Kichizaemon Raku, the eldest son of Kakunyu XIV, succeeded to the role as the 15th head of the revered Raku family of tea bowl craftsmen in 1981, a tradition founded in the Momoyama Period (1573-1603) by Tanaka Chojiro (d. 1592). His latest exhibition, "Raku Kichizaemon × Wols" at the Sagawa Art Museum in Shiga Prefecture, reveals how he pays extraordinary homage to the abstract painter Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913-51).
Wols was a Berlin-born political exile active in France. As an emotionally wounded, self-neglecting alcoholic insomniac, he developed a flair for putting the introspective tragedy of his own short life down on canvas. His discomfortingly scratchy lines, abstracted shapes resembling human viscera and forms poised on physical collapse, suggest the painter's own advancing state of bodily and mental decay. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre admired the authenticity of this metaphysical crisis in painting. Dying from food poisoning after consuming rotten horse meat, Wols was posthumously honored by the art impresario Michel Tapie as a founding figure of the early postwar European art informel, counterpart to American abstract expressionism.
Kichizaemon discovered Wols a decade ago on seeing a friend's small painting and etchings by the artist. He sensed an immediacy and a certain spirituality, though little has been written about Wols in Japanese, and occasions to see his works had been few. When the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art staged a Wols exhibition in 2017, it presented an opportune moment for Kichizaemon to investigate, resulting in this current exhibition of Raku tea bowls interspersed with small-scale Wols copperplates, watercolors and oil paintings, including "La Grenade Rouge" (1940/41-48).