He had been enthusiastic when he first left on a study trip to these countries, but couldn't feel the same when he returned there. He was an intellectual, a very, very gifted person, that's for sure. But facing him there were adventurers like the ones who created this museum, like one of our friends, Germaine Dieterlain and Marcel Griaule . But oddly enough Levi Strauss was trained in the same way Taro Okamoto had been, who had come to France because of all the renowned painters and discovered that besides painting, there was an extraordinary thinking system. To us it's an essential book about aesthetics, and the artist's role.
French anthropologists consider it one of the most important books ever written.
In it he even discussed the Nouvelle Vague films. That the existentialists of the time reviewed it, and before 1968 it was considered one of the few books still following Mauss' way of thinking. For us Taro is the model of a clever and avant-garde artist. Of course he earned a lot of money with ridiculous things like balloons painted with his name, drawings he randomly sent by uncontrolled flying balloons over Tokyo. But he was also someone different.