Genichiro Inokuma (1902–1993) enrolled at Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts) in Ueno in 1922, the year he turned 20. In 1926, while he was still a student, his Portrait of a Woman was selected for the 7th Teiten (Art Exhibition of the Imperial Art Academy), marking his first acceptance into a government-sponsored exhibition. From that point until his death at the age of 90 in 1993, he continued to paint without interruption. Over the course of his long career, Inokuma’s art shifted from figuration to abstraction, and eventually to a mode that transcended the distinction between the two, while his subjects and themes also evolved over time.

Inokuma began with the human figure as his primary subject. During a stay of nearly three years in Paris beginning in 1938, when he was in his mid-thirties, he experimented with a range of approaches and subsequently produced major figurative works. Later, when he was over 50, he moved to New York, where he was based for roughly 20 years, and there his art shifted toward abstraction. In the stimulating environment of a city brimming with extraordinarily talented people and architectural landmarks rising one after another, Inokuma awakened to the metropolis as a theme and began producing paintings composed of squares, circles, and straight lines. From 1975 onward, after the age of 70, he divided his time between Tokyo and Hawaii, and his subject matter gradually shifted toward the cosmic. Perhaps influenced by Hawaii’s brilliant sunlight and abundant natural surroundings, he began depicting a wide range of forms in luminous, richly modulated color. Then in 1988, at the age of 85, following the death of his wife, he began painting faces. As he became absorbed in weighing how each form was placed within the rounded contour of a face, his paintings evolved into compositions that treated not only faces but all forms as equivalent structural elements.

As the times and his environment changed, Inokuma regarded it as only natural that he would change as well. Each day he renewed his sense of what was new, and, true to who he was at any given moment, continued to devote all his energy to painting. This is what makes his work so remarkably varied, yet underlying it all is his belief that “beauty is, in the end, balance,” and that “no matter how rough its brushwork may appear, a good painting has its own internal order.”* These beliefs consistently guided his production of paintings that were beautiful in their structural integrity.

*“Courage,” in My Resume (Watashi no Rerekisho) by Genichiro Inokuma, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Art, The MIMOCA Foundation, 2003, p.8