Profile
岡本太郎（1911-1996）は神奈川県出身の芸術家。パリ留学でピカソに衝撃を受け、独自の芸術理論「対極主義」を掲げて戦後日本の前衛美術を牽引した。大阪万博『太陽の塔』や『明日の神話』、「芸術は爆発だ」のフレーズで知られる。
Taro Okamoto was born on February 26, 1911, in Takatsu Village, Tachibana District, Kanagawa Prefecture (now Takatsu Ward, Kawasaki City), the eldest son of cartoonist Ippei Okamoto and poet-novelist Kanoko Okamoto. He enrolled in the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1929, but the following year accompanied his father on a reporting trip to France and remained in Paris for roughly a decade. There he studied philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and ethnology at the Sorbonne, and in 1932 a chance encounter with a painting by Pablo Picasso at a gallery struck him so forcefully that he resolved to make surpassing Picasso his lifelong artistic goal. He moved in the circles of the abstract art and Surrealist movements and associated with figures such as Georges Bataille. In 1940, fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris, he returned to Japan, only to be drafted soon after into the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, enduring harsh military service on the Chinese front.
After the war, Okamoto co-founded the avant-garde collective “Yoru no Kai” (Night Society) with critic Kiyoteru Hanada and others, and put forward his original theory of art, “Polarism” — the idea that genuine creation arises not from compromise but from forcing opposing elements into violent, unresolved confrontation. His book Today’s Art: Who Creates the Era? (Kobunsha, published August 5, 1954) became an instant bestseller; its central claim — that art today must not be skillful, must not be pretty, must not be comfortable — sent shockwaves through postwar Japanese ideas about art. Between 1968 and 1969, he created Myth of Tomorrow, a 5.5-meter-tall, 30-meter-wide mural depicting human figures consumed by a nuclear blast, commissioned for a hotel under construction in Mexico City. When the hotel project collapsed, the mural disappeared and remained lost for 34 years until it was rediscovered in Mexico in 2003; after restoration, it was permanently installed in 2008 in a pedestrian passageway at Shibuya Station in Tokyo.
At the 1970 Japan World Exposition (Expo ’70) in Osaka, Okamoto served as producer of the Theme Pavilion and openly rejected the exposition’s official slogan, “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” In its place he built the Tower of the Sun, a roughly 70-meter-tall tower drawing on the imagery of Jomon-era pottery and masks, which still stands today as one of Japan’s best-known monuments in Expo ’70 Commemorative Park in Suita, Osaka. In 1989 he was made a Commandeur of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1981, a Hitachi Maxell television commercial showing him pounding a piano and shouting “Art is an explosion!” turned the phrase into a national catchphrase, which won the “Quotation Award” at Japan’s 1986 Buzzword of the Year awards, keeping him a familiar public figure into his final years. He died on January 7, 1996, at a Tokyo hospital from acute respiratory failure caused by Parkinson’s disease, at the age of 84. His longtime atelier and residence in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo, is now open to the public as the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, and the Kawasaki City Taro Okamoto Museum of Art has also been established in his hometown — his uncompromising art and ideas continue to draw audiences today.