On Kawara: Early Works

Born in Kariya, Japan, Kawara moved to Tokyo in 1951 immediately after graduating from high school, where he established himself as a key member of the rising postwar avant-garde. Kawara quickly distinguished himself from his peers; rather than directly depicting atrocities that remained fresh in the minds of Japanese citizens, he chose to evoke their psychological resonances, marshaling form and content in service of one another to channel elusive feelings of unease, anger, and disillusionment.

Fewer than a dozen of Kawara’s paintings from the 1950s remain extant; among them, Stones Thrown (1956) is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Featuring recurring motifs that collide with kaleidoscopically patterned, claustrophobic settings, these vivid compositions seem diametrically opposed to the straightforward works for which Kawara would later become known. Yet, in many ways these paintings inform those which followed, demonstrating the artist’s nascent interest in approaches on which he would later elaborate to great effect, including serial repetition, abstracted forms, chromatic expression, and existentialism.

Golden Home (1956) depicts a colorful domestic interior whose patterned walls, tiled floors, and delicate furniture have been overtaken by a swarm of crawling gray maggots. The motif of worms and maggots recurs in Kawara’s earlier series of drawings, The Bathroom (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), where the vermin occasionally appear on dishes or walls in the same spaces as human figures.

In this ominous scene absent of figures, the viewer observes from below as if crouching next to the table and stool wedged in the corner of the room. As a result, the furniture looms architecturally large, yet appears inconsequential against the volume of ins covering its form. This juxtaposition of the larvae against the repeated and concentric patterning of the surrounding surfaces evokes the idea of horror vacui, heightened by the composition’s skewed perspective, which is in turn reinforced by the irregularly shaped canvas.

Untitled (1956) is a kind of still life, depicting at eerily enlarged scale a white-clothed tabletop crawling with long red-and-pink worms whose wriggling forms move to join others on a large rounded dish in the right-center of the composition. The motif of a bowl or plate surrounded by and covered with worms (but noticeably absent food) first appeared in a preliminary drawing for Kawara’s 1952 painting Pregnant Woman; motifs of worms and maggots also recur in the drawing series The Bathroom (like Pregnant Woman, held in the collection of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), where the vermin occasionally appear on dishes or walls in the same spaces as human figures.

Absentees (1956) depicts a scene of agitation and entrapment, showing dozens of limbs outstretched through the gridded bars of prison cells whose silvery-gray stone walls contrast eerily with the arms’ red shirtsleeves. The figures’ fists and hands reach outward—whether in want or in protest is open to interpretation—toward passageways that are empty save for scattered and stacked empty bowls. Both corridors are met on either end by illuminated portals whose entryways are marked by another grid of prison bars. Here, the skewed perspective forces the viewer to take on a level of discomfort in spectating the crowded enclosed spaces.

When this painting debuted in the 8th Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in March 1956, Kawara insisted on discussing only the way in which the work was made, not its content. He explained that the work began with his sketching several preparatory drawings on paper over the course of one and a half months, followed by two to three more months completing the canvas. Kawara stated, “How I got the idea for this work or how I decided to express this idea are not at issue here. Rather I will confine myself to describing the technical process by which I created this work, because that is all I am certain of.”

The composition of Flood (1955) is a rare instance of the artist acknowledging the influence of a real-life event on his early work. Among the first of his shaped-canvas paintings, the work is based on the Northern Kyushu flood of June 1953, a catastrophic natural disaster that was caused by three days of heavy rain and resulted in the death or loss of more than one thousand people. In Kawara’s interpretation, ropy, twig-like forms in dark green and blue-black traverse the canvas in bunches, intersecting and tangling as they appear to fall in pieces toward an abyssal space beyond. Additional layers appear in the form of gridded planes resembling thatched or tiled roofs. While perhaps suggestive of photographs of driftwood and piled-up debris from the 1953 flood, this imagery of intertwining cords is also reminiscent of recurring motifs in Kawara’s earlier series of drawings Events in a Warehouse (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), where many compositions show pipes or wires dynamically criss-crossing the picture plane, oppressively filling the contained spaces depicted within.

In Flood, the perspectival disorientation is reinforced both by the composition as well as the irregularly shaped canvas, which together inhibit the viewer’s ability to ground themselves among the teeming mass that seems to ricochet off the picture’s angled edges. Further provoking discomfort, the cylindrical structures are covered in crawling ants whose grayish-beige bodies almost glow in contrast against the dark expanse of tangled forms.