The Essence of Toshiko Okanoue Toshiko Okanoue

*Available only in Europe

*This book is secondhand.

This volume distills the "essence" of Toshiko Okanoue's photo collages, a body of work created in an intense burst during the early 1950s. Born in Kochi and trained at Bunka Gakuin, Okanoue cut and reassembled images from Western fashion and picture magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Life to build dreamlike black-and-white worlds. A pivotal introduction to the poet and critic Shuzo Takiguchi, who exposed her to European Surrealists like Max Ernst, shaped her sensibility. Elegant gowned women, crumbling architecture, birds and skies are spliced into unreal compositions where beauty and unease coexist. With its bilingual English title, the book presents her to an international audience and situates her within Japan's postwar avant-garde. Having abandoned art on marrying and fallen silent for four decades before her rediscovery in the 1990s, Okanoue left a small but remarkable oeuvre; this collection lets readers savor the concentrated core of that brief, luminous career.