Teruko Yokoi by Marlborough Gallery

Teruko Yokoi

March 7 – April 20, 2024 Marlborough Gallery 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 + 1 212 541 4900 marlboroughnewyork.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 Galería Marlborough Barcelona Enric Granados, 68 08008 Barcelona, Spain +34 934 674 454 galeriamarlborough.com

Anke Kempkes

Voyager: Teruko Yokoi’s Landscape of Abstraction

I would define nostalgia as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own phantasy…The nostalgia that interests me here is a symptom of our age, a historical emotion…It is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. Secondly, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams...Time out of time…Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity…reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space…Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, and a cure.1 – Svetlana Boym I’ve always been a free spirit—and I also like poppies. As a child I was overly sensitive and lonely. For many years I had this dark shadow surrounding me…My art? What colors can do! For example, blood just contains so many colors. So, playing with colors, I would say, even if “play” might not be the right word…Snow softens all the sharp edges, all the points and corners, and makes everything—everything!—soft and warm…black contains every color: red, yellow—all of them. I believe black is the most important and warmest color. You can even feel it—as is the case with blue…My paintings are poems written in colors.2 – Teruko Yokoi

In her apartment/studio at Rue du Douanier-Rousseau, 1960

In Teruko Yokoi’s paintings, elements of American modern abstraction and traditional Japanese figuration and poetry are intertwined and hybridized, striking a genuine fusion. With this stylistic intervention the artist manifested her artistic independence and gave a meta-personal dimension to her practice. Like Kenzo Okada in New York and Imai Toshimitsu in Paris, Japanese painters who worked, in Yokoi’s words, at the “high-time” of abstraction in the Western centers, she was aiming at a transcultural 5

form of late modernism, or what Russian-American cultural theorist Svetlana Boym described as an alternative modernism, or the “off-modern” emerging from a position of decentered subjectivity. Curator Marta Dziewanska traced back the artist’s restless path until finally settling in Switzerland in the 1960s: Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, Paris, and Bern—all places that left marks on her oeuvre…with all the feelings of uncertainty, disquiet, and displacement that such a position triggers…It is also an account of the experience of an artist who has worked despite and through the wounds of history, geography, race, and gender. Despite Yokoi’s proximity to the central Western postwar art movements of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, she has never been made one of them—gifted and innovative, yet distinct and coming from a different cultural background…too different to share the same fights.3 It was a journey during which she subsequently harmonized and transcended these experiences of otherness and disjunctive modernity4 in the hybrid and introspective lyricism of her work. When Teruko Yokoi gave her debut in the Swiss art world, historian Willy Rotzler described her painting “an imaginary inner landscape that does not exist in this form, neither here in the West nor in the Far East… pictorial and metaphorical concentrations of emotive devotion to the unutterable, to the experience.”5 One can only speculate what made Teruko Yokoi settle in 1962 in Switzerland after her early daring life journey from Tokyo to San Francisco, and from New York to Paris, a journey she embarked on for the most part as a single young Japanese woman in a time still marked by gender restrictions and challenging cultural-political constellations. In Switzerland, Yokoi adopted the country’s epic landscape, its shared characteristics with the Japan she remembered from the past. Ever since, her Oriental landscape paintings appear as a search for a phantasy of the rural Japan of her childhood, a “paradise” forever lost: L andscapes—a riverbed of white sand, the rice fish of my hometown. These are the images of my childhood that have become my paintings, my internal landscapes. I truly believe that this was my paradise—everything was crystal clear from the mountains down to the Pacific. The water and even the fish were transparent, and Japanese nightingales flew through the sky. This white sand— it’s my spiritual homeland.6

eruko Yokoi painting on her last day in Japan T before leaving for the United States, Inubōsaki peninsula, near Tokyo, 1953.

In early 1961, after a year in Paris and her separation from the short marriage with American painter Sam Francis, Yokoi returned briefly to Japan, but was unable to reconcile with the now dramatically changed landscape that she had memorized as an arcadian vision of her youth: My father warned me I would be disappointed. When I returned with my friend at her invitation, I found a city on the once-empty riverbed. I asked my friend, “Is this really my place? The place I was so often with my bicycle and a canvas in my bag?” I don’t know what led to all the changes, but perhaps it was a typhoon. The quiet, the emptiness—it was all gone.7 Teruko Yokoi rarely commented on the traumata inflicted by wartime cataclysm or the “typhoon” of socio-political upheaval and rapid economic modernization of the two postwar decades that shook Japan as well as the West where she mostly spent these years. Nor did she associate herself— despite or because of her husband’s intense involvements with the rising Japanese art scene—with the “informel whirlwind”8 of new radical experimentation and art philosophical debates that caught her generation of Japanese artists, in particular the Gutai movement, “having found their postulates convincingly expressed in the raw psychological realism of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings as the advent of a ‘new humanism.’”9 7

Tsushima at the Kiso River, Japan

eruko Yokoi putting last touches on T Moon Snow Flowers before the opening of Five painters from abroad in the Canton of Berne at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1975.

However, in Yokoi’s recollections of her childhood in a long last interview conducted in 2019 shortly before her passing in 2020, she depicts herself as a young girl in the 1930s, hyper-perceptible to the atmosphere surrounding her and overcome by what could be interpreted as a psychic internalization of the long shadows of oppression Japanese society experienced during the rise of the totalitarian regime: I was a very anxious child. I was afraid of the dark, of the night, of the color black—for black can hold anything. One day I was no longer able to open a drawer in a dresser we had at home, as I was so afraid of the darkness inside. And it was so gloomy in the countryside. It was hell for me…When I was ten years old, my mother even took me to the hospital in Nagoya because she was afraid my terrible fantasies would lead me to kill myself. My teachers, too, thought I might commit suicide. I was so full of fear. When I read at night, I feared my soul would slip away into the darkness.10 At this point her imaginary of the local countryside was still inflicted by deeply negative feelings, a “hell” rather than the later idealized “paradise.” But with the overcoming of her infantile fears, a healing primarily induced through her early poetry writing and art making encouraged by her parents and teachers who clearly saw the special talent of the child, Yokoi embraced for the decades to come a vision of nature and home that could be interpreted—against the larger historical backdrop of her life— as driven by in inner necessity for a reflective nostalgia, to appease what maybe was never wholesome. Was it finally Switzerland’s primal landscape that increasingly triggered her childhood reminiscences? Was it the intensely explored genre of allegorized landscape painting by such early Modernists as Ferdinand Holder and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner whose works are omnipresent in the Swiss collections which she likely visited? These painters expressed their concerns about the dawn of the Western modern age with such overwhelming temperament, explosions of color, vastness, effects of alienation and looming premonition, that their work appears rather an antidote to Yokoi’s balanced, calm, mannerist, Asianidentified compositions of the second half of her oeuvre. Someone declared her flat stylized works “painting without individuality,” quasi anonymous. But with a closer look at the artist’s prolific practice an inner landscape of great ambiguity and restlessness can be traced back to her experiences during her upbringing and youth, and through complex strata of gender and racial politics and self-chosen cultural translocation, impacting a self-understanding that made her part of worlds that could not easily be reconciled. 10

The Journey Teruko Yokoi is one of the few women artists who worked in the 1950s in New York at the establishment of Abstract Expressionism. She was situated as much at the heart of the scene—due to her partnership with Sam Francis and friendships with various protagonists such as Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada, and Mark Rothko—as she kept herself at a self-declared outsider position. Yokoi was a young Japanese woman painter in New York after the war, speaking little English at the time, who was inevitably exposed to multiple forms of projections: not only to the period-typical art world sexism, but also vis-à-vis a complex constellation in which Japan was not long ago the arch enemy of the United States while in the cold war era after the war defeated Japan was increasingly constructed as a pacified Zenpracticing society. Subsequently American and European modernists fashioned an embrace of East-Asian culture and philosophy:

lassmates at the California School of C Fine Arts, San Francisco, California 1955.

