Tsutaka has been recognized as one of the leading postwar Japanese abstract painters for his calligraphic paintings, which explored the formal, textual, and material variety of lines.
He also created ink paintings, watercolors, drawings, lithographs, ceramic plates, stone carvings, collages, and illustrations for publications, as well as poems, essays and articles on art, and exhibitions reviews.
Born in 1911 in Osaka as the son of a rice dealer, Tsutaka was adopted by his older half-brother and moved to Nishinomiya in 1914 following his father's bankruptcy.
Under the provisions of the Public Security Preservation Laws, in the so-called Kobe Poet Incident, several members were arrested and interrogated under the suspicion of undermining the political and social order.
He became a vital member of Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group, commonly known as Genbi), which was founded in 1952 by Jirō Yoshihara, Kokuta Suda and others as a forum for a free interdisciplinary exchange among artists, critics, and scholars from the Kansai region.
[10][11] In addition to painters and sculptors, the group included avant-garde practitioners of the traditional arts: ceramics (such as Sōdeisha), calligraphy (such as Bokujinkai) and ikebana.
Despite his international exhibitions and travels, Tsutaka remained strongly attached to his hometown Nishinomiya and the surrounding Kansai region until his death.
Beginning in 1965, he included pottery and ceramic works in his exhibitions,[23] followed by ink wash paintings, drawings, lithographs, and stone carving.
These exhibitions, which ran for a day each in 1962 and 1963, or, since 1964 for about a week, were accompanied by events, symposiums, dance and music performances, and refreshments, with the aim of making art asseccible to the greater public and fostering free and open dialogue between people.
[25] This idea further developed into seminars and to the foundation of an organizational committee and eventually to the establishment of the open-air Kakū tsūshin tento ten (Communication of Imagination Tent Exhibition) at the Shukugawa River banks in Nishinomiya in 1980, which included performances, workshops, and site-specific works.
Although in the 1940s, Tsutaka chose painting over poetry as his main form of artistic expression, he continued to publish poems, e.g., in magazines such as Hi no tori and Tenbin (Scale),[29] and to collaborate with poets throughout his life.
Around 1949, the human figures in his paintings were schematized in a Surrealist manner, reduced to their contour lines and placed before undefined plain backgrounds.
With Maisō (Burial) from 1952, Tsutaka ultimately omitted any figurative elements, he created a geometric structure composed of vigorously painted broad lines in black and yellow.
He created compositions of broad dark blue and black lines of oil paint, which he applied in dynamic, energetic movements, with spontaneous elements such as splashes.
[31] Between 1962 and 1966 Tsutaka introduced the application of liquid paint on the canvas with syringes,[32] which resulted in a new variety of shades and gradations of soaked fine lines.
[34] These pieces, made of Shiragaki clay,[35] included dark or color-glazed ceramic plates (tōban), into which abstract compositions with lines, circles and notches were scratched.
[50] Boshi-zō (Mother with a Child), shown at the 6th Kōdō Exhibition in 1951, was Tsutaka's first work that was publicly commended by the influential art critic Atsuo Imaizumi for the “new sentiment” it embodied.
[51][52] Imaizumi, who in 1952 criticized the intricateness and old-fashioned nature of the Japanese paintings presented at the Salon de Mai show in Paris,[53] during the 7th Kōdō Exhibition later that year, continued to praise Tsutaka's abstract Maiso (Burial) and Kurai kisetsu (Dark Season) for their “brisk space and rhythm”.
Tsutaka's paintings inspired Japanese-Brazilian painters such as Manabu Mabe and Tomie Ohtake in their transition from figuration to informal abstraction in the late 1950s.