Image: Artizon Museum, Tokyo
The Artizon Museum in Tokyo is showing "Takiguchi Shuzo: Writing and Drawing" (瀧口修造 書くことと描くこと), an exhibition devoted to the visual work of the Showa-era poet and art critic Takiguchi Shuzo (1903-1979). It runs from 23 June to 4 October 2026 in the museum's fifth- and fourth-floor galleries, shown together with a selection from the Ishibashi Foundation collection.
The Ishibashi Foundation holds 163 works by Takiguchi, including pieces he made with other artists. The museum says this is the first occasion on which more than half of that group has been shown together since the works entered the collection. About 140 works are on view in total.
Takiguchi began writing poetry in the 1920s under the influence of Surrealism and published a translation of Andre Breton's "Surrealism and Painting" in 1930. From the 1930s through the postwar decades he built up a body of criticism on art from Cezanne to his own contemporaries, and in 1958 he served as commissioner and juror for the Japanese pavilion at the 29th Venice Biennale. Around 1960 he pulled back from writing criticism and turned to making what he himself called "dessin" - drawings, watercolours and works in a range of experimental techniques - holding his first solo exhibition that October.
The presentation sets Takiguchi's own works against pieces by artists he wrote about and worked alongside. The museum's social announcement highlights Yayoi Kusama, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, while the exhibition introduction names Paul Klee, Duchamp and Joan Miro; the full participant list also includes Cezanne, Odilon Redon, Constantin Brancusi, Man Ray, Lucio Fontana, Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns and Kazuo Okazaki, among others. All works come from the collection of the Ishibashi Foundation Artizon Museum.
The question the museum poses is what the act of drawing meant for someone who had spent his life confronting the world through writing. The show takes in his activity as a whole - poetry, criticism, exhibition-making and his exchanges with other artists - rather than isolating the visual work.
Related programming includes curator-led gallery talks during the run and two Saturday lectures in the museum's third-floor lecture room: 25 July with the poet Ryoji Asabuki, and 29 August with the artist Hiraku Suzuki, a lecture-performance on the ground between writing and drawing. The exhibition closes on 4 October 2026 and runs concurrently with the museum's Ettore Sottsass exhibition.
