Description

This Taro Yamomoto is a bit different than some of the others we have seen.  First, he used a really interesting (and gorgeous) color palette of greenish blues and yellows, orange and purplish pinks.  Second, he experimented here with wax in addition to watercolor.  Completed in 1957, he executed this during the height of abstract expressionism just a few years after he had completed his studies with Hans Hofmann.

Details

• Taro Yamamoto (American, 1919-1994)
• Untitled (1957)
• Watercolor and wax on paper
  
• Signed and dated in lower right hand corner
  
• 24 1/2" x 29 3/4" (overall) 18 1/2 x 23 3/4" (paper)
• Newly matted and framed under UV plexiglass

About the Artist

Taro Yamamoto was a member of the New York Abstract Expressionist School. Born in California in 1919, he returned to Japan until the age of nineteen in order to receive a traditional Japanese education. Already exhibiting great promise as an artist at a young age, he enrolled in Los Angeles City College upon his return. He served in World War II from 1941 to 1946, after which he continued his art studies at Santa Monica City College and then, New York City. It was there, at the famous Art Students League in New York, that Yamamoto had the opportunity to study with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morris Kantor, Vaclav Vytlacil and Byron Browne. His talent was well-recognized as he was awarded a scholarship to the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1952 and a traveling fellowship to Europe in 1953. Yamamoto eventually settled with his wife and son in the art colony of Wellfleet on Cape Cod where he died in 1994. During Yamamoto's most prolific period in the 1950s and early 1960s he had solo exhibitions at the Gallerie Huit in Paris, the Art Students League and Krasner Gallery in New York, and Gallery 371 in Provincetown, MA.