Page 26 - 2021 March 16th Japanese and Korean Art, Christie's New York City

16 INOUE YUICHI (1916-1985)

Tsuki (Moon)

Sealed Yuichi
Hanging scroll; ink on paper
70Ω x 49¬ in. (179.1 x 126.1 cm.)
Inscribed 'CR 82102a'

$40,000-60,000

PROVENANCE: artist who suddenly realized that creativity can only go
Private collection, Japan with a freeing movement. Then, followed a time when
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue Yuichi devoted his entire self to the exploration of art
raisonné Vol.4, now in preparation by Masaomi by digesting and deconstructing his learning. Tirelessly
Unagami, under No.CR82102a. he experimented new media and technics, hunted any
rhetorical movement or set of rules to deepen his
practice and finally acquire a complete freedom beyond
"To my mind, he (Yuichi) is unquestionably one of the any consciousness.
small handful of great artists of the second half of the Tsuki (Moon) is created by wielding deft and powerful
twentieth century. I do not know whether his work has brush strokes, where composed boldness orchestrates
been shown outside Japan, but it certainly should be. vertical and horizontal structural lines that embody
He was a marvelous painter of what I call, in my mind," a beautiful artistic fusion of Western abstract
essences" and I can think of no higher ideal in modern expressionism and modern Japanese Calligraphy. Yu-
art which has abandoned storytelling" . ichi breaks with tradition and abandons the use of

- Robert Motherwell (Letter to Masaomi Unagami, dated conventional small-size square paper. Instead, he opts
16 April 1987) for large sheets of paper with size over a hundred
centimeters (40 in.) long in what he calls" the calligraphy
Cofounder in 1952 of the avant-garde Society for
of humans" — a liberation from traditional form of
calligraphy Bokujin-kai, Yu-ichi Inoue, along with four
calligraphy that emphasizes skills to truthfully express
Kyoto-based calligrapher had the ambition to break
the personal beliefs and emotions of the calligrapher by
through with the Post War Japanese calligraphy which
merging the human body and soul as one in the creation.
felt to them merely decorative and lacking of new
At the end of the hook stroke in Tsuki (Moon), Yu-ichi lets
creative breath.
the hook tapers off by sealing the space altogether: is it
After a long seven-year training under mentorship of the Moon or it isn't? This essentially blurs the literal sense
established sho calligraphy master Ueda Sokyu, Yu-ichi of the character 'yue' (moon), where the three geometric
started practicing calligraphy as he personally conceived patterns conjure a sheer composition from the visual
it, slowly emancipating himself from the guidance of perspective, while the intense burst of ink dots on the
his teacher. This new exercise first destabilized the upper left suggest the artist's surge of creative passion.