The John Solt Kitasono Katue Collection

About Kitasono Katue and the John Solt Archive

From the 1920s to the 1970s the poet and artist Kitasono Katue (1902-1978) played a primary role in introducing Dada, Surrealism, Imagism, the Black Mountain School, Beat poetry, and Concrete poetry to the Japanese public, as well as presenting Japanese poets and artists to the West. One of the major nodes of the international avant-garde, Kitasono corresponded with such figures as Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, and Haroldo and Augusto De Campos, and led one of the Japan’s longest and most enduring groups of avant-garde poets and artists, The VOU Club (1935-1940, 1949–78). During the early to middle years of the twentieth century, he was the principal bridge between Japanese and Western avant-garde movements, as well as an exemplary poet and artist in his own right. A master trespasser across mediums and isms, across cultures and languages, his influence was pervasive, vast, and not limited to one country, culture, or art form. A prolific poet, artist, editor, translator, designer and theorist, he is among the great polymaths of the twentieth century avant-garde, considered by Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Eugen Gomringer, and Kenneth Rexroth to be among the finest poets and artists of the century.

Born in 1902, Kitasono’s long career began in earnest in the middle 1920s as an editor of the Dada-inspired magazine Ge.Gjmgjgam.Prrr.Gjmgem (1924-1926) and a contributor to journals like MAVO (1923-1925). His potent mixture of visual poetry, lyric innovation, and restless experimentalism--while owing much to poets like Apollinaire, early Japanese avant-gardists like Hirato Renkichi, and peers and collaborators like Haruyama Yukio--was iconoclastic from the beginning, charting new ground in the collision of languages and cultures, word and image. Never simply mirroring western styles, Kitasono absorbed, adapted, evolved and critiqued the theories he drew from, creating prescient works whose formal characteristics would prefigure movements still far in the future, like Concrete Poetry and Language poetry. As prolific as he was experimental, he founded journals like Rose, Magic, Theory (1927-1928), and Madame Blanche (1932-1934), where along with poets and artists like Nishiwaki Junzaburō and Takiguchi Shūzō, he elaborated the contours of Japanese Surrealism, and eventually, in 1936, founded the VOU Club and its central organ, VOU Magazine.  

One of the longest running avant-garde groups of the era, the VOU Club had over a hundred members and included artists, photographers, poets, composers, architects and filmmakers. In the approximately forty years of its publication, the magazine launched the work of such diverse Japanese artists as the surrealist photographer Yamamoto Kansuke, the poets Tamura Ryūichi and Shiraishi Kazuko, and the polymathic poet and filmmaker Terayama Shūji. It also helped to introduce international figures like John Cage, William Burroughs, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, and Haroldo and Augusto De Campos to Japan. As both designer and editor, Kitasono oversaw the production of every issue of VOU, and his strong visual sensibility and far-reaching editorial vision kept the magazine in the vanguard for a half-century. Central to the pre-war arts in Japan, and continuing in the post-war to exert a powerful influence on the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, VOU was both foundational to Japanese modernism, and the most well-known non-western avant-garde magazine of its time internationally. 

In addition to work with VOU, Kitasono was a prominent contributor to numerous avant-garde publications and groups in Japan and the West, from the New Directions Annual to the Brazilian Noigandres group’s magazine Invençao. He experimented in a wide range of styles and modes, from painting and photography to surrealist poetry, prose-poetry, tanka, haiku, and visual poetry. Unconcerned with strict disciplinary boundaries, he was often able to combine and collapse forms in remarkable ways. This is especially pronounced in his post-war contributions to international publications, from his famous concrete poem “Monotonous Space” to his late-career “plastic poems,” photographic works comprised of assemblages of objects like bits of paper, stones, and wire. Such compositions were embraced by the artists and poets engaged in similar cross-discipline experiments, like the Black Mountain School and, later, the Concrete Poetry movement. These same tendencies were also apparent in Kitasono’s design work, which spanned some five hundred publications and included the first four issues of the Black Mountain Review as well as hundreds of Japanese publications: from periodicals like VOU to the covers of translations of novels by J. D. Salinger, Marguerite Duras, Boris Vian, and Ernest Hemingway. Today, Kitasono is recognized as one of the preeminent Japanese designers of the mid-century, noted for the use of language, geometric design, photography, and blank space in his minimalist compositions.

Despite the acclaim for Kitasono in nearly every sphere he entered, since his death in 1978 he has been slow to be recognized for his accomplishments, particularly in the West. Recent years, however, have seen a number of exhibitions on Kitasono, including Kitasono Katue: Surrealist Poet at LACMA in 2013 and An Unusual Pair of Brothers at Mie Prefectural Art Museum and Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo in 2010—the latter focusing on the relationship between Kitasono and his brother, Hashimoto Heihachi, one of Japan’s most distinguished modern sculptors. Shows by close associates of Kitasono like Yamamoto Kansuke (Getty, 2013) and Murayama Tomoyoshi of MAVO (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 2012) have also helped to elucidate Kitasono’s milieu in Japanese art, as has the increasing recognition of peers and collaborators like artists Koga Harue, Tamamura Hokuto, Onchi Kōshirō and Tōgō Seiji. Additionally, recent exhibitions, such as MoMA’s Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, have presented the work of younger VOU-associated artists like Terayama Shūji as well as that of the artists and poets of the Kitasono-influenced generation of the 1960s and 1970s.

The work featured on this site is drawn from an archive assembled by the poet and scholar John Solt, who wrote Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), the first full-length critical study on Kitasono. Assembled over the course of four decades, Solt’s collection is the largest, most comprehensive that exists on Kitasono in any country, containing approximately 2000 items, many of them unique to the collection. The various sections of this website seek to highlight a few key pieces and works from this archive, as well as to make available works by or about Kitasono that were previously difficult to find. We hope the site can serve as a hub for information about Kitasono and his legacy, and to make available resources for those curious not only about Kitasono, but also his circle in Japan and internationally.