Kenzo Okada

Kenzo Okada (Yokohama, 1902 – Tokyo, 1982) was a Japanese-born painter who spent much of his career in the United States. He is regarded as the first Japanese-American artist working in the Abstract Expressionist style to gain international acclaim, which makes him an important figure in the history of Asian American art.

Born in Yokohama into a wealthy family, Okada faced his father's opposition to his wish to become an artist. After his father's death he enrolled in the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but left in 1924 for Paris, where he worked with the fellow Japanese expatriate Tsuguharu Foujita and exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1927. Back in Japan he joined the Second Section Society and became known for portraits of women and views of French cityscapes, while his surfaces gradually turned cooler in colour.

In 1950 he moved to New York, where Abstract Expressionism initially puzzled him. After a period of trial and error he developed a method of wiping away paint and laying thin, loosely dissolved layers over the canvas, producing a lyrical, textured abstraction. The dealer Betty Parsons supported him for about thirty years and gave him his first New York solo show in 1953. At the 1958 Venice Biennale he won the Astorre Meyer Prize and the UNESCO Prize. His work, linked to traditional Japanese aesthetics, was popularised under the name Yugenism.

Okada's works are held by major American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, and in Japan, where his widow donated many paintings to Akita and to the Kitasato Institute. His work featured in the 1997 touring exhibition Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions and in the 2008 survey Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970.