Tadaaki Kuwayama: 1932 – 2023

Tadaaki Kuwayama in his studio on 6th Avenue, New York, 1959.

Ad Infinitum Lilly Wei

Thoughts of the infinite immediately come to mind when thinking about Tadaaki Kuwayama’s signature projects. I imagine a pristine multipart installation consisting of luminous rectangles oriented vertically, as one example, extending along a wall in a seemingly endless progression limited only by the physical parameters of the venue. The forms proceed with a measured cadence, one succeeding the other in a repetition that is foundational to minimalist aesthetics, the revelation of content not dissimilar to the unfurling of film. Depending upon the works’ components and dimensions, they often cannot be seen in their entirety at once, the viewer required to move from panel to panel. They are, ultimately, a collaboration between the artist, the work, the site, and the viewer, perpetually coming into being, like a text, a score, a movie.

Defining painting as perceptual, as pure color and form, Kuwayama resolutely avoided any trace of narrative and composition. He once said that for him, painting itself was the subject of painting, espousing, with many of his peers, non-objectivity as a way forward for the venerable medium, stating that “ideas, thoughts, philosophy, reasons, meanings, even the humanity of the artist, do not enter into my work at all.” There is only the painting itself.

The skirting of the allusive, however, is not always easy to achieve, since we are so conditioned to make connections to things that exist in the real world, particularly in painting with its long history of the mimetic. But in Kuwayama’s paintings, those associations slip away. That might be attributable in part to his preference for the monochrome, the canonical image of non-objective abstraction. Or to the colors that he preferred in his later works, more sheen than hues identifiable in nature. His surfaces are also flawless, any wavering of the hand eradicated, further edging them into the realm of the abstract, into the technological. He demystified the process, democratizing art, insisting that his paintings could be easily replicated and made by anyone (which is giving many of us too much credit). Nonetheless, that they are just “a fact, a truth, a reality” was a belief that was central to his practice.

Kuwayama, who died this past August in New York at the age of ninety-one during the planning of this exhibition, was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1932 and attended Tokyo University of the Arts, the country’s most prestigious art school, graduating in 1956. He moved to New York soon after, where, in 1976, he found and converted a former horse stable in Chelsea into a spacious studio and residence. He lived there for nearly five decades with his wife Rakuko Naito, also an artist, raising their two daughters there, one now an artist, the other an architect. He was trained in the rigorous methods of traditional Japanese painting known as nihonga, which included the use of ink, mineral pigments, gold, and silver which was then applied to paper, silk, wood, and other supports. But he had already found its restrictions too chafing when in Japan, and he quickly pivoted after he arrived in New York.

Nihonga conventions were supplanted by Western techniques, materials, and theories, especially the more radical, analytic concepts of minimalism and non-objective art that a new generation of artists were embracing, although he was never drawn to the gestural, the expressive, and the representational, whether east or west in origin.

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It might be noted that Tokyo, between the two World Wars, was an international cultural destination where artists from other regions of Japan, as well as China, Korea, Russia, and elsewhere flocked to study, exchange ideas and mingle with like-minded artists seeking more experimental ways to think about and make art, and where, not incidentally, the work and ideologies of the Russian avant-garde were long known as well as other European trends such as the Zero Group. When he was in Tokyo, Kuwayama might or might not have been familiar with Aleksandr Rodchenko’s famous procla-

mation about the death of painting, after he reduced painting to “its logical conclusion” of three primary-colored canvases. But he did say, in a 2012 interview with Kosuke Fujitaka, that when he began making art, he “felt the age of painting was over.” Kuwayama did not state that painting was dead, but he knew it needed to be revitalized, redirected. He was grappling with contemporary problems that the medium presented in his quest to make something unfamiliar, confident that it had possibilities that had not been addressed. Toward that end, his goal was to create work that was not yet comprehensible as painting, that was far different from previous paintings.

He also wanted a kind of painting that did not have a “trace of painterliness” in it, not a trace of the author. Keeping that in mind, he said that he felt no need to sign or date his works on the surface, nor did he feel the need to title them.