In the 1950s, Western artists in the abstract avant-gardes reconceptualized Asian culture and philosophy as a form of “Modern Buddhism” where spirituality was a central engagement and an antidote to the atrocities of WWII and to the new cultural-political regressions and conservatism.11

Yokoi navigated this shifting cultural-political landscape with a multitude of self-representations: We see her at her 1959 wedding reception dressed in a formal yet fashionable gown next to a dashing Sinatra-hat wearing Sam Francis in the midst of an exuberant crowd of cosmopolitan New York peers. In the same year—while Francis was on tour in Japan—we see her sitting on the floor of her studio casually dressed with her hair down— a conscious gesture of informality underlined by the artist holding strands of her loose hair playfully up in the air, more modern Beatnik than exoticized Asian female. Yokoi is here surrounded by canvases showing her obsessive experimentation with a mysterious diamond-shaped painterly cipher. In later years in Switzerland we see her at receptions in traditional Asian attire. The formative years of Teruko Yokoi’s artistic identity took place in a dramatically disruptive time that, for her generation, setting in motion a complex matrix of cultural and political ambiguities. The story begins with a young woman, outstanding in her artistic ambition, coming to age in Japan in the immediate aftermath of World War II and leaving behind a landscape of destruction and a country in defeat. The next chapter can be defined as a time of maturing spent in the United States of the mid 1950s, which was marked by the restorative McCarthy era, and simultaneously by the cultural awakening and unrest of the Beatnik generation. Yokoi’s artistic development orbited around some of the focal points of twentieth-century cultural history. By her own account, she was always arriving at “high-time”—first in the San Francisco art school milieu during a period of artistic renewal and protests, and then in New York City in the heydays of Abstract Expressionism. And yet, Yokoi always remained somewhat on the periphery of these events. For Japan’s postwar generation, a general feeling of uncertainty resulted from what American curator Alexandra Munroe described as an internalized “cultural schizophrenia” that was brought on by the American occupation.12 Artists and intellectuals of the new avant-garde movements, such as Gutai and Zero, wanted to radically break with Japanese traditions corrupted by an oppressive past, while they simultaneously kept a distance to the Americanization imposed on Japanese society after the war. They expressed the need for a new indigenous art practice in a post-traumatic age in countercultural expressions. The Gutai group was founded in Osaka in 1954 by the painter, teacher, and entrepreneur Jirō Yoshihara. Due to her move to the United States in 1954, Teruko Yokoi did not witness the rise of the new Japanese avant-garde groups, nor did she take part in their debates about post-colonialism and a modern Japanese cultural identity that reached the Parisian and New York art world.

Kazuo Shiraga performing Challenging Mud, Tokyo, 1955 © Shiraga Fujiko and Hisao and the former members of the Gutai Art Association. Courtesy Amagasaki Cultural Center

Photos from Yokoi’s personal files from around 1946 to 1951, still in Japan, show the artist in her early 20s, now a confident young woman dressed in modern Western fashion. In one of her early art school-period paintings she portrays teenage girls in proper school uniforms gathering in protective domestic environments, at ease in an elegant milieu of perfect harmony, between the styles of the traditional and modern eras. Her world looks like a bourgeois still life, untouched by the previous totalitarian repression and undisrupted by war. Other early photos show unpopulated picturesque rural settings of Tsushima, the blueprints for Yokoi’s later lyrical landscape paintings. The majority of the photos were taken in the city of Nagoya: one shows the young artist in a park, the notes on the edge reading “Near Nagoya Castle”; another is referenced as “Nagoya (under occupation).” All of the photos are close-ups that do not exhibit any traces of an urban environment effected by the ravages of the war.13 In 2014, in the context of her much-discussed show Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Alexandra Munroe focused on the effects of postwar politics on Japanese avant-garde culture, referring to it as “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia”:14 One room residence and studio in Tokyo

The atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 compelled the unconditional surrender and defeat of the Empire of Japan to the Allied Forces, effectively ending World War II. Driven by militarist ideology and the dream of a unified Asia under the Yamato race, wartime Japan ruled over nearly three million square miles of the Asia-Pacific region, making it one of the largest maritime empires in history. It was also one of the most brutal. But with the United States-led occupation and its quick adoption of Japan as a principal ally in the rising Pacific front of the Cold War, Japan’s history and memory of the war were officially erased. American elite academies successfully recast the image of Japan from an aggressor to a victim nation.15 Munroe describes the reactions of young artists to the complexities of Japan’s “culture of defeat” as being torn between rejecting “America’s ideological inventions of a pacified, effeminized, Zen-loving, contemplative Japan” and their embrace of the “American humanism” expressed in the avant-garde art movement of Abstract Expressionism.16

his painting was chosen by the Japanese T Association of Painters

While the Gutai avant-garde opposed the construction of a newly essentialized, undisrupted image of Japan, this view was nevertheless adopted and internalized by many Japanese citizens who witnessed, under occupational forces, a time of material stabilization through the growth of a robust economy. The new prosperity was also symbolized by the 13

In Nagoya, ca. 1946

inauguration of many new museums and a bustling modern culture.17 But according to Munroe the postwar generation was “born from the belly of the beast.”18 Gutai’s manifesto provocatively embraces the image of the ruin:

S aburo Murakami performing At One Moment Opening Six Holes, 1955 © Murakami Makiko and Tomohiko

Gutai Art does not alter matter. Gutai Art imparts life to matter. Gutai Art does not distort matter…When matter remains intact and exposes its characteristics, it starts telling a story and even cries out…Ruins unexpectedly welcome us with warmth and friendliness; they speak to us through their beautiful cracks and rubble—which might be a revenge of matter that has regained its innate life. In this sense we highly regard the works of [Jackson] Pollock and [Georges] Mathieu. Their work reveals the scream of matter itself. We believe that by merging human qualities and material properties, we can concretely comprehend abstract space.19 Despite the political ambiguities of the occupation era, Gutai and New York fell “under each other’s spell,” as American philanthropist and artist Charles Jenkins recounts.20 Gutai spread its ideas internationally from 1955 in the Gutai journals, which were sent via post to New York, Paris, Turin, Amsterdam, Johannesburg, and elsewhere. Copies of the first two editions were sent to Jackson Pollock with the request that he may circulate them. The dialogue was initiated, and soon the work of Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Ray Johnston, and Sam Francis, Yokoi’s future husband, were published in the journals. And although Yokoi left Japan upon Gutai’s founding, the movement certainly gained attention in the New York milieu that surrounded her in the following years. One central factor to this alignment was Sam Francis’s very close ties with the Japanese art scene, as he himself was strongly Asian-identified in his practice. In 1957, Gutai invited him to be part of a two-person show in Tokyo: Sam Francis—Imai Toshimitsu. Francis met Toshimitsu in 1954 in Paris, where the American artist resided from 1950 to 1956, and the two of them developed a close friendship.21 Toshimitsu introduced Francis to a new perspective of connecting traditional Oriental philosophy with modern abstraction. He was searching for a modern form of Orientalism that would overcome postcolonial subjection and yet be an expression of universality: ogether with the collapse of Western rationalism, there is a world T trend toward a deep interest in the Orient. Thus, we must abandon our past abject colonial mentality of servile devotion to the West, and actually create works that bring tradition to life through a contemporary awareness. We Oriental people must discover the unlimited space of void, temporality, color, and form within tradition and bring this traditional structure to life within contemporary works in a way that is structurally completely different from the West.22 15

