Tatsuo Ikeda

Tatsuo Ikeda (池田 龍雄) was a Japanese Avant-garde artist.

An active figure in the Japanese postwar art scene, Ikeda’s works adopted a surrealist sensibility deeply grounded in social and political critique.

Using strategies of distortion, grotesque figures, biomorphic forms, and a satirical tone, Ikeda sharply engaged with a range of contemporary issues including labor politics and class conflict, Japan-United States relations, nuclear disarmament, and legacies of militarism, especially through the proliferation and continued presence of American military bases on Japanese soil after the end of the Occupation era.

After working on a base in Sasebo, Nagasaki, a land reclamation project in Imari Bay, and briefly apprenticing at a Nabeshima ware pottery studio, Ikeda resolved to pursue the visual arts, and made his first oil painting, a self-portrait made in the style of Tsune Nakamura’s Portrait of Vasilii Yaroschenko (1920).

Ikeda Tatsuo was born in Imari, Saga prefecture on August 15, 1928, as the eldest son of a stonemason.

As a young witness to the escalation of imperial aggression and militarist ideology through the 1930s and early 40s, Ikeda's early education was heavily shaped by the nationalist sentiments that colored the atmosphere of the era.

After enrolling in Imari Commercial High School in 1941, he was put in a military training course, where he recalled hearing the broadcast of the Imperial Japanese Navy's entrance into war in the Pacific following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In 1943, at the age of 15, Ikeda and his classmates were called upon to volunteer to serve in the armed forces.

Told to commit on the spot without consulting their families, Ikeda was the first of his class to stand up and volunteer, prompted by a conviction that he would eventually have to serve regardless.

He was subsequently drafted into the Imperial Japanese Navy to train as a kamikaze pilot in Kagoshima.

Before he was dispatched on a suicide mission, the war came to an end, allowing him to escape the fate that befell his fellow pilots.

The end of the war left Ikeda with a sense of traumatic disillusionment, and he described his sentiments during this period as follows: "Young people had grown up being fed the lesson that sacrifice for the country and becoming a god enshrined at Yasukuni [i.e., dying in the war] was the road to eternal righteousness. We were all hurtling down that road with no time to think. When the road suddenly cut off, it led to great sorrow and confusion.”

After the dismissal of the pilots, Ikeda took a four-day journey from Kasumigaura to Imari.

Upon passing through Hiroshima, he recalled seeing an "utterly empty landscape, which felt absolutely horrible. At the time, there was not yet a word for 'atomic bomb', so we had just seen flyers that read 'Enemy drops new type of bomb.'" Ikeda reached Saga in late August 1945, and enrolled in a teaching school later that year after learning that his middle school credentials would be accepted.

"I didn't want to be a teacher," Ikeda recalled.

"I just wanted to learn, and also not have to pay tuition."

However, after the GHQ prohibited former military personnel from taking teaching positions due to suspicions regarding the potential of lingering militarist sentiments to seep into postwar education practices, Ikeda was expelled from the teaching school in 1946.

Ikeda gained admission to the Tama Art and Design School (now Tama Art University) with the painting as part of his portfolio, and moved to Tokyo in 1948 to begin his studies.

Though he had originally enrolled with the intention of studying oil painting, Ikeda quickly lost interest in academism and instead began to immerse himself in Tokyo's Avant-garde circles.

Ikeda's classmates at Tama included Hiroshi Katsuragawa and Masahiro Mori.

At the invitation of a friend, he joined Tarō Okamoto and Kiyoteru Hanada's Avant-garde Art Study Group, which brought together artists and writers to discuss and debate the paths to developing artistic paradigms that broke free from the clutches of the old militarist order.

Ikeda quickly grew disillusioned with the conservatism of the university and his instructors.

After seeing a portrait of the imperial crown prince on a ski holiday by Ihara Usaburo, one of his professors, that confirmed his ambivalence about the academy, Ikeda dropped out in late 1948.

The study group was but one of the many collectives (many of which shared members and goals) formed during the early postwar years that sought to redefine creative production amidst a rapidly changing and unstable political milieu, reimagine the social role of creatives, encourage artistic experimentation, and provide publishing and exhibition platforms.

As few formal exhibition spaces and sponsoring bodies supporting Avant-garde art existed at the time, many artists in early postwar Japan took it upon themselves to organize their own shows.

Members of the group included writers Kiichi Sasaki, Kōbō Abe, photographer Shōzō Kitadai, and artists Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Hideko Fukushima.

Though these groups were short-lived, they provided a crucial intellectual foundation, marked by Marxist and Surrealist influences, that influenced a generation of post-war artists and movements.

Younger artists broke off from the groups to form collections such as Jikken Kōbō. Ikeda, who also affiliated with groups such as Seiki no Kai, NON, and Seibiren, participated in a number of organizations independently organized by the groups.

Seibiren

A leading figure in the Reportage movement of the 1950s and early 60s, Ikeda, along with artists such as Hiroshi Nakamura, Kikuji Yamashita, and Shigeo Ishii, visited sites of protest across the country to document the realities of postwar social unrest through a expressive mode inflected with both surrealist and realist tenors.

He was involved in a number of prominent but short-lived artistic societies that emerged after the war, including Tarō Okamoto and Kiyoteru Hanada's Zen'ei Bijutsu-kai (Avant-garde Art Study Group, which had its roots in their earlier Yoru no Kai group), Seiki no Kai (Century Society), Seibiren (Youth Artists' Alliance) and the Seisakusha Kondankai (Producers' Workshop), which he co-founded with film critic Senpei Kasu.

Ikeda mostly worked in painting and drawing using earthy monochromatic tones, though later in his career he turned towards mixed-media and sculptural work as well.

He is best known for his ink drawing works, which include Anti-Atomic Bomb, Chronicle of Birds and Beasts, and Genealogy of Monsters.

His works from the early 1950s, which feature fragmentary geometries and constellated symbols demarcated by strong, dark outlines reveal the influences of Cubism and Surrealism on the young artist’s nascent practice.

At the encouragement of Okamoto Taro, Ikeda submitted his work to the second annual Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition in 1950.

The onset of the Korean War in 1950 spurred political fervor among Ikeda and his colleagues, and prompted Ikeda to begin engaging more closely with issues of labor, U.S.-Japan relations, and nuclear terror.

In 1953, Ikeda visited a coal mine near his home in Saga.

His observational sketches became the basis for Arm (Ude) (1953), a bold image of a muscular, nude torso, whose ash-covered hand holds a shovel.

The figure, whose face is obscured, emerges from a pile of glowing coals, producing an evocative yet unnerving image of the bodily politics of labor.

His later works, particularly following the Anpo protests in 1960 and their failure to enact social upheaval, turned to more spiritual and cosmological concepts, as evidenced by the biomorphic, embryonic forms expressed in the BRAHMAN series (1973–88).