Word: ikeda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After Foreign Minister Kiichi Aichi scanned the book, he erupted. Among other things, Kawasaki had quoted a remark generally attributed to General Charles de Gaulle: just before a formal chat in 1964 with the late Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, he confided that "today I am going to have a little talk with a transistor-radio salesman." Even more annoying to Aichi was Kawasaki's charge that in Japan "there is clearly an absence of leadership at the top, no realization of what is best in the national interest, a shortage of moral courage and discipline." Political parties got short...
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...
...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...
...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...