Toshimitsu’s advocating of an alternative form of modern abstraction and Oriental modernism seems to strongly resonate in Teruko Yokoi’s lifelong aesthetic quest despite their very different painterly sensibilities and temperaments: where Toshimitsu was all about outward explosive drama, Yokoi was all about psychological inwardness. Sam Francis met Yokoi in New York after his stay in Japan in 1957, and they married in March 1959. He returned to Japan in November 1960 with the intention of purchasing a home for Yokoi, their newborn daughter, and himself. However, he fell ill with tuberculosis and left Japan in January 1961. In the winter of 1957, Francis had his second solo show at the influential Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, followed in 1958 by the Sixth Gutai Exhibition. This first show of the young Japanese artists in the U.S. was ambitiously prepared, and presented mostly paintings that were created in highly experimental performative ways alongside some film material and photographs. But New York was not yet ready for Gutai’s radical innovations. The works were dismissed as merely “derivative” of American and European abstraction. The critics’ disappointment derived from the impression that the show did not look “Japanese” enough while they obviously put a blind eye to the strong evidence of post-traumatic affects and processing in the young artist’s works. A comparable force was preconfigured in the postwar work of American female Abstract Expressionist Michael (Corinne) West in paintings like Nihilism (1949) or Dagger of Light (1951) in which the artist scratched off the center of previous paintings and slashed the canvas with violent strokes of red and silver expressing her anguish about America’s nuclear warfare. But such outstanding contributions by women artists in the milieu were not yet recognized. The same counted for Teruko Yokoi whose work was at the time inevitably eclipsed by the attention given to the rising success of her male artist partner. Her only exposure in New York was the inclusion in a group show at Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960 when she had already left for Europe. A year before, Gutai’s influential young advocate, the critic Tōno Yoshiaki, stayed in Sam Francis and Teruko Yokoi’s spacious Chelsea Hotel studio apartment while Francis had left for another stay in Paris. A photo from 1959 shows Tōno at their space, and we can only speculate if a direct exchange happened between Yokoi and Tōno. Though a friend of Francis, he would soon find a stronger generational bond with artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Still in Japan at the beginning of her studies, Teruko Yokoi found herself at a crossroads between the remains of the past and the rapid modernization of her country. A photo from “her last day in Japan” shows her on a beach, painting primitive fishing boats—anchors for her memory. But she was 16

ichael (Corinne) West, Dagger of Light, 1951 M oil, aluminum paint, and sand on canvas 55 × 35 in. / 139.7 × 88.9 cm © The Michael (Corinne) West Estate. Courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.

then to embark on an adventure that would set a new path. Upon her arrival in San Francisco in 1954, Teruko Yokoi began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts as one of two Japanese students. She turned swiftly toward the new time of abstraction. She found herself among a new generation of counter-culturally driven artists, writers, and drifters— but always keeping her reserve: I kept to myself, even when I was at art school in California, where there were protests. I didn’t speak enough English, and when the other students asked me to join in, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be protesting. I was never political.23 Teruko Yokoi, Figure, 1955 oil on canvas 275/8 × 337/8 in. / 70.3 × 86.2 cm

Teruko Yokoi, Duett, 1954 oil on canvas 357/8 × 273/4 in. / 91.3 × 70.7 cm

Despite these recollections, Yokoi’s early paintings from her time in San Francisco speak a metropolitan, modern language, like in the portraits Musicians and Pink Lady. Photos from this period show Yokoi as a confident, fashionable, elegant, and joyous young woman among her fellow students, posing in front of her first abstract paintings with an air of proud awareness of their distinctly contemporary aura.24 The titles of her paintings of the time were cool and matter-of-fact, even indicating the inescapable Greenbergian influence that mixed with the remnants of her Post-Impressionist education in Japan: Non-Objective, Yellow Figure, Pink Lady, Corner, Color Poem, Portrait in Black, Garden and Walk, Still Life, Lemon, Musician, and Mid-Day. In 1955, Yokoi received a grant and arrived in the buzzing city of New York. She enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s legendary art school on Manhattan’s 8th Street. The German émigré was one of the undisputed masters of European modernism, and his postwar work was seen as the advent of Abstract Expressionism. Hofmann made his Friday evening lectures open to the public, which was regarded as “very European.” Hofmann’s classes in the 1930s included many women artists, such as Lee Krasner and Louise Nevelson, and later the younger generation of Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Marisol. Despite his rigorous teaching method, he reportedly struck awe with his students. However, his then typical chauvinistic attitude toward female students was equally notorious. Lee Krasner later recalled a scene where Hofmann commented on her student work with the now infamous statement, “This is so good, you would not know it was done by a woman!”25 For the younger generation of female students, Hofmann’s authoritarian teaching style seemed like a tootight corset. Joan Mitchell, a year below Yokoi, was a jazz-age girl and a close friend of the poet Frank O’Hara. She was to become a friend to Yokoi first in New York and later in Paris. Mitchell wanted to study with Hofmann after her arrival in New York in 1947, but she quit Hofmann’s class after attending just one, putting to question his approach and complaining, like many American students, about his very strong German accent: 17

I couldn’t understand a word he said, so I left terrified… He was talking about push and pull, and he was erasing people’s drawings and saying: “This goes this way.” The nude was sitting there, “and this angle is there and that angle is there,” he said. I could see that, but did I have to make that nude into that angle?... I wondered why and why and why.26 Even though a 31-year-old Yokoi studied with Hofmann a decade later, beginning in 1955, she also complained about his courses, as is reflected in a correspondence with her San Francisco dealer Scotty H. Tsuchiya dated April 9, 1956: “We regret to hear you are not pleased studying under Hans Hofmann, but we believe what you do learn from him will be beneficial to you later on.” Was her discomfort provoked by the misogynistic tone of her teacher? Or was it related to the rigorous style of his teaching, or to the fact that his eccentrically preserved foreign accent must have made her English-language skills at the time seem insufficient? Where Joan Mitchell might have reacted out of juvenile rebellion against the larger-thanlife teacher, it can be presumed that Yokoi’s response reflected a certain maturity gained through her encouraging experiences in San Francisco. In fact, some of her paintings from the West Coast period of 1954 to 1955 already show a surprisingly independent, deep, and increasingly nonobjective style of abstraction. Hofmann’s teachings might have felt like a step back.

lass at the Hans Hofmann school, Provincetown, C Massachusetts, ca. 1945. Photographer unidentified, Hans Hofmann Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.

Yokoi’s general relationship with the female artists of the Abstract Expressionist milieu was simultaneously close and distant. The sexist character of New York’s art scene at the time was notorious, and it created a competitive environment between the few women that found acceptance, often by behaving “masculinely,” in this men’s world. The legendary Eighth Street Club, a central hub of the Abstract Expressionist scene, was a members- and largely male-only locale. Only Perle Fine, Joan Mitchell, and Mary Abbott were occasionally given invitations, and Mitchell reportedly once loudly promoted her “omnipotence” as a painter at the club. Such over-compensatory acts were born out of frustration over the marginalization women artists experienced then and for the following two decades. Among the seventy-four participants of the groundbreaking artist-organized Ninth Street Show, there were only five women. Even though some female artists in the scene occasionally held a solo show in a commercial gallery—such as Elaine de Kooning at the Stable Gallery in 1952 and at Tibor de Nagy in 1957—their works received much less critical acclaim and far fewer museum exhibitions than their male contemporaries. Lee Krasner—one of the earliest painters of the Abstract Expressionist cohort who would struggle against the marginalization of women artists, even changing her first name from Lena to the gender-ambiguous Lee in the 1940s—saw a retrospective of her work mounted for the first time in 1983, a year before her death. Most of these women would not see such honors in their lifetime. Yokoi’s recollections testify to a similar picture, despite her characteristic expressions of reservation and disconnect: ack then all the famous artists were men. And all the female artists, B except for me, complained about it constantly...But I always looked out for myself, as I knew I wasn’t very good in a group. Back then I didn’t know anything about the Ninth Street Women, but I understood right away that they spoke with a men’s vocabulary. Joan Mitchell cursed all the time. She cursed constantly, said “shit” continually, which I was uneasy with. But still we were good friends…I liked her because she was wild…In those days, Joan and the others said: “Teruko is a little girl from Japan. She doesn’t know the art world.” And that was a good thing, as I really didn’t know the art world. I liked Joan and the others, but they were all always aware that they were competing with me. They were very ambitious and competitive. I never thought of myself as being in competition with other artists.27

Asked about her marriage with Sam Francis, Yokoi states: I had a difficult time with him. I was a nobody, and everyone was interested in Sam Francis. He always said he simply fell in love with me at the first exhibition at the MoMA after the April 1958 fire. The show included work by Henri Matisse, who I really like. Joan and others said that I was a very strong source of inspiration for Sam. I believe it, too, simply because he always failed to mention that I was also an artist. Soon afterward, from around 1958 to 1960, we lived, like Joan, in the Hotel Chelsea.28 Sam and I and my daughter—we lived at the very top in the penthouse.29 Yokoi’s comments reveal how the day’s gender inequalities even reached into the relationships between these “Amazons” of the avant-garde.30 It was a time when Joan Mitchell, a brash tomboy, could belittle Yokoi via the stereotype of the Asian child-woman—“she is a little girl from Japan”— and, in the next moment, empower the legacy of her fellow woman artist by stating Yokoi’s major artistic influence on her famous husband. And while Yokoi spoke of an “all-but-not-me,” excluding herself from the struggle of her female contemporaries, she also testifies to how her own husband tried to make her, as a fellow artist, invisible. 20

Teruko Yokoi in front of a Sam Francis mural, with their baby daughter Kayo, Chase Manhattan Bank, 1959 © The Sam Francis Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Yokoi only once participated in a show in New York at Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960. Invited by Jackson’s son David Anderson, Yokoi sent a group of drawings from Paris.31 The general lack of public recognition, however, did not keep Yokoi from entering a phase of intense experimentation, as she searched for her own identity in the complex matrix of influences that surrounded her.