He found his cohort soon after his arrival in New York, becoming acquainted with artists such as Kenzō Okada, Sam Francis, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, and other so-called minimalists (none of them identified themselves as such), some becoming lifelong friends. He had his first solo show at the Green Gallery in 1961, followed by a second solo there the following year, its quixotic director the fabled art dealer Richard Bellamy, both gallery and director enshrined in the golden, if gritty, aura enveloping the genesis of the contemporary New York art world.

Several of Kuwayama’s distinctive paintings from that exhilaratingly transformative period are in this exhibition, which features works from the 1960s and 1970s to 2010 and 2016. It includes an untitled work from 1960, one of the earliest works here, that was shown at his Green Gallery debut, a dense painting of dry mineral pigment divided into a green and blue section, a horizontal stripe of silver leaf separating them, with paper and canvas as the support. He was still making paintings that were based on nihonga techniques and materials (traces of which would linger in his work throughout his life), but he began adding acrylic solvents and other contemporary western materials to them. These saturated monochromatic fields in several formats in blues, greens, reds, whites, and combinations of those colors were pure color, their frames metal, the surfaces bisected, trisected, or quartered by horizontal and vertical metal strips. He also upped his scale, inspired by American artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, their paintings of a size which he had never seen in Japan.

Kuwayama was included in Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim in 1966, the groundbreaking, most “intellectually rigorous,” exhibition of purist, non-objective art to date, according to Robert Pincus-Witten in Artforum.

Curated by the influential art critic Lawrence Alloway, almost all the artists included in the show (Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Jo Baer, Kenneth Noland among many) have been inscribed into the history books as pioneers of minimalism. Kuwayama’s contribution to it included a red and blue painting with a silvery glow that Pincus-Witten described as a kind of greatly enlarged color sample, likening it to the works of another participant, Ellsworth Kelly.

At the time, Kuwayama claimed that he was not fussy about his colors. He was not much interested in their aesthetic qualities and thought they were all equivalent, using “horrible” colors on occasion to prove his point. But it seems a bit disingenuous (like his claim that anyone could make his paintings), to be taken with a bit of skepticism, since his work is so exquisitely constructed and balanced, his sense of color exceptionally elegant, an uncanny mix of spareness and extravagance. Color is inextricably part of his work, and provides much of its pleasures, from the rich opacities of his monochromes to the softly radiant, fugitive metallics of his later years.

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He began to explore the three dimensional and made his initial floor piece (the first of many) in the early 1960s. By mid-decade, he replaced his paint brushes with spray paint as an obvious way to eliminate touch and he eventually switched to canvas. His highly saturated dry pigments were gradually replaced by more elusive metallic shades in the 1970s. He explored oil paint but preferred a formula of his own devising that mixed acrylic with metallic powder. He gravitated toward metallic paint, he said, because its colors were unassertive and not traditional art colors, and because they did not create a surface dissonance that would disrupt the neutrality of his work and its fastidiously balanced objectivity.

In addition to paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, three major installations of later date anchor the present exhibition. One is from 2010, the Untitled (also referred to as the “White: Osaka Project”), originally commissioned for an exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, consisting of eighteen square canvases that measure 49 × 49 × 2 inches (124 × 124 × 5 centimeters), the extra depth making it a kind of relief. All white, the materials are a familiar part of his repertoire—acrylic, tape on wood—installed in a single line separated by evenly spaced intervals that stretched around 130 feet. Due to the length of the distance between the opposing two walls of the space, the viewer could not step back far enough to see it in its entirety, which, like other such installations of his, permitted only a partial view that, from certain vantage points, created an illusion of infinite extension. The white, like his metallic paints, was optically quiet but, when seen close-up, the surface revealed a pattern of deftly angled, overlapping strips of tape that produced a shimmer. The white was given a thin gloss, a layering that he sometimes added to make the surface glow, making it appear as if it were white light, and therefore a full spectrum, all colors included.

In time, Kuwayama began to fabricate pieces in aluminum, titanium, and Bakelite, attracted by the hardness of their surfaces. The panels became increasingly sculptural in presence, even architectonic, sometimes freestanding, restructuring the spatial appearance of their surroundings. He was particularly enthusiastic about titanium. It was difficult to shape but it had the great merit that its color is permanent, due to an anodizing process that fused it into the material. The colors of the aluminum works would fade if exposed to sunlight, although aluminum had other advantages, chief among them its greater malleability. Another property of titanium that was of great importance to him was its ability to shift colors. For instance, a work might be pink, but depending upon the light and its angle of incidence and other ambient factors, as well as where the viewer is positioned, it might appear green, complicating the notion of what its “real” color is.

