Anti-Action - Artist-Women's Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan

Women artists briefly enjoyed prominence in the Japanese avant-garde art scene of the 1950s and '60s, helped in part by the influx of the Art Informel pictorial movement from Europe. These same women would, however, be excluded from critical discourse once action painting emerged from the United States - with its ties to dynamism, strength, and other such "masculine" qualities - prompting male critics to champion traditional gender hierarchies. This book re-examines the output of these women, presenting some 120 works by fourteen artists, including Kusama Yayoi, Fukushima Hideko, and Tanaka Atsuko, plus an interview with feminist art historian Griselda Pollock.