(b Tokyo, 22 May 1911). Japanese painter and teacher. His grandfather was the celebrated Nihonga (Japanese-style) painter Gyokusho Kawabata. In 1934 Kawabata graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music). From 1939 to 1941 he lived in Italy and France. In 1950 he became a professor at the Tama Art University, Tokyo, and the following year he exhibited at the first São Paulo Biennale. In 1953 he was a founder-member of the Nihon Abusutorakuto Ato Kurabu (Japanese Abstract Art Club) with Jiro Yoshihara, Takeo Yamaguchi and others. In 1958 Kawabata went to the USA and participated in an international exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where he was awarded a prize. He exhibited Rhythm (1958; Tokyo, N. Mus. Mod. A.) at the Sengo No Shusaku (Post-war Outstanding Works of Art Exhibition) at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (1959). In the same year he started lecturing in painting at the New School for Social Research in New York. He exhibited Work (B) (1961; Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefect. Mus. Mod. A.) at the sixth Nihon Kokusai Bijutsuten (International Art Exhibition, Japan), Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo. One-man exhibitions of his work were held at the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (1975), and at the Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (1988). He painted in an Abstract Expressionist style in the 1950s and in a colour field style after the 1960s.

• Kawabata, Minoru
  • Yoshihara, Jiro