岡本太郎

Tarō Okamoto (1911–1996) was a Japanese artist whose radical vision reshaped postwar art. Born into an artistic family—his father a celebrated cartoonist, his mother a writer—Okamoto spent formative years in Paris (1930–1940), where he studied philosophy and ethnography under luminaries like Marcel Mauss, and encountered Picasso's work with transformative force. He joined the avant-garde Abstraction-Création group and participated in Surrealist circles before returning to Japan as war broke out.