Kenzo Okada

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Kenzo Okada (岡田 謙三 "Okada Kenzō" September 28, 1902 &ndash; July 25, 1982) was a Japanese-born American painter.

According to Michelle Stuart, “when Okada came to the United States he was already a mature painter, well considered in his native Japan. To American abstraction Okada brought civilized restraint, an elegance of device and an unusual gift for poetic transmutation of natural forms.”

Biography

Kenzo Okada (1902–1982) was an American painter of Japanese birth. In 1922 he entered the department of Western painting at Tokyo School of Fine Arts, called today Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, but in 1924 left for France where he studied with fellow Japanese expatriate Tsugouharu Foujita, executing paintings of urban subjects. In 1927 he returned to Japan, where he exhibited widely.

In 1950 he moved to New York City, where he produced abstract paintings. Undoubtedly stimulated by Abstract Expressionism, these nevertheless display a strong Japanese sensibility and feeling for form. His paintings from the 1950s reveal subtle changes in the natural world through the use of imagery constructed with delicate, sensitive colour tonalities, floating within the compositional space. In 1953 he began to exhibit his abstract expressionist paintings with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City.

During the 1970s he painted numerous...
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