Memory of Lines: Seitaro Kuroda's Drawing of the Showa Period, July 1967

Memory of Lines: Seitaro Kuroda's Drawing of the Showa Period, July 1967

In the 1960s, Japan's graphic culture was enveloped in a new fever. Twenty years after the postwar devastation, as the economy continued to grow and advertisements and magazines changed the face of the city, Seitaro Kuroda continued to draw pictures that carried the warmth of the human body. Born in Osaka, he valued the power of life over sophistication, and in his rough brushstrokes he imprinted the chaos and hope of the postwar period. At the end of the 1960s, as the student movement and the Vietnam War shook society, Kuroda and Teruhiko Yumura attracted attention as the standard-bearers of "underground pop. Unlike the orderly aesthetics of corporate advertisements, their works, like graffiti on the street, were vivid and conveyed the breath of the times. Kuroda's illustrations for the magazines "Talking Features" and "Playboy" were "mirrors of the times" for young people, bringing back human emotions that had been lost in the growing society. Kuroda said, "To draw is to li
ve," and drew lines not with logic but with his breath. His trembling lines are a silent testimony to the pain and hope of the Showa era.