Untitled (titanium blue green) and Untitled (titanium blue) (both 2016) are the latest works in the show and are dazzling, the colors, once again, in a starring role. Each installation consists of thirty spaced titanium squares installed in a precise grid formation. While the units of each are the same color, they are also always fluctuating, never quite the same when looked at, like not being able to step into the same river twice, as Heraclitus famously observed. Yet Kuwayama wants the viewer to know that the installation is one color, the difference in each square’s hue dependent on external conditions, revealed sequentially as the viewer moves toward the installation and away from it. Again, it is notable that given their blue/green and blue hues—even if metallic, even if a neutral, geometric shape, even if hung as a grid, even if finely calibrated to avoid any representational tilt—intimationsof landscape and nature do not linger in them as they might in another painter’s work.

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I first met Tadaaki Kuwayama in the late 1980s. I remember that he said, as an aside, that our thoughts on art would change, as would aesthetic criteria,

since it always has. Art, he said, has a future as well as a present. He was not much interested in the past at that moment nor was he much interested in defining art, or even calling what he did making art in a conventional sense.

But he did care deeply about how the work was constructed, and how he could make it last. He was always ambitious for his work. After all, aspiring to make a kind of painting that had never been seen before is aiming high, but I think he meant it matter-of-factly. He believed that he could strip painting down to its essentials, scraping off its subjective aesthetic barnacles, and other extraneous accretions and distractions. From that, he could forge a rehabilitated, purified corpus of work of limitless possibilities that included the integration of painting and sculpture, art and architecture in a hybridizing of disciplines that was once radical and is now part of most artists’ standard vocabulary.

Like all such works, perhaps even more than most, Kuwayama’s works must be seen, they cannot simply be described in words. Looking at a Kuwayama is not intended to be a spiritual experience, as it is meant to be in front of, say, a Rothko (depending upon whatever your inclinations might be in that regard). Yet for all his insistence on the empirical, he had his own dreams for art, among them the desire to teach us to see with greater perceptivity and appreciation, to pause and question what we see, to absorb it. He did not talk about “otherworldliness” then, but it’s a word that has cropped up in his conversation at times. He said that he wanted his work to have its own dimensions, its own kind of temporality, to go “beyond art.” Looking at his work, carefully sited in a particular space, while perhaps not meant to be spiritual, is also not merely phenomenal. In its rectitude and ordered simplicity, conjuring a space that seems an antidote to chaos, the response invoked might feel, if not spiritual, like a time-out zone, a benediction, a moment of grace, a world without end.

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pp. 10–11: Tadaaki Kuwayama: 1932 – 2023 (installation view) pp. 12–13: installation view consisting of Untitled, 2016 titanium; 30 pieces, each: 7 7/8 × 7 7/8 in. / 20 × 20 cm and Untitled, 2016 titanium; 30 pieces, each: 77/8 × 77/8 in. / 20 × 20 cm pp. 14–15: Untitled, 2010 (installation view) acrylic on tape over wood 18 pieces, each: 49 × 49 in. / 124.5 × 124.5 cm facing page: Untitled, 2010 (detail) 16

Untitled, 1962 pigment on paper over board 48 × 38 1/2 × 4 in. / 121.9 × 97.8 × 10.2 cm 18

Untitled, 1961 dry pigment on paper over board 15 × 11 7/8 in. / 38.1 × 30.2 cm 20

Untitled, 1961 pigment with acrylic on canvas 24 × 18 1/2 in. / 61 × 47 cm 22

Untitled, 1961 dry pigment on canvas 40 × 541/8 in. / 101.6 × 137.5 cm 24

Untitled, 1960 pigment with silver leaf on paper over canvas 861/2 × 657/8 in. / 219.7 × 167.3 cm 26

Untitled, 1960 pigment with silver leaf on paper over canvas 785/8 × 631/8 in. / 199.7 × 160.3 cm 28