Kenzo Okada, Number 3, 1953 oil on canvas 651/8 × 577/8 in. / 165.4 × 147 cm © The Estate of Kenzo Okada / The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Yokoi’s first major influence entered her orbit through a paternal friendship with Japanese Abstract Expressionist Kenzo Okada (1902–1982),32 who lived in Paris in the 1920s and moved from Tokyo to New York in 1950. In 1954, he began exhibiting at Betty Parsons Gallery, and, through Parsons, gained access to the inner circle of Abstract Expressionism and to the early Color Field painters. Okada, among many others, became friends with Mark Rothko, whom he introduced to Yokoi. The older Japanese artist expressed a type of “Asian sensibility” in his paintings, which present a lyrical transformation of natural forms in the modern language of abstraction. His pattern compositions—often appearing ephemeral, almost like paper collages—evoke the structure of landscapes in delicate and light, yet earthy color tones that float within the compositional space. Some loose geometric shapes make a subtle appearance in these paintings— forms that reemerge in much more pronounced ways in Yokoi’s work from the second half of the 1950s. In his later life, Okada, much like Yokoi herself, reinterpreted the decorative effects of traditional Japanese painting in his work. The direct influence of Okada on Yokoi is visible in a group of paintings from 1956 to 1958: November (1957), Summer Morning (1957), Winter (1958) [p. 38], June (1958) [p. 35], Untitled (1959). Yokoi shares Okada’s sparse distribution of form on the canvas and his earthy tones, but her paintings are much less translucent, thus avoiding the effect of lightness in Okada’s work. With a few very simple lines and shapes, and with an intensely opaque color range, Yokoi evokes the mood of landscapes and of nature’s seasons. Expressing modern abstraction through the genre of landscape painting and motifs deriving from nature, and vice versa, might seem a contradiction for a contemporary sensibility. Why compromise avant-garde innovation with the conventions of the past? For the generation of the 1940s and 1950s, this method was the program—for example, Helen Frankenthaler’s monumental painting Mountains and Sea (1952) became her break-through piece. Artists of the postwar era still thought of themselves as being on a trajectory that derived from Post-Impressionism and Cubism. Innovation was measured against the criteria of how modern and groundbreaking a traditional genre could be treated: landscape and still life (Cézanne), the nude (Picasso), or the portrait (Giacometti).33

Joan Mitchell—who permanently moved to France from 1959, living the first years in Paris, where Yokoi likely spent time with her during her stay in 1960—inherited enough money following the death of her mother to purchase a two-acre estate in the town of Vétheuil, near Giverny, which was situated nearby the gardener’s cottage which had been Claude Monet’s home. Mitchell increasingly engaged in her large-scale panels with abstract reflections on landscapes—the same natural environment which had inspired the French Impressionist’s paintings such as “Water Lilies.” Underlining their modernity, Clement Greenberg believed that Monet had found in his later series not so much a general principle in nature but the essence of art itself, in one word its “abstractness.” Joan Mitchell who had a solo show at Galerie Kornfeld in Bern in 1962, the year of Yokoi’s permanent move to the Swiss town. Mitchell’s wildly gestural work with prominent drips painted on white ground from the time carry titles like Atlantic Side (1960) or Garden Party (ca. 1962). By the late 1960s Mitchell increasingly executed multi-panel paintings much like her predecessor Monet in his last legendary painting project. However, in most of these compositions she chose a distinct feature announcing her late modernist stance: by discontinuing and disrupting the motif from panel to panel she diminished any illusionary effect of a compositional integrity in favor of the material impact and emotional expression of the pronounced painterly gestures. Meanwhile, in 1961–63 Teruko Yokoi painted the four-panel piece The Seasons. Like Mitchell, she chose to treat every panel’s composition separately from the others: “…only the constant diamond motif unifies the four segments—for there is otherwise no continuous visual connection between the four sections representing the seasons…”34 In 1970 Mitchell paints the three-panel piece Three Seasons in which she suggests a stronger painterly continuation between the second and third motif, while Yokoi creates her masterpiece Moon Snow Flowers in 1975: “…the three parts of the triptych Moon Snow Flowers are inseparable from one another as a composition. Indeed, they were conceived as a unified ‘landscape’ in which Yokoi would expressively bring together the visual language she had gradually cultivated up until that point.”35 Moon Snow Flowers exemplifies how the characteristic mannerist flatness of traditional Japanese landscape painting corresponds in Yokoi’s painting to the Greenbergian late-modernist postulate of “flatness” as exemplified in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, as much as the cryptic calligraphic gestures in the work of Clyfford Still, Franz Kline or Michael (Corinne) West, and Sonja Sekula are testimonies to the Asian-identified trend in the postwar New York Avant-garde.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952 oil and charcoal on canvas 865/8 × 1171/4 in. / 220 × 297.8 cm Helen Frankenthaler Foundation (on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). © 2024 The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Between East and West While Abstract Expressionism generalized the landscape genre, making it a descendent in the genealogy of modernism, Yokoi most likely found in Kenzo Okada’s distinctly Asian perspective on the genre a model to guide her own search for a genuine artistic identity between East and West: At the same time, when Yokoi introduces calligraphic signs, she often (but not always) deprives them of meaning: they follow one another vertically and melt with the similarly vertical drips of paint. Words lose their meaning and gestures become imbued with content. This vibrant tension—a mix of balance, rhythm, and chaotic turbulence—became a signature of a sort, a way of emphasizing both Yokoi’s general kinship and otherness.36 At the occasion of Yokoi’s recent retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bern, Japanese-Swiss critic and film maker Kuniko Satonobu Spirig and JapaneseSwiss artist Osamu Okuda took a closer look at the Asian influence in Teruko Yokoi’s work: Teruko Yokoi’s paintings are often described as “Japanesque.” Indeed, they do show Japanese poems, evoke Japanese landscapes, or allude to the great cultural significance of the seasons—they are full of Japanese elements. But at the same time, the Western aspects arising from Yokoi’s painterly abstraction are obvious, and it has even been said that Eastern and Western beauty coexist in her work. The latter is certainly true of one of her work Untitled painted in New York in 1958. At first glance it appears as an Abstract Expressionist composition in which a bold diamond shape floats above a vibrant layer of color. Yet hidden away in this typically late-modern work we also find Far Eastern cultural traditions.37 In earlier and later paintings like Autumn (1957) [p. 33] painted in New York, and March (1965) [p. 44] created Bern, we find traditional Japanese poems directly worked into the abstracted landscape motif, known as waka—a type of five-line poem from classic Japanese literature—written in calligraphy: I like poems and waka that call to mind a scenic feeling of presence that makes me feel as if I were there. The artist’s father was a calligrapher who created traditional three-line haikus. Yokoi’s would later adopt this heritage from her youth in her work.38

