Random Article Summary #161

Teiji Takai (1911–1986) was a Japanese painter best known in the 1930s as a Surrealist. After World War II, he moved to the United States in 1954 and became recognized as an Abstract Expressionist artist. Later in his career, he made semi-figurative works using simple motifs such as fish and birds. His art has been collected by major museums and institutions in Japan and the United States. These include places such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. His work is also held internationally, including at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Montana. Takai was born in Osaka and moved as a child to Wakayama, where he began studying oil painting at junior high. After working in his uncle’s Japan Air Transport Institute, he studied at the Shinanobashi Institute of Western Painting, taught by several prominent artists, and then moved to Tokyo in 1930, where his work was selected for the Nika Exhibition. He became known as a Surrealist painter, helping found several artist groups and taking part in their exhibitions, while also illustrating literary works. Around 1940, wartime repression increased and Surrealists were targeted, leading to the dissolution of the Ninth Room Society in 1941 and a shift in Takai’s style toward more figurative painting. He won major Nika awards in 1940–1941 and later showed war-related themes, including landscapes of mainland China and war scenes. Takai visited the front in China as a military painter in 1938 and 1942, and some of his war paintings are held by the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama. After World War II, the Nika Association was brought back, but several artists—including Seiji Tōgō, Junkichi Mukai, and others—split off to form new groups such as the Kōdō Bijutsu Association and the Niki-kai. Teiji Takai helped found the Kōdō Bijutsu Association in 1945, taking part in exhibitions and producing bright, vivid figurative paintings, along with dreamy images of women. He left the association in 1951. In December 1954, Teiji Takai arrived in Hawaii, where he held two solo shows in Honolulu over the next seven months. In 1955 he moved to New York and continued exhibiting, including solo shows in 1956 and later at the Poindexter Gallery, where he became established as an Abstract Expressionist artist. His early works were known for energetic gestures and vivid colors, but around 1961 his style shifted toward large blank spaces and quiet areas, and two of his paintings were later acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Around 1963, Teiji Takai shifted away from his earlier Abstract Expressionist style and began painting semi-figurative subjects such as fish, birds, butterflies, plants, the sun, shellfish, horses, and people. His bold, colorful fish series used large deformed forms and careful composition without turning into mere graphic design, which he called “joyism.” He had major exhibitions starting with a solo show in Tokyo in 1963, including retrospective shows in 1979 and the next year, and he died in Tokyo on June 26, 1986 at age 75.