Untitled, 1963 acrylic on canvas 51 × 341/8 in. / 129.5 × 86.7 cm 30

Untitled, 1962 acrylic on tape over wood 49 × 33 in. / 124.5 × 83.8 cm 32

Untitled, 1963 acrylic on tape over wood 1121/8 × 30 in. / 284.8 x 76.2 cm 34

pp. 36–37: installation view consisting of Untitled, 1977 metallic acrylic on canvas; 83 × 83 in. / 210.8 × 210.8 cm and Untitled, 1977 metallic acrylic on canvas; 83 × 83 in. / 210.8 × 210.8 cm facing page: Untitled, 1977 metallic acrylic on canvas 83 × 83 in. / 210.8 × 210.8 cm 38

Untitled, 1977 metallic acrylic on canvas 83 × 83 in. / 210.8 × 210.8 cm 40

Untitled, 1974 (installation view) metallic acrylic on canvas with aluminum strips 95 3/8 × 83 1/4 in. / 242.2 × 211.5 cm 42

Untitled, 1974 metallic acrylic on canvas with aluminum strips 95 3/8 × 83 1/4 in. / 242.2 × 211.5 cm 44

Interview with Tadaaki Kuwayama Russell Storer

This interview was recorded at the studio of Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuko Naito, New York City, on 2 April 2018. It was undertaken as research for the exhibition Minimalism: Space. Light. Object., held at National Gallery Singapore and the ArtScience Museum, Singapore, in 2018–2019, and an extract was published in the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition presented a global perspective on Minimal and Post-Minimal art, with a particular focus on the influence of Asian philosophies and the contributions of Asian artists. Tadaaki’s work was pivotal to the exhibition, which featured two dry pigment works from 1960: a black panel, alongside other black paintings

by Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman; and a cobalt blue panel, paired with a 1961 red infinity net by Yayoi Kusama.

Together these works demonstrated Tadaaki’s extraordinary innovation in monochrome painting, using Japanese nihonga pigments and paper to entirely new ends, as well as his significant presence in New York at the time, as this interview demonstrates. His is a profound legacy that has only just begun to be properly recognised.

RS: Can you tell me about your early studies in Japan?

TK: I went to Tokyo University of the Arts. I didn’t know nihonga [Japanesestyle painting], materials or anything at the time. Once I got in, I learned about the materials and found that the professor was very conservative and was part of a national historical painting group, and I don’t like those.

Actually, I didn’t particularly like nihonga; as a student, I learned about art in France, but only during the weekends. They said if I were to have a show while I was still a student, they will kick me out. They said: “This is traditional Japanese painting”—but this is not right.

RS: It’s quite neo-traditional, a kind of modern revival.

TK: Yeah, the world was changing…So we were against those [conser­ vative] groups. And the painting too, was very classic. It did nothing for the young people at the time, and we didn’t hear anything from the United States. I saw maybe Jackson Pollock’s painting and Calder. I was so impressed with those two, that’s about it. I thought at the time that the United States is the richest country after the war, and France is supposed to have won the war, but in reality it was nothing like that. I thought only rich countries support art and Japan has not that kind of situation.

[Rakuko] was two classes younger and we knew each other and decided to go to the United States. I waited until after she graduated, so I waited two years with nothing else to do but see movies or read books or see my friends.

When she finally graduated we decided to come to the United States. The only way was with a student visa, there was no tourist visa or anything in those days. I had an interview with the head of the United States office and they said, “Why are you going to the United States? You should go to Paris”.

I never heard that Paris was any good, and I explained that I’d rather go to the United States. Because of the people support, and as the richest country that can support art, and they said OK. So we came to the United States.

Nihonga, I never learned, but I know its materials: pigment and paper.

I carried those materials to this country. I went to the Art Students League [of New York], and I saw that the students there were not interested in school either—school is boring! The school was on 57th Street, near the Museum [of Modern Art] on 53rd, and they had big shows in those days. I was so impressed by American art—huge! I had never seen artworks that big.

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RS: So which works were these?

