September 15, 2023
Tadaaki Kuwayama, a celebrated painter who forged a distinctively minimal path with cool but vividly colored monochromes, died on Aug. 18 in Manhattan. He was 91.
His wife, the artist Rakuko Naito, said the cause was a cerebral hemorrhage after a fall.
When he arrived in New York City in 1958, Mr. Kuwayama was intent on distancing himself from nihonga, the traditional Japanese painting style in which he’d been trained. But the gestural individualism of Abstract Expressionism, then at the tail end of its dominance, held no appeal for him.
He found instead that he had more in common with friends and acquaintances like Donald Judd and Frank Stella, whose work would later be tagged Minimalist, though he had no use for that label, either. As he put it in a 2012 interview, he wanted to “create works with no trace of touch that can be made by anybody and replicated endlessly.”
