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 the introduction of 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, he corresponded with such figures as Tristan Tzara, Andre 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 20th century, he was the principle 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 20th century avant-garde, and likely the least studied of its major figures. Though less well-known than most of his admirers, he was considered by such figures as Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Eugen Gomringer, and Kenneth Rexroth to be among the finest poets and artists of the 20th century.

Born in 1902, Kitasono’s long career began in earnest 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 older contemporaries like Hagiwara Kyōjirō, was iconoclastic from 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 from the very first, work of startling originality. As the poet and editor Karl Young put it, “he seemed to have the uncanny ability to implement the forms and develop the concerns of Western movements decades before they began in the Atlantic cultures,” writing poetry in the 1920s that would not feel contemporary until nearly half a century later. As prolific as he was experimental, with the dissolution of Ge.Gjmgjgam.Prrr.Gjmgem he helped to form journals like Rose, Magic, Theory (1927-1928), and Madame Blanche (1932-1934), where along with poets and artists like Nishiwaki Junzaburó and Takiguchi Shūzó, 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 and magazines of the 20th century, Vou had over a hundred members, and included artists, photographers, poets, composers and film-makers. In the nearly forty years of its publication it helped launched the work of such diverse Japanese artists and poets as the surrealist photographer Yamamoto Kansuke, poets Tamura Ryuichi and Shiriashi Kazuko, and the polymathic poet and film-maker Terayama Shūji, as well as helped to introduce to Japan such international figures as John Cage, William Burroughs, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, Haroldo and Augusto De Campos, among many others. A prolific designer and editor, Kitasono oversaw the production of every Vou, and his strong visual sensibility as well as his far-reaching editorial vision kept the magazine on the vanguard for the near half-century it was published. Central to the pre-war avant-garde, and continuing in the post-war to exert a powerful influence on the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, Vou was likely one of the most important avant-garde groups and magazines of the century.

In addition to his design and editorial work with the Vou club, Kitasono himself was a prominent contributor to numerous avant-garde magazines and publications in Japan and the West. Remarkably diverse as a writer and artist, he experimented in a wide range of styles and modes, from painting and photography to prose-poetry and visual poems, continually pushing his form and method over the course of the fifty years he was active. His early poetry won him admirers such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, while his later poetry and visual work found enthusiastic reception among Fluxus artists and concrete poets. In addition to visual poetry, Kitasono’s photographic work (which he called “plastic poems,”) were also highly valued, appearing widely in magazines and exhibitions throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Parallel to his fine art, he was also the designer of approximately 500 books and magazines, and since his death he has been recognized as one of the preeminent Japanese designers of the pre-war era, with a distinctive, idiosyncratic visual sensibility, utilizing a minimal geometric designs and photographic compositions. Among his many designs are the first four issues of the Black Mountain Review, as well as hundreds of Japanese magazines and novels, ranging from periodicals like VOU, to the covers of Japanese translations of novels by J.D. Salinger, Marguerite Duras, Boris Vian, or Ernest Hemingway.

Despite the innovation and acclaim Kitasono achieved in nearly every sphere he entered, since his death in 1978 he has been slow to be recognized for his accomplishments outside of the avant-garde movements through which he passed, especially in the West. Recent years, however, have seen a flurry of exhibitions on Kitasono curated from items in this collection, including Kitasono Katue: Surrealist Poet at LACMA in 2013, and An Unusual Pair of Brothers at Setagaya Art Museum in 2010, the later focusing on the relationship of Kitasono and his brother, Heihachi, one of the founders of Modern Japanese Sculpture. Shows by close-associates of Kitasono like Yamamoto Kansuke (Getty, 2013), and peers like Murayama Tomoyoshi of MAVO (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 2012), have also helped to elucidate Kitasono’s period and coterie in Japanese art, as has the increasing recognition of collaborators like artists Koga Harue, Tamamura Hokuto, Onchi Kochiro and Tōgō Seiji. The younger artists of VOU like Shuji Terayama, and the artists and poets generation of the 1960s and 1970s deeply influenced by Kitasono, such as Ikeda Tatsuo, have also been recognized in recent years, in shows such as MOMA’s Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde.

This collection of work on Kitasono Katue was put together by John Solt who wrote the first full-length critical study of the artist and poet, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (Harvard, 1999), which generally acknowledged as having kickstarted the resurgence of interest in Kitasono and VOU in Japan and internationally. Solt’s collection is the largest, most comprehensive that exists on Kitasono in any country, containing hundreds of unique items, and approximately 2000 items in total. It provides not only a picture of a single, virtuosic body of work, but illuminates the channels of collaboration of several generations of artists and writers working on the cutting edges of their mediums, uncovering via correspondence, artwork, magazines, and manuscripts the interconnection of Japanese avant-garde groups. It provides not only a portrait of the literary landscape, but also the cultures of visual art and design, showing the constant back and forth between artists, writers, poets, and theorists. The collection provides a history not just of Japanese Modernism from the 1920s to the 1970s, but a vast and in-depth archeology of the networks of cultural exchange among the international avant-garde. Weaving through many of the major artistic and poetic movements 20th century, from Dada and Surrealism to Black Mountain and Concrete Poetry, Kitasono drew together Pacific and International cultures in a remarkably unique way. He is not simply a seminal figure in Japan and a major artist and poet himself, but a figure whose role in global modernism in integral to understanding its breadth and scope.

PRAISE FOR KITASONO KATUE

Collection Highlights 

-Paintings, photographic compositions, visual poetry, drawings, mixed media works, and experimental 8mm films by Kitasono Katue.

-Original gelatin silver and color prints of Kitasono’s Plastic Poems, duplicate of the complete negatives of all of the plastic poems, along with photographic reprints of every plastic poem.

-Extensive manuscript material, including original compositions, translations, poetry in Japanese and English.

-All existing diaries kept by Kitasono, along with several notebooks and a collaged scrapbook.

-Hundreds of works authored by, edited, or designed by Kitasono, including early periodicals like Madame Blanche, Cendre, and Vou magazine, as well as extensive ephemera related to Vou and the Vou artists, exhibition posters, fliers, and books published by Vou.

 -A thorough collection of Kitasono’s appearance in avant-garde magazines from the 1930s to 1970s, both in Japan and internationally, including a vast trove of Japanese avant-garde magazines and ephemera, both pre and post-war. 

- Works inscribed to Kitasono from Tristan Tzara, Kenneth Patchen, James Laughlin, Andre Breton, Robert Creeley, Nishiwaki Junzaburó, Augusto De Campos, Jean-Francois Bory, Claudio Parmiggiani, Pierre Senghers, and Haroldo De Campos. 

-Correspondence to Kitasono Katue from Japanese artists and poets including key members of the Japanese avant-garde like photographer Yamamoto Kansuke, poet Chika Sagawa, Takiguchi Shūzó, Nishiwaki Junzaburó, and artists like the surrealist Koga Harue, Sadanosuke Nakada, and many others.

-Correspondence including all the extent letters from Ezra Pound to Kitasono Katue, as well as manuscripts and books sent by Pound to Kitasono.

-Correspondence sent to Kitasono Katue from James Laughlin, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Heinz Gappmayr, Jean-François Bory, Pierre Garnier, Kenneth Patchen, Arrigo Lora Totino, and many others.

-Correspondence and ephemera related to Kitasono’s brother, Heishimoto Heihachi, one of the founders of modern Japanese Sculpture.