TK: That was maybe ’59, and I saw Barnett Newman’s work, Sam Francis, Rothko—all these so impressed me. And I thought: these are great artists but I won’t follow them; this work is already passé. We should make another generation of art. I was also painting myself. I had to go to school every day, do the morning assignment and go back home and do my own thing. When I made very simple shapes, that’s when I felt I’m Japanese. We have old traditions, very simple and yet deep, like Zen, we have that thinking. And I thought I’m not influenced by that; I rather say that they were influenced by the Orient, that philosophy.

RS: The American artists?

TK: Yes, many were at the time. I never thought I was a Minimal artist, that came later. Maybe art critics gave it that name. I wanted to make pure art without history. That’s what I wanted, and I still try to do it that way; my art has not changed much since those days. Later, people said this is Minimal art, but I never thought of that.

RS: Did you feel an affinity with artists around you, like Frank Stella and Donald Judd?

TK: Yes, and Dan Flavin. Because we showed at the same gallery, Green Gallery. Dick Bellamy the director wanted to make something new, and he was looking for artists at the time. I didn’t know that the gallery existed.

In those days, on Mondays, the museums and galleries were all closed, so young gallery owners like Dick Bellamy and the curators from MoMA, Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum like Henry Geldzahler [would visit artist studios]. Ivan Karp was the director of Leo Castelli Gallery. He was the first one to come to my studio, and he liked my work. He said next week he’ll bring over all those people. And I thought it’s a joke—all those museum people coming to see a young artist! Actually they all came together.

RS: So from all the different museums…wow!

TK: Yes. Bellamy was there too, but I didn’t know. When they came I just showed them, you say a kind of nihonga, but for me, it is purely art. When I showed those, they were so impressed. One young guy came back; that was the Green Gallery director, and he’d just opened the gallery on 57th Street in October or December with Mark di Suvero. He invited me to the gallery, so I went a couple of days later. Of course, I didn’t know anything about the art gallery system, I’d never heard of that. They were nice, I looked at the gallery, and at Mark di Suvero’s work. It was the first time I was invited to a gallery.

So then I said goodbye. Bellamy misunderstood when I said goodbye, he thought I meant no more—but I simply meant goodbye! Ivan Karp called me and said, “Don’t say no”. I didn’t mean no! My English is not so good. So Dick invited me for the December group show in 1960. And since then I was an artist at Green Gallery. And then they asked me about a show in January [1961]. I didn’t have enough time, but I did it.

In ’61 or ’62, I made the first [monochrome painting]. I think its colour was red, with a silver wooden ready-made frame. I didn’t want to make a composition. Sometimes when artists paint red, they need a little yellow here, or maybe a blue there to make the composition. I didn’t want that, so I did just one colour; this means no composition.

RS: What was your relationship with Frank Stella like?

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TK: When I had my first show at the Green Gallery—in January ’61, I had a small opening and nobody comes of course, and nobody knows who I am.

Frank was showing his silver paintings at Leo Castelli’s. I went there to see his work; I liked it. He’s also kind of alone, going his own way, and he came to my show so many times. That’s how we knew each other.

RS: Do you feel like you were trying to pursue a similar goal? He was trying to remove narrative as well.

TK: He was doing metallic, shaped canvases with the cheapest paint from the paint store.

RS: House paint.

TK: Later on most of them faded away! Judd was writing for art magazines and he was also many times at the gallery; we knew each other and he also supported me until he died.

RS: Can you talk about Systemic Painting? Did your inclusion in that exhibition feel like you were part of a new movement?

TK: I didn’t feel that way. Those young people, they just picked it [the artists]. I did a pink metallic and a blue metallic work. I used a spray gun; I started with the spray gun in those days because the material was straight for me, nothing to do with a brush.

RS: So it’s really about removing the artist’s hand. All your paintings from that time were sprayed?

TK: Yes, I started very early with the spray. People didn’t like this kind of surface but it’s okay!

RS: The aluminium dividing strips, how did you come up with that system?

TK: First I did two panels, multiple panels joined together. If the panels are in the same colour, then this is a joint line, right, not a drawn line, which means you cannot deny it. If you paint a line, this is already to me a composition.

RS: Were you looking at say, Barnett Newman, the zips?

TK: It was just a joining line, a physical line. Those much more expressed a feeling—this is one canvas, made with two joined canvases. The line is a joining line so I put in metal. At the beginning it was aluminium I bought in a Canal Street hardware store, and I put those in. And I’m still doing it!

