Tatsuo Ikeda

Tatsuo Ikeda (池田 龍雄, Ikeda Tatsuo, August 15, 1928 – 30 November 2020) was a Japanese avant-garde artist. An active figure in the Japanese postwar art scene, Ikeda’s works adopted a surrealist sensibility deeply grounded in social and political critique. Using strategies of distortion, grotesque figures, biomorphic forms, and a satirical tone, Ikeda sharply engaged with a range of contemporary issues including labor politics and class conflict, Japan-United States relations, nuclear disarmament, and legacies of militarism, especially through the proliferation and continued presence of American military bases on Japanese soil after the end of the Occupation era. A leading figure in the Reportage movement of the 1950s and early 60s, Ikeda, along with artists such as Hiroshi Nakamura, Kikuji Yamashita, and Shigeo Ishii, visited sites of protest across the country to document the realities of postwar social unrest through a expressive mode inflected with both surrealist and realist tenors.^[1]

He was involved in a number of prominent but short-lived artistic societies that emerged after the war, including Tarō Okamoto and Kiyoteru Hanada's Zen'ei Bijutsu-kai (Avant-garde Art Study Group, which had its roots in their earlier Yoru no Kai group), Seiki no Kai (Century Society), Seibiren (Youth Artists' Alliance) and the Seisakusha Kondankai (Producers' Workshop), which he co-founded with film critic Senpei Kasu.^[2]: 74

Ikeda mostly worked in painting and drawing using earthy monochromatic tones, though later in his career he turned towards mixed-media and sculptural work as well.^[3] He is best known for his ink drawing works, which include Anti-Atomic Bomb, Chronicle of Birds and Beasts, and Genealogy of Monsters. His later works, particularly following the Anpo protests in 1960 and their failure to enact social upheaval, turned to more spiritual and cosmological concepts, as evidenced by the biomorphic, embryonic forms expressed in the BRAHMAN series (1973–88).^[4]: 10