The poem integrated in March reads: The poem by Emperor Kōkō (830–887) For you, I went out to the fields to pick the first spring greens all the while on my sleeves a light snow falling.39 In these poem-paintings, Yokoi “succeeded in renewing the synthesis of writing and imagery that was practiced in Japan’s older culture, without sacrificing her own aesthetic sensibility, by combining it with a modern means of expression.”40 By 1958 to 1959, something extraordinary took shape in Yokoi’s work. It could be described as a moment of psychological dramatization in her composition, surface treatment, and choice of colors. In a cycle of paintings from that time, a diamond-shaped form moves prominently into the foreground, empty in its center and with heavy drips pouring over its edges. The all-over composition is based on bold monochromatic fields. The paint is roughly applied, revealing multiple layers underneath. A series of studio photos at the artist’s Chelsea Hotel apartment studio from 1959 show Yokoi surrounded by paintings done in her new style— together they suggest an almost excessive repetition of the same form experiment. The colors Yokoi chose for this cycle start with her former range of opaque, dark tones, and then move to bright, almost aggressive primary colors of yellow, red, orange, and blue, and to white and black, like in the work on paper Untitled (1957–8) [p. 75] and the canvases Untitled (1958) [p. 37] and the highly saturated Shizen – Natur (1960) [p. 41] painted in Japan. There is nothing delicate or mimetic anymore in these new studio paintings. In the bright yellow work Untitled (1958), a large hollow diamond shape sits in the upper-left third of the canvas. It is outlined in blue, and the paint on its edges drips down to the border of the painting field. The center of this unmediated form is painted white, while the yellow background is kept rough, with areas left uncovered where other stages of the painting process break through. The sublime subtleties of Kenzo Okada’s work are left behind in favor of an expressiveness that vibrates between a state of existential urgency and liberated playfulness. There is a rawness in these paintings that exposes the “matter” of the medium itself—a new experiment that appears like an echo of Gutai’s proclamation for an art that “does not distort matter,” but rather keeps it “intact and exposes its characteristics,” a concrete experience of abstract space.

Teruko Yokoi, Untitled, 1958 oil on canvas 50 × 421/4 in. / 127 × 107.5 cm

Joan Mitchell in her rue Daguerre studio in Paris in September 1956, for LIFE article “Women Artists in Ascendance,” published May 13, 1957. Loomis Dean / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock

The white color field revealed inside this new signature diamond-shaped form in Untitled (1958) seems to have a compositional dimension that parallels the white spaces of Sam Francis’s paintings from these years, like Around the Blue (1957) or Blue Balls I (1960) expressing a “bleak modern sort of nothingness” (Tono). But there is another feel to Yokoi’s treatment. Her white is not simply empty space, but an impenetrable, tough, strongly layered presence bearing in each painting’s coloring and spatial dynamic a different psychological impact. In the yellow Untitled (1958) the white space encapsulated by the diamond, with its contrasting blue edges, appears as the visual paradox of a vital presence of emptiness.

Atsuko Tanaka installing Work (Bell) for the 3rd Genbi Exhibition at the Kyoto City Museum of Art in 1955 Courtesy: Kanayama Akira and Tanaka Atsuko Association

There is also something modern happening in Yokoi’s self-presentation in the studio photos. These images not only show her coming a long way from the 1953 Tokyo studio photos of a dapper young painter seated on a sofa in front of her easel; they also contradict the “bourgeois” image she allegedly had among her fellow New York artists for wearing a white lab-style coat when painting.41 Instead, Yokoi fashions herself here in the way that the New York Action Painters liked to present themselves: sitting on a studio floor amidst a scene of large scattered canvases that fill every inch of space, as in Helen Frankenthaler’s staged studio photos from 1956, or in the picture of Joan Mitchell taken in her Parisian studio in 1956 for the LIFE article “Women Artists in Ascendance.” Meanwhile, studio photos of, for example, Elaine de Kooning taken a few years earlier, in 1950, or of Atsuko Tanaka installing Work (Bell) at the 3rd Genbi Art Exhibition in 1955, show how much the 1950s were a tipping point for women artists’ self-presentation, going from formal yet fashionable and lady-like bourgeois styles to the casual bohemianism of the later 1950s. Yokoi also claims that the diamond motif came to her as a form that emerged from her unconscious: Around 1957 I started using the diamond form for some reason, but I can no longer remember why...I usually title my paintings only after they have been completed, and often the titles are inspired by the paintings themselves. I don’t paint with preconceived ideas or a concept.42 However, in 1958 another painting of this series is titled Samurai, and a later one from 1963 even more explicitly Kimura Shigenari, the Young Samurai which led Satonobu Spirig and Okuda to ask the artist about the background of this specific historic cultural reference and Yokoi confirmed the suggestion that the diamond shape might refer to a Samurai’s armor: “Yes, the diamond is associated with an angular suit of armor. There are also diamond-shaped emblems for samurai families” hinting to narratives of her own ancestry.43 25

The association of the diamond with a samurai’s armor could lend itself to a further feminist psychological reading, in the complex professional and changing biographical constellations and circumstances surrounding the artist in the late 1950s. Satonobu Spirig and Okuda conclude: It seems likely that Yokoi unconsciously linked this geometric form with her own traditions and memories, and, over time, transformed the diamond into an independent means of expression, an autonomous symbol that was well suited to produce a meaningful effect in modern abstract painting. The diamond introduces dynamic movement to a composition, and when cut off by the edge of the painting, it opens an imaginary space outside of the canvas.44 In Paris, Teruko Yokoi still explored her last New York experiment as we see in Shizen – Natur (1960). Between 1957 and 1980 Yokoi painted at least fifty works with diamonds as the favored motif, however, the shape becomes softer, integrated as an organic compositional feature in her abstracted landscapes. In the years following, taking her work from New York to Switzerland, she continued using her language of bright primary colors and her post-expressionist abstract style while Japanese-identified motifs came to the foreground. For a deeper understanding of Teruko Yokoi’s practice, “reflective nostalgia” as a historical emotion—so elaborately analyzed by Svetlana Boym—can be seen at the core of the artist’s creative drive: An “internalized cultural practice”45 seeking to create a genuine and experimental union between modern Western abstraction and a contemporary re-evaluation of Eastern artistic traditions. First a longing during her nomadic artistic journey in the midst of cultural renewal and political restauration in both East and West, in her maturing years she was able to give this stylistic union a sense of equilibrium transcending time, history and space, the former “whirlwind” of contemporaneity and the experience of cultural displacement.

eruko Yokoi surrounded by the works T at the Chelsea Hotel, New York, 1959

S vetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii.

2 Teruko Yokoi, “I’ve Always Been a Free Spirit,” interview by Anuschka Roshani, in Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York—Paris— Bern (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), 92–94. 3 Marta Dziewańska, “Teruko Yokoi: History and its Dangerous Supplement(s),” in Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York—Paris— Bern (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), 79. 4 Cf. Charles Mereweather, “Disjunctive Modernity. The Practice of Artistic Experimentation in Postwar Japan,” in Art Anti-Art Non-Art. Experimentation in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970, ed. Charles Merewether and Rika Iezumi Hiro (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 2007), 1–22. 5 Kuniko Satonobu Spirig and Osamu Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!’ On the ‘Japanesque’ in Teruko Yokoi’s Painting,” in Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York—Paris—Bern (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), 113. 6

Yokoi, “I’ve Always Been a Free Spirit,” 94.

7 Not only was Japan an economic boom and a fast growing industrialization in the post-war years, the “typhoon” that effectively changed the political landscape of Japan just before Yokoi’s visit was one of the largest social upheavals in history. In May and June of 1960 Japan was shaken by massive protests. They erupted over the passage of the “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security” (also known as “Anpo”) between Japan and the United States that significantly expanded and extended the impact of the American occupation. The democratic anti-Anpo protests induced countrywide general strikes and hundreds of thousands of people—farmers, factory workers, students, women’s organizations, etc.—came onto the streets day after day. 8 Cf. Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Japanese Views of the Void in Sam Francis’s Painting during the ‘Informel Whirlwind,’” in Around the Blues, 1957, 1962–3 by Sam Francis, Tate Research Publication, 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/in-focus/around-the-blues/japanese-views-of-thevoid, accessed 10 September 2019. 9

f. Alexandra Munroe, “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia: C Americanization and the culture of defeat in postwar Japan,” (talk at the conference: Postwar—Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, organized by Haus der Kunst at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich, 24 March 2014).