RS: And then you have a very particular finish on your works as well to give a reflective surface.

TK: That’s right. Most of the painting in those days, in the ‘60s especially, the Greenberg school, those paintings were big with raw canvas, which they stained with oil paint. I thought I’ll do more what I want to strongly express, just acrylic medium that shines up, no touch, no nothing.

RS: And how did it feel to be a Japanese artist in New York at that time?

TK: At that time I didn’t talk to anybody, I mean I’m alone…

RS: To other Japanese artists or to any artist?

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TK: I think at that time not many [Japanese] artists came to the United States. That came later. I saw of course Kusama when she came to New York.

She became attached to me. [Rakuko: She didn’t want to see any woman artists!] Almost every day there was a phone call from her saying “I want to go out”. This was too much!

RS: Was she wanting to just have a conversation, or help?

TK: I don’t know…She knows me, but I didn’t have communication with a lot of artists. She of course, had the communication! But I liked her first show, the white one. It’s still amazing and she’s the best. I wrote a letter to my good friend in Japan: I saw good art in New York, that’s Kusama!

TK: Lawrence Alloway was the curator for the Systemic Painting show and he came to my place. I don’t know why; somebody told him [Rakuko: Kasper König]. Kasper König was so young…maybe twenty-two or three. He said the reason why he came to the United States was because he wanted to see Dick Bellamy and almost every day he came to the gallery to see Dick.

I knew him also; he was also every week at my studio. Lawrence Alloway came to my studio with five or six girls, they were all Guggenheim curators or something. He liked my art and he picked already from that work for the Systemic show. He asked me my nationality. I said I’m Japanese and he said no, Guggenheim is only for American art. Those days every museum in this country was only American art. He said, sorry I cannot do it, but then he said, but I’m also English, I’m a foreigner. Let’s do it! And then I was picked.

RS: Oh good!

TK: In those days, the Carnegie International was so important, and their special curator came to my studio, I think about ’61. Usually each country included their sample, but that time he came to my studio and he picked my art. I had a group of international shows, and there was so much writing about my art. I did the Carnegie again in the ‘60s, they are supposed to never take the same artist twice, but the curator came to my place and really liked my work and asked me. The ‘60s were quite busy and so in the beginning I could earn from making art.

RS: Did you feel there was an appreciation of what you were doing here?

Do you think people could relate or understand?

TK: Some people, yes…but the majority was, “This is not art”!

RS: You also started making some sculptures. How did they relate to the paintings? What were you trying to do with sculpture?

TK: I showed at the Green Gallery in [‘61]. First, Dick came to my studio, he picked this painting, this painting, this painting. Second, I learned the gallery was hanging my first show with a curator from MoMA. A young curator and Dick’s friend. He came to the gallery, and they picked quite a number of artworks and they hung them together. I was just watching. In Japan, art hanging is just hanging, just doesn’t matter. But here, two days to select, this one, this wall, that one is coming here, or this is less work or something.

Two days they are doing it, I was watching, and I learned much from the hanging, so important. The second show was in ‘62 and that time I did it.

Already I was doing those [works] and still later, Dick said you are doing those works for the ’62 [show] already. In ‘61 I did it, and the show was early ‘62. I still have that work, a number of those. Always big, black, 4 × 8 plywood painted black and put the wood in a strip, paste on and paint all black.

I don’t know how many panels, the all-black ones. I learned in the early days.

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RS: It is really evident in the more recent shows, just the precision.

TK: Now I always make it my own way, even museums. Space is more important, contrasting space to art.

RS: At that time how did you conceive of the space around the work?

The relationship of your work to the space, how did you think about that?

TK: I don’t know. I learned in the first show, they are hanging for two days.

I learned much about art in that first show. I should make my own art show!

I learned when I came to the United States, the first three years. I learned so much.

RS: During that time did you maintain a relationship with Japan?

TK: No. RS: So you didn’t go back or show there?

TK: No I couldn’t. I set my mind here and a good friend, Sam Francis, was so nice to me. Before we moved here [current studio] in ’76, he was around the corner. Sam Francis found me a studio with a skylight. He was so nice.

Good friend.

