Description

We always get excited when we see a work that is mostly yellow.  Yellow is happy and just emits joy into a room.  Maybe Taro Yamamoto himself was feeling joyful -- outside on a sunny day, maybe -- when he created this exuberant drawing in his sketchbook.  Completed in the hey day of abstract expressionism, we can clearly see the influence of Yamamoto's teachers, Vaclav Vytlacil and Hans Hofmann. 

Details

• Taro Yamamoto (American, 1919-1994)
• Untitled 
• Pastel crayon and pencil on sketchbook paper
  
• Signed and dated in lower right hand corner
  
• 10 1/2" x 13 1/2" (paper) 18" x 21" (overall)
• Newly framed and matted under UV plexiglass
• Damage and toning to paper with some pigment migration

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.