I’ve pondered how much to grudgingly admire the towering raspberry Tadaaki Kuwayama gave rhetorically to the practice of art. His expressed approach oozes iconoclastic gore in the spirit of outré versecraft from the pages of Poetry.

… He wanted to “create works with no trace of touch that can be made by anybody and replicated endlessly.”

“I didn’t want to create any distinction between ‘good’ or ‘bad’ colors. I wanted to treat them as equivalent to each other. So I used some horrible colors — all on purpose.

“I’ve never felt the need to sign or date my works… I can remake [earlier paintings]. If anything, it’s more interesting to remake them now. The only thing that changes is the material.”

[The Art Students League] “wasn’t a very interesting place to be… It was where amateurs and bourgeois wives went, and the teachers were all conservative. So I hardly went to school at all. I would just sign in and go home.”

“When I started my practice… 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 in painting wouldn’t understand. And I still do.”

Never mind whether I can understand or look much at what he did. Mr. Kuwayama, a “celebrated painter,” made his own weather. Kind regards, by the way, to amateurs and bourgeois wives everywhere!

(Will Heinrich, “Tadaaki Kuwayama, 91, Dies; Painter Who Carved His Own Spare Path,” New York Times, 9-15-23)

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