RS: Looking back at that time from the perspective of now, what do you think is the impact of the work you did, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, the Minimalists. What do you think is the importance for you?

TK: They never thought of their own art as Minimal art or whatever, it was later that people say it. They just wanted simple, pure work, for the art I think.

I liked those days, we were in the same gallery. Everything happened! Flavin told me he never sold anything in this country, nobody buys his fluorescent lights. Germans were supporting him. Judd too. Me too. I showed largely in Germany, this country was very hard.

RS: There was a bigger reception in Europe than there was here?

TK: Yes. My first [solo] museum show was in Folkwang [Essen]. That was in 70-something [1974]. The director was Dieter Honisch. He supported me. He was originally in Stuttgart [Württembergische Kunstverein], and he bought my work. Since then, when he moved, he bought my work for the museum. His last museum was the national museum in Berlin. They have some of my work. The Neue Nationalgalerie. He was so nice, but he passed away. I miss him.

In those early days, it was mainly from Germany supporting me. My first gallery was [Bruno] Bischofberger. Swiss. He called me when he was at the Stedelijk museum show [New Shapes of Color, 1966-67]. He went to the opening and he called me from there, and he said he would like to visit my place. And he came! He had just opened the gallery at that time, he was so young, just after graduating from college or something. He invited me there and said he would like to have all the rights for Europe. He paid me every month and that was the first time! So, the beginning was Bischofberger.

RS: That was a good way to start!

TK: The Stedelijk was my first museum show.

RS: That featured mostly American artists?

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TK: Yes. Mostly American artists. I think the oldest one was Josef Albers,

Barnett Newman. The 50th anniversary was last year. I went to Amsterdam for a gallery show [Willem Baars Projects, 2017]. The former director of the Stedelijk, Rudi Fuchs, was there when I was there, he was there every day and he really liked my work. Also another museum director, Benno Tempel, from Den Haag [Kunstmuseum]. He was there every day also. This was the 50-year anniversary show. And they say, why in 50 years you never show in Amsterdam? So I said, nobody ever asked me! So many newspapers wrote that up last year.

RS: You’ve followed the same principles, the same ideas throughout your whole practice.

TK: Yes. RS: Are there changes you have registered? How do you see it developing from those very early works?

TK: Still I really like to do what I want.

RS: As you said earlier, your work isn’t about anything, it is just about what you see. Has that changed, or do you feel that’s possible?

TK: I don’t know, of course it’s possible, human is possible! I made a statement a long time ago, in ‘63, in Art in America. Still clearly that is my statement.

RS: When you said that “art is only about itself”. That is still your principle.

TK: That is endless, it never stops. I use those same ideas. I’m not doing Minimalism, more like pure art.

An excerpt from this interview was first published in Eugene Tan & Russell Storer, eds., Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2018). Courtesy National Gallery Singapore.

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List of Works

p. 12 Untitled, 2016 titanium 30 pieces, each: 7 7/8 × 7 7/8 in. / 20 × 20 cm

p. 41 Untitled, 1977 metallic acrylic on canvas 83 × 83 in. / 210.8 × 210.8 cm

p. 13 Untitled, 2016 titanium 30 pieces, each: 7 7/8 × 7 7/8 in. / 20 × 20 cm

p. 45 Untitled, 1974 metallic acrylic on canvas with aluminum strips 95 3/8 × 83 1/4 in. / 242.2 × 211.5 cm

p. 14 – 17 Untitled, 2010 acrylic on tape over wood 18 pieces, each: 49 × 49 in. / 124.5 × 124.5 cm p. 19 Untitled, 1962 pigment on paper over board 48 × 38 1/2 × 4 in. / 121.9 × 97.8 × 10.2 cm p. 21 Untitled, 1961 dry pigment on paper over board 15 × 11 7/8 in. / 38.1 × 30.2 cm p. 23 Untitled, 1961 pigment with acrylic on canvas 24 × 18 1/2 in. / 61 × 47 cm p. 25 Untitled, 1961 dry pigment on canvas 40 × 541/8 in. / 101.6 × 137.5 cm p. 27 Untitled, 1960 pigment with silver leaf on paper over canvas 861/2 × 657/8 in. / 219.7 × 167.3 cm p. 29 Untitled, 1960 pigment with silver leaf on paper over canvas 785/8 × 631/8 in. / 199.7 × 160.3 cm p. 31 Untitled, 1963 acrylic on canvas 51 × 341/8 in. / 129.5 × 86.7 cm p. 33 Untitled, 1962 acrylic on tape over wood 49 × 33 in. / 124.5 × 83.8 cm p. 35 Untitled, 1963 acrylic on tape over wood 1121/8 × 30 in. / 284.8 x 76.2 cm p. 39 Untitled, 1977 metallic acrylic on canvas 83 × 83 in. / 210.8 × 210.8 cm