Partners in London, United Kingdom, 6 October – 26 November 2023. Cf. Nancy J. Troy: “Mondrian was my Guru: Charmion von Wiegand and Piet Mondrian in the 1940s and 1950s,” and Haema Sivanesan, “Charmion von Wiegand’s Vision of Modern Buddhism” in Charmion von Wiegand: Expanding Modernism, ed. Maja Wismer (Prestel Kunstmuseum Basel: Munich/London/ New York, 2023), 67–117. 12 C f. Alexandra Munroe, “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia: Americanization and the culture of defeat in postwar Japan,” (talk at the conference: Postwar—Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, organized by Haus der Kunst at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich, 24 March 2014). 13 T his alone is extraordinary, as Nagoya was one of the most targeted cities in Japan due to its industrial significance for the war— for example, Nagoya Castle, used as a military command post, was largely destroyed. The city was the site of the Mitsubishi factory, one of the largest centers of the Japanese military aircraft industry. As such, it was ultimately a site for psychological warfare aimed at disrupting the city and damaging the morale of citizens. 14 T he movie Godzilla premiered in Japan in 1954. A prehistoric creature awakened by nuclear radiation Godzilla was conceived for the atomic age as a symbol that makes the violence of the past a subcultural aberration. Munroe, “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia,” 2014. 15 Munroe, “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia,” 2014. 16 Munroe, “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia,” 2014. 17 “ The years immediately after the end of World War II were filled with the inauguration of new museums and the formation of new arts organizations and performance groups.” Mereweather, “Disjunctive Modernity,” 2007. 18 Munroe, “Godzilla’s Schizophrenia,” 2014. 19 Jirō Yoshihara, “Gutai Art Manifesto,” transl. Reiko Tomii in Gutai: Splendid Playground, ed. Ming Tiampo, Alexandra Munroe (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), 18–19. 20 Ming Tiampo, Under Each Other’s Spell: Gutai and New York (New York: Pollock Krasner House Study Center, 2009), 1. 21 T oshimitsu also introduced Francis to the art teacher and patron Teshigahara, who commissioned Francis in 1956 to paint a mural for the headquarters of his Ikebana school in Tokyo. 22 W inther-Tamaki, “Japanese Views of the Void in Sam Francis’s Painting,” 2019.

10 Yokoi, Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York—Paris—Bern, 92.

23 Yokoi, “I’ve Always Been a Free Spirit,” 95.

11 A nke Kempkes, Even Poets were Jealous of These…, curated by Linn Zhang and Anke Kempkes, exhibition held at Vermillon

24 She was very successful at winning prizes in her West Coast years, and her abstract works were exhibited in 1955 at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Two later shows of figurative “ink and wash-drawings” depicting cityscapes at San Francisco’s California Palace gained Yokoi also considerable commercial success—the only one of the years to come. 25 M ary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018), 39. 26 J oan Mitchell, interview by Dorothy Seckler, Archives of American Art, May 21, 1965, in Gabriel, Ninth Street Women, 378.

35 Satonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 115. 36 Marta Dziewańska, “Teruko Yokoi: History and its Dangerous Supplement(s),” 79. 37 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 111. 38 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 113.

27 Yokoi, “I’ve Always Been a Free Spirit,” 96.

39 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 113.

28 Mitchell only stayed at the Chelsea Hotel briefly, when she and Barney Rosset returned to NYC from France in 1949 and were looking for an apartment. She never settled in and “lived” there.

40 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 114.

29 Yokoi, “I’ve Always Been a Free Spirit,” 96.

41 Therese Bhattacharya-Stettler, “Reflected Signs,” in Teruko Yokoi: Mond, Sonne, Jahreszeiten (Basel: Wolfsberg, 2010), 6.

30 ArtNews editor Tom Hess, an important critic and champion of the group, would call them the “sparkling Amazons who emerged in the flower of American painting.” Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women, 9. 31 T eruko Yokoi was also invited to two group exhibitions in the United States: the Philadelphia Annual Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1957, and the Washington Biennial at Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1958. Additionally, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston approached Yokoi in 1957 through her San Francisco connections: “The Institute of Contemporary Art is planning a research catalogue which will try to ascertain the Oriental contribution to American painting.” (Personal Photo Album of Teruko Yokoi).

42 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 112. 43 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 112. 44 S atonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 113. 45 Zhang, Even Poets were Jealous of These…, 2023

32 “ I did meet Kenzo Okada, who was very important to me. He was like my older brother—a very good friend. He gave me a lot of support; he didn’t have children. He was intelligent but not an intellectual.” Yokoi, Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York—Paris— Bern, 95. 33 O ne can see a similar lineage in the paintings and drawings of Agnes Martin. The artist is predominantly considered a part of Minimal Art due to the reduced and rigid mathematical structures of her paintings and drawings. But Martin was far senior to the artists associated with this movement, and many of her work titles refer not to conceptual properties of the works, but to nature and seasonal sensations. Martin saw geometry as “a different kind of nature,” and she associated herself more with Abstract Expressionism. And as for Bridget Riley, her work has, by her own account, “nothing to do with Op Art but all to do with Cezanne.” 34 Satonobu Spirig and Okuda, “‘Oh! These Falling Forms Look like Waka!,’” 115.

Works on Canvas

Autumn, 1957 oil on canvas 38 × 501/8 in. / 96.5 × 127.3 cm

June, 1958 oil on canvas 301/8 × 401/8 in. / 76.5 × 101.9 cm

Untitled, 1958 oil on canvas 397/8 × 351/4 in. / 101.3 × 89.5 cm

Winter, 1958 oil on canvas 501/4 × 36 in. / 127.3 × 91.4 cm

Shizen – Natur, 1960 oil on canvas 571/8 × 445/8 in. / 145.1 × 113.3 cm

Autumn Night, 1965 oil on canvas 453/4 × 35 in. / 116.2 × 88.9 cm

March, 1965 oil on canvas 125/8 × 193/4 in. / 32.1 × 50.2 cm

Untitled, 1965 oil on canvas 283/4 × 361/8 in. / 73 × 91.8 cm

Herbstwald, 1965 oil on canvas 575/8 × 273/4 in. / 146.4 × 70.5 cm

Blue Night, 1966 oil on canvas 235/8 × 275/8 / 60 × 70.2 cm

First Snow, 1968 oil on canvas 291/8 × 567/8 in. / 74 × 144.5 cm

Herbstgedicht, 1968 oil on canvas 197/8 × 241/8 in. / 50.5 × 61.3 cm

Lauschen II (Nocturne), 1969 oil on canvas 575/8 × 275/8 in. / 146.4 × 70.2 cm

Untitled, 1969 oil on canvas 311/2 × 235/8 in. / 80 × 61 cm

Untitled, 1969 oil on canvas 193/4 × 133/4 in. / 50.2 × 33.8 cm

Untitled, 1970/2007 oil and acrylic with metallic colors on canvas 255/8 × 193/4 in. / 65.1 × 50.2 cm following spread: Mond/Schnee/Blumen, 1975 triptych, each panel: 767/8 × 511/4 in. / 195.3 × 130.2 cm overall: 767/8 × 1533/4 / 195.3 × 390.6 cm

Mond/Schnee/Blumen I, 1979 oil on canvas 591/8 × 213/4 in. / 150.2 × 55.2 cm

Violet, 1980 oil on canvas 453/4 × 32 in. / 116.2 × 81.3 cm

Works on Paper

Untitled, 1957 oil on paper 147/8 × 11 in. / 37.8 × 27.9 cm

Untitled, 1957–8 oil and gouache on paper 15 × 237/8 in. / 38.1 × 60.6 cm

Untitled, 1957–8 oil and gouache on paper 271/4 × 201/8 in. / 69.2 × 51.1 cm

Untitled, 1957–8 collage, oil, and gouache on paper 191/4 × 241/2 in. / 48.9 × 62.2 cm

Untitled, 1957–8 gouache on brown paper 193/4 × 253/8 in. / 50.2 × 64.5 cm

Green and Gray, 1960 gouache on paper 195/8 × 255/8 in. / 49.9 × 65.1 cm

Red #1, 1960 gouache on paper 217/8 × 293/8 in. / 55.6 × 74.6 cm

Red and Green, 1960 gouache on paper 127/8 × 16 in. / 32.7 × 40.6 cm

Red, White, and Blue, 1960 gouache on paper 101/8 × 12 in. / 25.7 × 30.5 cm

Untitled, 1968 egg tempera on paper 187/8 × 253/8 in. / 47.9 × 64.5 cm

Untitled, 1975 egg tempera with metallic color on paper 21 × 29 in. / 53.3 × 73.7 cm

