If your knowledge of Taro Okamoto's work begins and ends with the sculpture "Tower of the Sun" that he created for the 1970 Osaka Expo, a visit to "Taro Okamoto and His Contemporaries in the Post-War Era," now at the Setagaya Art Museum, is in order.
Focusing on the years 1946-54, when Okamoto lived and worked in Setagaya, the exhibition provides an excellent introduction to this turbulent man, his turbulent work and to the turbulent times out of which he and his works arose.
Setting the stage for Okamoto's years in Setagaya, the first section of the exhibition reminds us that the artist left Tokyo for Paris in 1930 at the age of 19 and remained there until, one step of ahead of the Nazi invasion, he returned to Japan a decade later. During his time there, he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne with the eminent sociologist Marcel Mauss, took part in the clandestine ceremonies of Acephale, the secret society founded by the philosopher and writer George Bataille, and was an active member, with artists such as Piet Mondrian and Jean Arp, of the important Abstraction-Creation group.