Museums and Public Collections

Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York Fukuyama Museum of Art, Hiroshima, Japan Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo, Japan Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana The Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Kitakyushu, Japan Kure Municipal Museum of Art, Kure, Japan Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria Takamatsu Art Museum, Takamatsu, Japan Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Toyama, Japan Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan The Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Osaka, Japan San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York The Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany The Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zürich, Switzerland Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Marlborough New York 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 + 1 212 541 4900 marlboroughnewyork.com Douglas Kent Walla, CEO dkwalla@marlboroughgallery.com Sebastian Sarmiento, Director sebastian@marlboroughgallery.com Vesper Lu, Assistant to Sebastian Sarmiento vesper@marlboroughgallery.com Alexa Burzinski, Director burzinski@marlboroughgallery.com Nicole Sisti, Director sisti@marlboroughgallery.com Bianca Barquet, Director of Graphics bianca@marlboroughgallery.com Parks Busby, Graphics Assistant busby@marlboroughgallery.com Mariah Tarvainen, Design Director tarvainen@marlboroughgallery.com Meghan Boyle Kirtley, Administrator boyle@marlboroughgallery.com Greg O’Connor, Comptroller greg@marlboroughgallery.com Dibomba Jean-Marie Kazadi, Bookkeeper kazadi@marlboroughgallery.com

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Tadaaki Kuwayama: 1932 – 2023 November 9, 2023 – January 13, 2024 Ad Infinitum © 2023 Lilly Wei All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Russell Storer: Interview with Tadaaki Kuwayama © 2023 Russell Storer All rights reserved. Used with permission.

All works © The Estate of Tadaaki Kuwayama Editors: Sebastian Sarmiento, Alexa Burzinski, Nicole Sisti, Vesper Lu, Marissa Moxley, Juul Van Haver Photography: Olympia Shannon, Dario Lasagni (p. 17, p. 32, p. 54) Printing and Binding: Thomas Group © 2023 Marlborough Gallery, New York All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper— without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Directors of Marlborough New York would like to express their sincere and heartfelt gratitude to the Kuwayama family for their support in mounting 1932 – 2023. During the exhibition’s planning, Tadaaki sadly passed away on August 18, 2023, at the age of ninety-one. This exhibition would have never been possible if not for his family’s trust and virtuosity following his death.

Peter Park, Registrar park@marlboroughgallery.com Carly Johnson, Registrar johnson@marlboroughgallery.com Marissa Moxley, Senior Archivist moxley@marlboroughgallery.com Juul Van Haver, Archivist juul@marlboroughgallery.com Isabel Wardlaw, Gallery Assistant wardlaw@marlboroughgallery.com John Willis, Warehouse Manager willis@marlboroughgallery.com Anthony Nici, Master Crater nici@marlboroughgallery.com Jeff Serino, Preparator serino@marlboroughgallery.com Brian Burke, Preparator burke@marlboroughgallery.com Matt Castillo, Preparator castillo@marlboroughgallery.com David Pugh, Preparator david@marlboroughgallery.com Associated Galleries Marlborough Fine Art London 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0) 20 7629 5161 marlboroughgallerylondon.com Galería Marlborough Madrid Orfila, 5 28010 Madrid, Spain +34 91 319 1414 galeriamarlborough.com Galería Marlborough Barcelona Enric Granados, 68 08008 Barcelona, Spain +34 934 674 454

facing page: Untitled, 1962 (detail) acrylic on tape over wood; 49 × 33 in. / 124.5 × 83.8 cm cover: Untitled, 1962 (detail) pigment on paper over board; 48 × 38 1/2 × 4 in. / 121.9 × 97.8 × 10.2 cm