Masaaki Yamada1929~2010 山田正亮

Yamada Masaaki, born in 1929 in Ebara, Tokyo, was one of postwar Japan's leading abstract painters. After exhibiting at the first Yomiuri Independants in 1949, he studied under Hasegawa Saburo from 1953 and began his signature "Work" series in 1956, which he continued for nearly 40 years until 1995. His stripe paintings gained wide critical recognition after the 1981 exhibition "The 1960s: A Turning Point in Contemporary Art." From 2001 he began the monochrome "Color" series, and he died of bile duct cancer on July 18, 2010 at age 81. A major retrospective, "endless: Yamada Masaaki's Paintings," was held at the National Museums of Modern Art in Kyoto and Tokyo in 2016.