Genichiro Inokuma

Japanese painter Genichiro Inokuma went to America in 1955, initially en route via Paris, where he switched to abstract painting. During a 20-year stay in New York, he changed his style of painting many times, influenced by several Western painters. He produced large canvases of mainly horizontal linear composition that, although abstract, suggest city planners’ blueprints, ladders, rail tracks, derricks, cranes, urban maps, industrial landscapes, especially in single colors or black on white. He also had a phase of painting female nudes, mostly when he stayed in Japan. In 1975 after suffering a stroke, he began spending the winters in Hawai’i and the rest of his time in Tokyo. Before his death he donated all of his works to the city of Marugame, where the Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1991.

Inokuma studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but had to interrupt his studies several times due to poor health. His first appearance at the Emperor Exhibition came in 1926. In 1936, Inokuma founded the Shinseisaku-ha-kyokai (New Creation Group), moving to Paris in 1938, where he was highly inspired by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. When World War II broke out, Inokuma returned to Japan. From there, he was sent to occupied China to study its culture, later also to the Philippines and Burma as a war painter. After kidney surgery in 1944, he was evacuated to Tsukui in Kanagawa Prefecture along with several other artists. After the war he continued to exhibit with the New Creation Group as well as world-wide. During this period, he also started producing murals and working as a designer.