Teruko Yokoi

Describing her own paintings as “poems written in colors,” Teruko Yokoi often wandered the hills near her home in Japan as a child with her father, a calligrapher and poet who taught her both art forms. At a time when it was difficult to move in the art world as a single young Japanese woman, Yokoi was one of the few women artists in the 1950s New York milieu of Abstract Expressionism. Through friendships with Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada, and Mark Rothko, Yokoi developed her unique, masterful integration of lyrical abstraction and East Asian landscape.

Yokoi settled in Switzerland, after her early daring trajectory living in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, and then Paris. Several years earlier in 1960, Yokoi separated from her husband, the American painter Sam Francis, and briefly returned to Japan. They had met in 1957 in New York and married in March of 1959. Yokoi’s work was eclipsed at the time by the attention given to the rising success of her male artist partner.

In Switzerland, Yokoi recognized in its pristine landscapes the characteristics of Japanese landscape that she had so loved and remembered from her past, but by the 1960s were largely gone at the expense of post-war urbanization. Critic Willy Rotzler, upon Yokoi’s artistic debut in the Swiss art world, described her painting as “an imaginary inner landscape that does not exist in this form, neither here in the West nor in the Far East . . . pictorial and metaphorical concentrations of emotive devotion to the unutterable, to the experience.”

Born in Japan in 1924, Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting before exploring European abstract art. In 1953, in the wake of World War II, she left Japan for San Francisco. As one of two Japanese students at the California School of Fine Arts, Yokoi turned to abstraction and received many scholarships and grants, one which allowed her to move to New York in 1955 to study with Hans Hofmann. After her separation from Francis, Yokoi permanently moved to Bern, Switzerland in 1962, where she remained until her death in 2020. There are two museums dedicated to Yokoi’s work in Japan: Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Museum (opened in 2004) and Teruko Yokoi Fuji Museum of Art in Shizuoka (opened in 2008).

Yokoi has had over ninety exhibitions, including two solo shows at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, as well as group shows at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, and Marlborough Gallery, New York. Her last major retrospective entitled Teruko Yokoi: Tokyo–New York–Paris–Bern was presented by the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 2020.