More than a decade after her death, Toshiko Takaezu’s (1922-2011) stature is still climbing – higher even than during her lifetime. One pot sold for $500 at auction in 1999; last year a similar one sold for $550,000. Her third posthumous retrospective is being organized by the Noguchi Museum (to tour) for 2024 and a recent one at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was widely attended and written about, including in the New York Times. All this followed the enormous honor of her presence in the US Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Despite much of her career having been spent in the close-knitlikened her swoopy lines of wraparound color to Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. At the same time, Takaezu, the American-born daughter of Japanese exiles in Hawai’i (one of eleven children) was feted by the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and collected widely in US art museums as well as, later, in Japan, Thailand and Switzerland.
