Kenzo Okada was the most successful Japanese painter in the United States in the years just after World War II. Okada’s abstract expressionist paintings were collected by major American art patrons, such as David and Peggy Rockefeller, and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Okada was born September 28, 1902, in Yokohama, Japan, and attended the progressive Morimura Gakuen Elementary School while fellow artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was a student in its kindergarten. Okada dropped out of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1924 to study in Paris, where he was befriended by the painter Tsugouharu (Léonard) Foujita (1886–1968), whose influence is evident in Okada’s early figurative paintings. After exhibiting his Landscape with Boat in the1927 Salon d’Automne, Okada returned to Japan.
Although he had a successful solo exhibition at the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo, Teiten (the juried art exhibition sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Education) rejected his submission. Beginning in 1929, however, his French cityscapes and female figures—reminiscent of paintings by Marie Laurencin and Edouard Vuillard—were shown annually by the Nikakai, a movement of Western-style artists who broke with the official selection process. Okada later was awarded prizes by and nominated for membership at Nikakai. His successful career in Tokyo also included teaching at several art schools.
The U.S. occupation after World War II, with its display of American might, also made an impression on Okada, who was growing dissatisfied with the state of his art and the contemporary art scene in Japan. A commission to paint the portrait of the son of an American colonel based in Yokohama triggered his interest in the United States. Okada tried to obtain an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to come to the United States in 1949 but was unsuccessful. He and his wife settled in New York in November 1950. René d’Harnoncourt, then director of MoMA, received an introductory letter dated October 29, 1951, on behalf of Okada from the Japanese Government Overseas Agency in New York, which served informally as the Japanese consulate pending the ratification of the San Francisco Peace Treaty on April 28, 1952.
Okada struggled to adapt to life in the United States, and after encountering abstract expressionism, he searched for a new aesthetic for almost three years. He would wipe paint off the canvas and reapply diluted pigment, eventually creating his distinctive, poetic, and expressive abstract style. Two years after their arrival, Kimi, who supported him as a seamstress during this difficult period, arranged a studio visit by Betty Parsons, a dealer and proponent of abstract expressionism who introduced numerous important American painters to the public at her gallery in New York. Okada would have his first American solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in October 1953, receiving positive reviews. He won numerous awards including the annual Campana Memorial Prize of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954 and the Carnegie Institute International Prize in 1955. He also represented the United States at the São Paulo Bienal in 1955 and then Japan at the Venice Biennale of 1958. He received the art prize from the Ford Foundation in 1960. Sponsored by directors of several museums, including MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Okada obtained permanent resident status in 1957 and became a United States citizen three years later. He had a solo exhibition organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York that traveled to several museums from 1965 to 1967. After his death, his reputation was furthered by an exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 2000 and a retrospective in Japan from 2003 to 2004.
