comparison with Picasso’s "Guernica" when it was included in the exhibition "Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky," curated by Alexandra Munroe and held at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. Another visionary curator, Hasegawa Yūko of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, has recently brought renewed attention to Inoue Yūichi’s achievement by including him in the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.