Kenzo Okada1902~1982 岡田謙三

Kenzo Okada (1902-1982) was a Japanese-American painter born in Yokohama. After studying Western painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he went to France and studied under Tsuguharu Foujita, becoming a popular Nika-kai painter known for portraits of women. In 1950 he moved to New York, where amid the dominance of Abstract Expressionism he developed his own abstract style called “Yugenism,” combining subtle color fields with a Japanese sensibility, and became the first Japanese-born artist to gain major international acclaim in abstract art. He won the Astor Mailer Prize at the 1958 Venice Biennale (the first Japanese to do so) and the Mainichi Art Award in 1967.