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Distributed for Hirmer Publishers

Hundertwasser

Japan and the Avant-garde

Hundertwasser was a key figure in the international avant-garde art scene in the years just after World War II. This volume takes a close look at an under-studied aspect of his work: the deep influence of Japanese art and philosophy that can be traced in his painting.
Like many European artists in the 1950s, Hundertwasser viewed the Far East as a source of a new, more open concept of art, free of the dispiriting weight of the Western tradition. He was fascinated by the striking woodcuts of Japanese masters Hiroshige and Hokusai, and his study of their work, along with his long-lasting engagement with Taoism and Zen Buddhism, greatly influenced his experimental compositions and action paintings of the period. An early friendship with Akria Kito and his 1961 marriage to his Japanese life partner provided further fuel to Hundertwasser’s artistic explorations.
A beautifully produced volume that offers a wholly new way of thinking about a potent figure in twentieth-century art, Hundertwasser will appeal to fans of the European and Japanese traditions alike.


256 pages | 160 color plates | 9 1/4 x 11 1/5 | © 2013

Art: European Art, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian Art


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Table of Contents

Foreword

      Agnes Husslein-Arco

Hundertwasser and His Works in Japan, 1961

      Tomoko Mamine

Hundertwasser in the Artistic Avant-Garde Network

      Robert Fleck

Hundertwasser: Performance as Cultural Criticism

      Axel Köhne

Traces of Far Eastern Thought in Vienna’s Postwar Modernism

      Harald Krejci

A Stranger in Tokyo

      Shin’Ichiro Osaki

Ornament and Hundertwasser

      Andrea Hubin

Appendix

Chronology of the Work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Bibliography

Index

Lenders

Authors’ Biographies

Colophon

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