Untitled, 1981 egg tempera on paper 247/8 × 183/8 in. / 63.2 × 46.7 cm

Untitled, 1983 egg tempera on paper 221/2 × 311/2 in. / 57.1 × 80 cm

Snow as Darkness Falls, 1986 egg tempera on paper 151/4 × 201/2 in. / 38.7 × 52.1 cm

Brightness, 1989 egg tempera on paper 143/4 × 191/8 in. / 37.5 × 48.6 cm

Nocturne, 1989 egg tempera on paper 121/2 × 185/8 in. / 31.8 × 47.3 cm

Untitled, 1989 egg tempera with metallic color on paper 253/8 × 187/8 in. / 64.5 × 47.9 cm

Untitled, 1989 egg tempera on paper 22 × 295/8 in. / 55.9 × 75.2 cm

Untitled, 1993 egg tempera on paper 221/4 × 293/4 in. / 56.5 × 75.6 cm

Untitled, 1996 egg tempera with metallic color on paper 251/8 × 187/8 in. / 63.8 × 47.9 cm

Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm

100

Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm

101

Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm

102

Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm

103

Untitled, 1999 egg tempera on paper 265/8 × 191/2 in. / 67.6 × 49.5 cm

104

Untitled, ca. 2000 egg tempera on paper 15 × 107/8 in. / 38.1 × 25.4 cm

106

Untitled, 2006 egg tempera on paper 121/2 × 123/4 in. / 31.8 × 32.4 cm

108

Peony, 2012 egg tempera and pastel on paper 111/8 × 143/4 in. / 28.3 × 37.5 cm

109

Gingko, 2014 egg tempera on paper 157/8 × 12 in. / 40.3 × 30.5 cm

110

Untitled, 2015 egg tempera on paper 107/8 × 143/4 in. / 27.6 × 37.5 cm

111

Works in Exhibition p. 33

Autumn, 1957 oil on canvas 38 × 501/8 in. / 96.5 × 127.3 cm

p. 35 June, 1958 oil on canvas 301/8 × 401/8 in. / 76.5 × 101.9 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020. Nr. 18 Literature: Kornfeld, Eberhard W. Teruko Yokoi: Schnee Mond Blumen II. Bern: Galerie Kornfeld, 2012. Reproduced, pp. 118–119. Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York— Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 46. p. 37 Untitled, 1958 oil on canvas 397/8 × 351/4 in. / 101.3 × 89.5 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020, Nr. 24 Literature: Kornfeld, Eberhard W. Teruko Yokoi: Schnee Mond Blumen II. Bern: Galerie Kornfeld, 2012. Reproduced, p. 83. Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 53. p. 39 Winter, 1958 oil on canvas 501/4 × 36 in. / 127.3 × 91.4 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2016 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020, Nr. 15 Literature: Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 4 p. 41 Shizen – Natur, 1960 oil on canvas 571/8 × 445/8 in. / 145.1 × 113.3 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern 2009 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020, Nr. 26 Literature: Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 55. p. 43 Autumn Night, 1965 oil on canvas 453/4 × 35 in. / 116.2 × 88.9 cm

p. 45 March, 1965 oil on canvas 125/8 × 193/4 in. / 32.1 × 50.2 cm Literature: Bhattacharya-Stettler, Therese. Teruko Yokoi: Mond, Sonne, Jahreszeiten. Ermatingen: Wolfsberg, 2010. Reproduced, p. 25. Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 108. p. 47 Untitled, 1965 oil on canvas 283/4 × 361/8 in. / 73 × 91.8 cm p. 49 Herbstwald, 1965 oil on canvas 575/8 × 273/4 in. / 146.4 × 70.5 cm Exhibited: Wolfsberg, Ermatingen, 2010/11 p. 51 Blue Night, 1966 oil on canvas 235/8 × 275/8 in. / 60 × 70.2 cm p. 52–3 First Snow, 1968 oil on canvas 291/8 × 567/8 in. / 74 × 144.5 cm p. 55 Herbstgedicht, 1968 oil on canvas 197/8 × 241/8 in. / 50.5 × 61.3 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020. Nr. 37 Literature: Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 67. p. 57 Lauschen II (Nocturne), 1969 oil on canvas 575/8 × 275/8 in. / 146.4 × 70.2 cm Literature: Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 109. p. 59 Untitled, 1969 oil on canvas 311/2 × 235/8 in. / 80 × 61 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020. Nr. 39 Literature: Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 69.

p. 61 Untitled, 1969 oil on canvas 193/4 × 133/4 in. / 50.2 × 33.8 cm p. 63 Untitled, 1970/2007 oil and acrylic with metallic colors on canvas 255/8 × 193/4 in. / 65.1 × 50.2 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2016 pp. 64–5 Mond/Schnee/Blumen, 1979 oil on canvas each panel: 767/8 × 511/4 in. / 195.3 × 130.2 cm overall: 767/8 × 1533/4 / 195.3 × 390.6 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2012 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 Literature: Kornfeld, Eberhard W. Teruko Yokoi: Schnee Mond Blumen II. Bern: Galerie Kornfeld, 2012. Reproduced, pp. 28–29. Dziewańska, Marta, et. al. Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo— New York—Paris—Bern. Edited by Marta Dziewańska and Nina Zimmer. Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Reproduced, p. 109. p. 67 Mond/Schnee/Blumen I, 1979 oil on canvas 591/8 × 213/4 in. / 150.2 × 55.2 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2012 p. 69 Violet, 1980 acrylic on canvas 453/4 × 32 in. / 116.2 × 81.3 cm Exhibited: in Auktion 2010, Galerie Kornfeld Auktionen AG p. 72 Untitled, 1957 oil on paper 147/8 × 11 in. / 37.8 × 27.9 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2019 p. 73 Untitled, 1957 oil on paper 147/8 × 11 in. / 37.8 × 27.9 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2019 Untitled (New York, Central Park), 1957 Indian ink with bamboo pen on paper 115/8 × 153/4 in. / 29.8 × 40.2 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2016 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020

p. 75 Untitled, 1957–58 oil and gouache on paper 15 × 237/8 in. / 38.1 × 60.6 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 p. 77 Untitled, 1957–58 oil and gouache on paper 271/4 × 201/8 in. / 69.2 × 51.1 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 p. 78 Untitled, 1957–58 collage, oil, and gouache on paper 191/4 × 241/2 in. / 48.9 × 62.2 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 p. 79 Untitled, 1957–58 gouache on brown paper 193/4 × 253/8 in. / 50.2 × 64.5 cm Exhibited: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2022 p. 80 Green and Gray, 1960 gouache on paper 195/8 × 255/8 in. / 49.9 × 65.1 cm Exhibited: Martha Jackson Gallery, David Anderson, New York, 1960, Nr. 6872 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 p. 81 Red #1, 1960 gouache on paper 217/8 × 293/8 in. / 55.6 × 74.6 cm Exhibited: Martha Jackson Gallery, David Anderson, New York, 1960, Nr. 6873 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 p. 82 Red and Green, 1960 gouache on paper 127/8 × 16 in. / 32.7 × 40.6 cm Exhibited: Martha Jackson Gallery, David Anderson, New York, 1960, Nr. 6874 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 p. 83 Red, White and Blue, 1960 gouache on paper 101/8 × 12 in. / 25.7 × 30.5 cm Exhibited: Martha Jackson Gallery, David Anderson, New York, 1960, Nr. 6875 Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020

