Family of the Sun 太陽の家族

Inokuma passed through New York on his way to France for the second time in 1955. He was attracted to the city and later spent twenty years living and working there. He had been working in a realistic manner for thirty years, but his experience in New York led him to adopt an abstract style. His early abstract works, including this one, expressed his strong sense of being Japanese in this melting pot of races, and many of the titles refer to things Japanese. Although the artist was approaching his sixtieth birthday at the time of this major change from figuration to abstraction, it was only the mid-point of his life as an artist. Subsequently, he went on to develop the Landscape series, using parallel lines and geometric forms to create pictorial surfaces that resemble a bird's eye view of a city, and a series of brightly-colored abstract paintings on the theme of the universe. In his late years he returned to representation, creating the "Faces" series, depicting a variety of human faces with simplified line drawing.