Kikuo Saito (斉藤規矩夫,Saitō Kikuo, 1939–2016) was a Japanese-born Americanabstract painter with ties to theColor Field movement andLyrical abstraction. A former assistant toHelen Frankenthaler,Kenneth Noland, andLarry Poons, Saito's work infuses richly saturated colorscapes with delicately drawn lines. Saito was the creator ofsui generis theatre and dance events, collaborating with innovative directors and choreographersRobert Wilson,Peter Brook,Jerome Robbins, and dancer and choreographer Eva Maier, to whom he was married for several decades. His productions combined wordless drama in the poetic frameworks of light, costumes, music, and dance, most of which he devised and directed himself.
Kikuo Saito was born inTokyo in 1939.[1] He began painting when he was 17 years old, and worked for 3 years as a proctor and studio technician at the workshop of Sensei Itoh, an established Japanese painter. During this time, Saito gained an understanding of both the traditional arts of Japan as well as contemporary movements such as theGutai Group. He also had an interest in the burgeoningNew York City art world and movements such asAbstract Expressionism,Minimalism,Color Field, andPop Art.[2]
Saito moved toNew York in 1966 at the age of 27. The journey across the United States to New York provided him a chance meeting withEllen Stewart, founder ofLa MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, whom he would later describe as his American mother. Once in New York, Saito worked with Stewart at La MaMa and was instrumental in bringing Japanese avant-garde dramatistShuji Terayama to La MaMa in 1980. In his early years in New York, Saito balanced painting with theatre, supporting himself with carpentry and working on loft build-outs inSoho.
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The composition of many of Saito's paintings was significantly influenced by and in dialogue with the geography of his theatre productions. Saito's dualistic nature took material form in the interplay between the collaborative theatre and the private realm of the painting studio. Art criticKaren Wilkin wrote that "if we are attentive, we discover that characters from his stage pieces have been reincarnated as abstract configurations within his paintings, reborn as the records of animated gestures that retain the individuality of their sources."[3]
A commonality in the entire body of Saito's work, both on stage or on canvas, focuses on written signs. Repeated investigations ofalphabet in Saito's work, both real and made-up, legible and obscured, speak to moments in his personal history.[4] As a young immigrant in a country whose language he did not speak, Saito wrote space for himself in the already-establishedColor Field tradition by constructing his own painterly lexicon. Opposing motifs of free gestural brushstrokes and elegant, ordered lettering allude again to his double practice as painter and architect of poetic performance. Abstraction in Saito's work points to a meditation on the instabilities and impermanence of language and the mutability of meaning. A space opens once departing fromstructuralist systems of transmuting signs, and Saito fills that space with vibrant color.
Saito worked with actors and dancers, devising, directing, and creating the decor and costumes for stage performances, sometimes collaborating with Wilson, Brook, and Maier. He drew inspiration from Japanese theatrical traditions ofKabuki andNoh plays, and was an innovator with water and other nontraditional materials onstage. He designed sets for numerous productions at La MaMa and for theFestival of Two Worlds inSpoleto, Italy. He collaborated with Wilson on projects inShiraz, Iran, and in Paris created the set for Brook'sConference of the Birds.
In 1996 he was the artist-in-residence atDuke University, where in collaboration with Maier he created the conceptual, wordless performanceToy Garden, which would later be performed at La MaMa.[5] Saito saidToy Garden was about what he imagined in the missing half ofVittore Carpaccio's painting "Two Venetian Ladies," a work with a famously-missing left side.[6]
Saito had his first solo exhibition at Deitcher O'Reilly Gallery on 67th Street in 1976. He would go on to exhibit both solo and group shows in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He is represented in collections in theMuseum of Modern Art, theWhitney Museum of American Art, theAldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and numerous private collections. An exhibition called "The Final Years", featuring work made in the year leading up to Saito's death, opened at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on East 68th Street in New York City from September 15 - October 14, 2016.[7]
In 2014, Saito and his partner Mikiko Ino purchased the former St. Patrick's School property inVerplanck, New York and recommissioned it as KinoSaito, a multidisciplinary nonprofit museum and art space projected to open to the public in 2020[8]
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