Untitled – SOLD
1954
24" x 30" Framed: 27" x 32"
Painting, oil on canvas
24" x 30" Framed: 27" x 32"
Painting, oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower right
Painter Robert Henry remembers Yamamoto single-mindedly absorbing the painting style associated with Jackson Pollock. Yamamoto had just arrived in town. He was studying at the Hofmann School. The year was 1954, when the master’s home and studio were on Nickerson Street in the West End:
“The painting area was on the street level where the garage was, filled with still-life materials set up by Hofmann,” Henry says. “There was a smallish area outside of the garage and at the foot of the stairs leading up to the second-floor drawing studio, and I remember Taro painting there. He set up his canvas, a rather large canvas for the space, and proceeded to paint. He started by flinging paint at the canvas with a palette knife, using it as a kind of sling shot, and quickly worked himself into a frenzy while furiously opening tube after tube of paint and scattering tubes and tube caps all over the place. While he was engaged in this activity, his somewhat pregnant wife [Gwen, whom he met in Paris four years earlier] was sitting there patiently watching, and when Taro was finished she gathered up the scattered tubes and meticulously replaced the caps, while Taro sat recovering while studying the painting.”
“The painting area was on the street level where the garage was, filled with still-life materials set up by Hofmann,” Henry says. “There was a smallish area outside of the garage and at the foot of the stairs leading up to the second-floor drawing studio, and I remember Taro painting there. He set up his canvas, a rather large canvas for the space, and proceeded to paint. He started by flinging paint at the canvas with a palette knife, using it as a kind of sling shot, and quickly worked himself into a frenzy while furiously opening tube after tube of paint and scattering tubes and tube caps all over the place. While he was engaged in this activity, his somewhat pregnant wife [Gwen, whom he met in Paris four years earlier] was sitting there patiently watching, and when Taro was finished she gathered up the scattered tubes and meticulously replaced the caps, while Taro sat recovering while studying the painting.”
About the Artist
(1919 - 1994)
Taro Yamamoto’s prolific career began at a young age. By the age of ten, he was already painting landscapes and still lifes in oil, and had won numerous prizes in exhibitions at school. In 1941 he joined the U.S. Army and served during World War II. After being discharged from the service he returned to California. In 1949 Glenn Wessel, a student of Hans Hofmann, convinced him to New York. There he worked with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Vaclav Vytlacil, Byron Brown, Reginald Marsh, and Morris Kantor.
In 1952 he won a John Sloan Fellowship from the Art Students League. The next year he traveled to Europe under a Edward G. MacDowell Traveling Fellowship where he practices in Stuttgard, Germany with Willy Baumeister. He also exhibited at Gallerie Huit in Paris. In 1954 Yamamoto was invited to a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. There he worked with Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko developing a unique abstract expressionist style. Later in his life he devoted himself to hard-edge painting.
Yamamoto had an extensive exhibition career including the Stable Gallery, Art Students League, Krasner Gallery, Westerly Gallery and Riverside Museum in New York; the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Guild Hall in Easthampton, Miami Museum of Modern Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the University of Minnesota, Wellfleet Art Studio, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Parrish Art Museum in Southampton along with many others.
Biography courtesy of McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL
