The Exquisite Corpses of Takayanagi Yutaka

Takayanagi Yutaka (b. 1941) is one of a wave of artists who brought fresh, intriguing approaches to figurative printmaking in postwar Japan. His works recall the Dadaist movement in Europe during the 1910s and 1920s, when artists embraced nonsensical humor in reaction to the exploitation of rationalism for military purposes during World War I (1914–1918).

Takayanagi’s prints are particularly reminiscent of the “exquisite corpse,” a language game invented in 1925 by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and others, in which words cut from a newspaper are randomly arranged to create unpredictable poems.