During autumn 2023, Galerie Le Minotaure will present its third exhibition by Chuta Kimura, Japanese painter from the Second School of Paris. This is a tribute that the gallery pays to the artist’s first defenders. Among their ranks we include the gallery owners Jacques Zeitoun (Art Vivant gallery, Kriegel gallery) and Antoine Sapiro, father of Benoit Sapiro (Kriegel gallery and Sapiro gallery) as well as the critics Pierre Cabanne and Max-Pol Fouchet (prefaces to the exhibitions at the Kriegel gallery in 1975 and 1977).

Chuta Kimura arrived in Paris in 1953, at the age of 36. After the Second World War, when borders became more porous again, like many artists from around the world, he too wanted to try his chances in the City of Lights and thus realize his “dream of the West”. The Parisian scene being itself saturated and faced with the birth of new artistic centers that are often more open and welcoming, its beginnings were not easy. Without resources, without knowledge in the field, without a patron, but also without perseverance and strength of character, even the greatest talent risks going unnoticed.

While before 1953, Kimura exhibited very little and this only in Japan (he was mobilized in 1937 and 1945), upon arriving in Paris, he had the “luck” of finding not only a patron thanks to whom he can rent a studio, but also gallery owners and critics who will quickly become his friends and support his work, despite the uncertainty of this commitment. Especially since in the artistic field the time is rather for the rejection, even the affirmed denial of the past, and Kimura, against the tide, asserts himself as “a successor of Monet” and wants to “transform the heritage of the great French pictorial tradition” by achieving “[the] accomplishment of Impressionism”, symbol of academicism reviled by the avant-gardes of the time. This is also the case not only in Europe and the United States, but also in Japan where in 1956 – the year of Kimura’s first exhibition in France – the Gutai Art Manifesto was published which considered the art of the past as “a deception”, a “heap of simulacra”, “deceptive ghosts which have taken on the appearance of another matter: magic of materials – pigments, canvas, metals, earth or marble…”[1]

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog in which we reproduce and translate for the first time into English the texts by Jacques Zeitoun, Pierre Cabanne and Max-Pol Fouchet which accompanied Kimura’s exhibitions in the 1970s as well as a small text “manifesto” by Kimura himself, written for the 1973 exhibition.

[1] Jirô Yoshihara, Guta Art Manifesto (Gendai bijutsu sengen), 1956.