Terror of the Bathroom: On Kawara's Early Figurative Drawings and Postwar Japan

Abstract

On Kawara (b. 1933), a Japanese-born artist based in New York, began his best-known work, the Today Series, or Date Paintings, on 4 January 1966. Each Date Painting bears the date of its creation, with the year and day set with Arabic numerals, and the month written as a textual abbreviation, rendered in white oil paint on a monochromatic canvas. The artist has now been continuously creating these simple canvases for over four decades.2 These highly conceptual works represent a stark contrast from the figurative drawings of grotesque images that Kawara created in Japan during the post-occupation period of the 1950s. Kawara first presented the now-legendary Bathroom series in 1953 at the first Nippon exhibition (Nippon-ten) held in Tokyo. In these pencil drawings, the bathroom is a distorted, claustrophobic space filled with bloody scenes of murder, dismembered body parts, and matricidal images. The naked bodies of wide-eyed men and women are cut into pieces, with various body parts floating inside a neatly tiled bathroom.3