Graphics: Crazy-Quilt Composer

Tokyo’s Masuo Ikeda, 33, gets angry when accused of being un-Japanese. To be sure, it took Western critics to discover him: the sharp eye of a German critic on the judging committee detected his hitherto unrecognized talents at a 1960 Tokyo prints competition. As a result, Ikeda won top honors. Last year Ikeda also walked off with the grand prize for graphics at the Venice Biennale. A show of his prints, currently traveling the U.S. under the sponsorship of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, opened last week at the East Tennessee State University Museum in Johnson City, Tenn. After this foreign attention, Japan is now coming to recognize him as one of its outstanding etchers and lithographers; inspired by Ikeda, a number of younger Japanese artists, hitherto bored with the tradition of wood-block prints, are turning back to graphics with new interest.

One reason Western critics may have cottoned to Ikeda sooner than his countrymen is that his art is frankly influenced by the West. He works only in red, blue, yellow and black, partly because Piet Mondrian used these colors.

His cheerfully scratchy, crazy-quilt compositions of bicycle handlebars, Coke bottles and girls in garter belts owe a good deal to Klee and Dubuffet.

Ikeda’s subject matter is decidedly pop-Oriented: he seems humorously obsessed with the artifacts and luxuries of modern Japan’s mass-produced prosperity. Rose Is Rose is a three-tiered print that piles flowers atop a pair of flowered, high-heeled shoes fitted into a box; the shoes in turn are on top of a pair of lipsticked girls who are also enclosed in a box. Woman from New York kids the Vogue ideal: a striped raincoat strides boldly across the paper—minus its wearer.

Despite his acknowledged indebtedness to Western artists, Ikeda’s work also reflects Japanese life and artistic traditions. While supporting himself by doing portraits of bar patrons along Tokyo’s Ginza (at 280 apiece), he studied older graphic techniques, and from them evolved his own distinctive style, in which he scratches directly on a metal plate with an etching needle to obtain a nervous, dramatically blurred line. “Why do Westerners insist that Japanese artists remain ‘quaint’ and ‘traditional’ in order to fit their image of artistry in Japan?” he asks. “We dress just as Americans do; we drink Coca-Cola just as they do. An artist’s work is composed of various sources. They include tradition, but they must also include the manner of life of man today.”