Works in Exhibition p. 85 Untitled, 1968 egg tempera on paper 187/8 × 253/8 in. / 47.9 × 64.5 cm p. 87 Untitled, 1975 egg tempera with metallic color on paper 21 × 29 in. / 53.3 × 73.7 cm p. 89 Untitled, 1981 egg tempera on paper 247/8 × 183/8 in. / 63.2 × 46.7 cm p. 90 Untitled, 1983 egg tempera on paper 221/2 × 311/2 in. / 57.1 × 80 cm p. 91 Snow as Darkness Falls, 1986 egg tempera on paper 151/4 × 201/2 in. / 38.7 × 52.1 cm Literature: Rotzler, Willy. Teruko Yokoi: Die fünf Jahreszeiten. Bern: Eigenverlag Teruko Yokoi, 1990. Reproduced, p. 93. p. 92 Brightness, 1989 egg tempera on paper 143/4 × 191/8 in. / 37.5 × 48.6 cm Literature: Rotzler, Willy. Teruko Yokoi: Die fünf Jahreszeiten. Bern: Eigenverlag Teruko Yokoi, 1990. Reproduced, p. 15. p. 93 Nocturne, 1989 egg tempera on paper 121/2 × 185/8 in. / 31.8 × 47.3 cm p. 95 Untitled, 1989 egg tempera with metallic color on paper 253/8 × 187/8 in. / 64.5 × 47.9 cm p. 96 Untitled, 1989 egg tempera on paper 22 × 295/8 in. / 55.9 × 75.2 cm p. 97 Untitled, 1993 egg tempera on paper 221/4 × 293/4 in. / 56.5 × 75.6 cm p. 99 Untitled, 1996 egg tempera with metallic color on paper 251/8 × 187/8 in. / 63.8 × 47.9 cm

p. 100 Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2012 Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2019 p. 101 Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2012 Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2019 p. 102 Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2012 Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2019 p. 103 Untitled, 1999 India ink on paper 6 × 91/2 in. / 15.2 × 24.1 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2012 Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2019 p. 105 Untitled, 1999 egg tempera on paper 265/8 × 191/2 in. / 67.6 × 49.5 cm Exhibited: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 2019 p. 107 Untitled, ca. 2000 egg tempera on paper 15 × 107/8 in. / 38.1 × 25.4 cm p. 108 Untitled, 2006 egg tempera on paper 121/2 × 123/4 in. / 31.8 × 32.4 cm p. 109 Peony, 2012 egg tempera and pastel on paper 111/8 × 143/4 in. / 28.3 × 37.5 cm p. 110 Gingko, 2014 egg tempera on paper 157/8 × 12 in. / 40.3 × 30.5 cm p. 111 Untitled, 2015 egg tempera on paper 107/8 × 143/4 in. / 27.6 × 37.5 cm

Biography

Teruko Yokoi was born in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan in 1924 and soon after moved to Tsushima. As a young child, Yokoi received oil painting lessons from Kouki Suzuki and was exposed to haiku poetry and calligraphy through her father. Yokoi trained in methods of traditional Japanese painting, moving to Tokyo in 1949 and continuing her studies with the painter Takanori Kinoshita. Yokoi soon developed a fervor for European contemporary art, and in 1953, in the wake of World War II, left Japan for San Francisco. Arriving in 1954, Yokoi spent a formative year at the California School of Fine Arts entrenched in a milieu of artists and writers. As one of two Japanese students studying at the school, Yokoi swiftly turned further towards abstraction, creating works which responded to a distinctly modern visual language. During her studies, Yokoi received many accolades: a Top Honor Scholarship, fourth prize at the Seventy-Fourth Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, and a scholarship from the Japan Society Scholarship. Receiving a grant for her studies in 1955, Yokoi moved to New York, enrolling in the school of the legendary German Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. It was during this time that Yokoi met Kenzo Okada, an Abstract Expressionist Japanese-born painter working in America, who moved from Tokyo to New York in 1950. Okada, among many others, became friends with Mark Rothko, whom he introduced to Yokoi. In 1957, Yokoi met Sam Francis and the couple married in 1959 and welcomed their daughter that same year. Yokoi, Francis, and their daughter Kayo resided in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel alongside vanguards such as Joan Mitchell. At this juncture, Yokoi’s work grew increasingly concerned with the use of color, with the artist producing works that put varying colors in conversation with one another. In 1960, Yokoi moved to Paris, and from abroad, participated in a group exhibition at the storied Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It was in Paris where she would meet Arnold Rüdlinger, a meeting that would lead to her first major museum exhibition in Basel at the Kunsthalle in 1964. In 1962, the artist permanently relocated to Bern, Switzerland, where she would remain until her death in 2020. In 2004, the Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Museum was founded in Ena, Gifu by Teruko Yokoi’s lifelong friend Shingo Kamada. In 1982, Yokoi met a poverty-stricken Kamada at a train station while he was traveling through Switzerland. Yokoi offered him food and the ability to use her kitchen, and the two became friends. Kamada grew a deep appreciation for her work and vowed to purchase her paintings once he was financially able to. Kamada founded the successful confectionary company, Enakawakamiya, and established the museum next to the original location of his store. In autumn of 2023, Yokoi’s ashes were buried at the museum per her wish. The establishment of the Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Museum was followed by the creation of the Teruko Yokoi Fuji Museum of Art in Shizuoka in 2008. Owners of a papermill, the Kawaguchi family began to purchase works by Teruko Yokoi, and upon hearing of the museum in Ena, they were inspired to build their own museum for Yokoi. Yokoi has held over ninety solo exhibitions beginning with the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Martha Jackson Gallery, New York; Galerie Kornfeld, Bern; and most recently, with Marlborough Gallery, New York. Her last major retrospective entitled Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo—New York—Paris—Bern was presented by the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 2020.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the many individuals who have contributed to this publication and exhibition documenting the oeuvre of Teruko Yokoi. Her name was first mentioned to us by Debra Burchett-Lere, Executive Director of the Sam Francis Foundation. It was Debra’s suggestion to take a much-needed look at Yokoi’s legacy that directed us to her daughter, Kayo Malik. Upon meeting Kayo, we were then directed to former assistant of Yokoi, Michaela Muhmenthaler of Galerie Kornfeld who shared her extensive archival research which we are publishing here for the first time. Extensive documentation was also provided though the collaboration with Tai Wallace. Published here is a text prepared by the internationally active curator, art historian, and critic, Anke Kempkes. A leading voice in the area of feminist art history, she has held the position of Chief Curator at the Kunsthalle Basel and the Muzeum Susch, and lectures on the topic at the Zurich University of the Arts. Laura Langeluddecke and Josephine Rapson de Pauley from Marlborough Fine Art London assisted with the initial compilation of documentation in Bern which was followed by a more in depth review by our archivist, Marissa Moxley. All of the works were rephotographed upon arrival in New York by Pierre Le Hors which subsequently was transformed into this publication by Mariah Tarvainen on the occasion of her first one-person presentation in the United States. Every project such as this have many working facets that have been beautifully attended to by the members here of the Marlborough Gallery. Douglas K. Walla

Teruko Yokoi with her daughter, Kayo Malik, at Schloss Thun, 2019

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Marlborough New York Douglas Kent Walla CEO dkwalla@marlboroughgallery.com

Peter Park Registrar park@marlboroughgallery.com

Sebastian Sarmiento Director sebastian@marlboroughgallery.com

Marissa Moxley Senior Archivist moxley@marlboroughgallery.com

Vesper Lu Assistant to Sebastian Sarmiento vesper@marlboroughgallery.com

Juul Van Haver Archivist juul@marlboroughgallery.com

Alexa Burzinski Director burzinski@marlboroughgallery.com

Isabel Wardlaw Gallery Assistant wardlaw@marlboroughgallery.com

Nicole Sisti Director sisti@marlboroughgallery.com

John Willis Warehouse Manager willis@marlboroughgallery.com

Bianca Barquet Director of Graphics bianca@marlboroughgallery.com

Anthony Nici Master Crater nici@marlboroughgallery.com

Parks Busby Graphics Assistant busby@marlboroughgallery.com

Jeff Serino Preparator serino@marlboroughgallery.com

Mariah Tarvainen Design Director tarvainen@marlboroughgallery.com

Brian Burke Preparator burke@marlboroughgallery.com

Meghan Boyle Kirtley Administrator boyle@marlboroughgallery.com

Matt Castillo Preparator castillo@marlboroughgallery.com

Greg O’Connor Comptroller greg@marlboroughgallery.com Dibomba Jean-Marie Kazadi Bookkeeper kazadi@marlboroughgallery.com Carly Johnson Registrar johnson@marlboroughgallery.com

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Teruko Yokoi March 7 – April 20, 2024 Marlborough New York 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

Voyager: Teruko Yokoi’s Landscape of Abstraction © 2024 Anke Kempkes All rights reserved. Used with permission. All works © The Estate of Teruko Yokoi Editor: Marissa Moxley Photography: Pierre Le Hors Design and Layout: Mariah Tarvainen Printing and Binding: Permanent Press © 2024 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. First Edition ISBN: 978-0-89797-456-1