AccountTadaaki Kuwayama, 91, Dies;
Painter Who Carved His Own
Spare Path
Arriving in New York from Japan in 1958, he sought to “createworks with no trace of touch” in cool but vivid monochromes.

Tadaaki Kuwayama in New York in the 1960s. Three years after arriving there from Japan, he had his
first solo gallery show. Paul Katz

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By Will HeinrichSept. 15, 2023

Tadaaki Kuwayama, a celebrated painter who forged a distinctively
minimal path with cool but vividly colored monochromes, died on
Aug. 18 in Manhattan. He was 91.
His wife, the artist Rakuko Naito, said the cause was a cerebral
hemorrhage after a fall.
When he arrived in New York City in 1958, Mr. Kuwayama wasintent on distancing himself from nihonga, the traditional Japanesepainting style in which he’d been trained. But the gestural
individualism of Abstract Expressionism, then at the tail end of its
dominance, held no appeal for him.
He found instead that he had more in common with friends andacquaintances like Donald Judd and Frank Stella, whose work
would later be tagged Minimalist, though he had no use for thatlabel, either. As he put it in a 2012 interview, he wanted to “createworks with no trace of touch that can be made by anybody andreplicated endlessly.”

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Mr. Kuwayama’s first solo show, at Richard Bellamy’s Green
Gallery in Manhattan in 1961, included what could be called his
signature work, “Untitled: Red and Blue,” a seven-foot-high paperon-canvas piece divided across the middle into sections of red andblue. In a different painting, that division might evoke a horizon.
But two pale bands along the sides of this work, rendered in white
pigment overlaid with silver leaf, make it hard to read the line
across the middle as anything but a line.

“Untitled: Red and Blue,” 1961, on display at
the Nagoya City Art Museum in Japan. It
has been called his signature work.
Collection of the Nagoya City Art Museum

The colors are dense but dry, vibrant but strangely quiet. You can’t
sink into them, but they don’t leap out from the surface, either.
They have too much texture for the kind of flatness that the critic
Clement Greenberg approved of, but not enough to create patternor depth. They’re nothing but color.
In follow-up shows, starting with a second solo at Green in 1962,
Mr. Kuwayama gradually moved from paper to canvas; from dry
pigment to acrylic, spray paint and metallic colors; and into flat
free-standing pieces reminiscent of the paintings. He developed avernacular of squares and rectangles divided into halves, quartersor thirds with thin strips of aluminum. Most often every section ofa given piece was the same color, but when they weren’t, heavoided both dissonance and obvious harmony by balancing, say, abright yellow against a white or deep brown.
If some works happened to be beautiful, others were not; for Mr.
Kuwayama, that was beside the point. Regarding a 1966 series that
included canvases in gray and beige, he said: “I didn’t want tocreate any distinction between ‘good’ or ‘bad’ colors. I wanted totreat them as equivalent to each other. So I used some horrible
colors — all on purpose. I thought of those works as the ‘cheap
American apartment series.’”
In 1966, Mr. Kuwayama was included in the influential exhibition“Systemic Painting” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But
after the 1970s, demand for his work came primarily from Europe,
especially Germany. In recent decades he experimented withtriangles and began fabricating pieces in aluminum, titanium andBakelite, including an untitled series of 136 vertical panels inalternating pink and yellow that he produced in 1996 for theKawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in the city of Sakura,
Japan.

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The panels, hanging at narrow intervals on the sides of a largeroom, adeptly avoid any figurative allusion. They look almost likestripes, ingots of precious metal, acoustic panels or a hundred
other things — but never entirely. In the end, they’re only
themselves.

“Construction/Materials,” 2019, at the David Richard Gallery in New York. Yao Zu Lu/Tadaaki Kuwayama
Estate, via David Richard Gallery, New YorkMr. Kuwayama’s work is held by the Guggenheim, the Buffalo AKG
Art Museum and numerous institutions in Japan, including theNagoya City Art Museum, which gave him a retrospective in 2010,and Germany. At his death, planning was underway for aNovember show at Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan.
Through career ups and downs and over many decades, Mr.
Kuwayama kept producing paintings in the loft where he and Ms.
Naito had lived and worked since 1976, in a former stable in theChelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Continuity, after all, was partof his concept.
“I’ve never felt the need to sign or date my works,” he said in thesame 2012 interview. And as for his earlier paintings, he added: “I
can remake them. If anything, it’s more interesting to remake themnow. The only thing that changes is the material.”
Tadaaki Kuwayama was born on March 4, 1932, in Nagoya, anindustrial port city where his father was a prominent maker ofShinto shrines. Tadaaki was the third youngest of 11 children. His
youngest brother, Tadasuke, also became an artist in New York,
where he goes by the mononym Tadasky.

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Mr. Kuwayama in 2014. As a young man in New York, hemade frequent trips to the Museum of Modern Art, quickly
learning about developments, like Abstract Expressionism,that he’d been unaware of in Japan. Rakuko Naito

Mr. Kuwayama met Ms. Naito in the nihonga program at Tokyo
University of the Arts, where she was two years behind him.
Although the materials they used — mineral pigments, ink,Japanese paper — had a lifelong impact on their work, both chafedat the rigidity of their instruction. They decided to move to New
York after Ms. Naito graduated.
The couple reached California by sea and then traveled acrosscountry by Greyhound bus, stopping for a week in Buffalo, Wyo.
Before leaving Tokyo, they had met the gallerist and painter Betty
Parsons at a dinner with a female companion, and the companion’s
daughter lived in Buffalo, in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains.
Mr. Kuwayama and Ms. Naito arrived in New York City on Labor
Day in 1958.
Both artists had enrolled in the Art Students League to get student
visas, but Mr. Kuwayama, at least, was not impressed with theschool.
It “wasn’t a very interesting place to be,” he said. “It was whereamateurs and bourgeois wives went, and the teachers were allconservative. So I hardly went to school at all. I would just sign inand go home.”
He did, however, make frequent trips to the nearby Museum ofModern Art, where he learned about developments in art, like
Abstract Expressionism, that he’d been unaware of in Japan.

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In addition to Ms. Naito, he is survived by two daughters, Sono, anartist, and Maki Kuwayama, an architect; and five grandsons,
including Ki Smith, a gallerist, and Sei Smith, an artist.
“When I started my practice,” Mr. Kuwayama said in 2012, “I felt
the age of painting was over, and I wanted to make things that had
no trace of painterliness in them, things that existed in a different
dimension. I wanted to create things that people who believed inpainting wouldn’t understand. And I still do.”Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously
been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer. More about Will Heinrich
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 18, 2023, Section B, Page 6 of the New York edition with theheadline: Tadaaki Kuwayama, 91, Artist Who Painted His Own Path, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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