Atsuko Tanaka, Artist Who Challenged Convention, 73

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Atsuko Tanaka, one of Japan's most important avant-garde artists, died
on December 3, 2005, at a hospital near her home in Nara, Japan, at the
age of 73.

The cause was pneumonia, said Midori Nishizawa of the Paula Cooper
Gallery, which represents her work in New York. Ms. Tanaka had been
hospitalized since being injured in an automobile accident last spring.

Ms. Tanaka was a member of the artist group Gutai. Founded in 1954, at
a time when many Japanese people were exploring new freedoms, Gutai
reacted to American Abstract Expressionism and the French Informel
movement by advocating a radically nontraditional, experimental play
with nonrepresentational materials. Ms. Tanaka, who joined the group in
1955, became widely known for works that combined sculpture, electric
sound and light, and performance.

In the mid-50's Ms. Tanaka made works of colored fabric that were cut
with scissors and pinned unstretched to gallery walls, challenging
traditional definitions of painting and artistic craft. Later she
created performances in which she would peel away layers of brightly
colored dresses that she had made herself, until she was wearing only a
black leotard or a rubber suit that made her appear nude.

The dress theme also led to her most famous work, "Electric Dress"
(1956), a sculpture in the form of scores of colored lights that almost
completely obscured Ms. Tanaka when she wore it for public
performances.

A sound piece called "Work (Bell)," also made in 1956, consisted of a
sequence of ringing sounds circulating the gallery by means of a single
button that viewers were invited to press.

In a 1956 essay, Shozo Shimamoto, another Gutai artist, called the bell
piece "perhaps the first-ever invisible work in the history of art."

Atsuko Tanaka was born on Feb. 10, 1932, in Osaka. In 1950 she began
studying at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, where her classmates
included the future Gutai artists Akira Kanayama, whom she married in
1965 and who survives her, and Kazuo Shiraga.

Ms. Tanaka contributed works to many group exhibitions in Japan,
including 12 Gutai group shows, before having her first solo exhibition
in 1963 at Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka. She had her first museum
retrospective, a show of 145 works dating from 1954 to 2000, at the
Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in 2001.

After the experimental works of the 50's, Ms. Tanaka devoted herself
mainly to producing abstract paintings and drawings. Her lively,
colorful compositions of circles and lines were initially inspired by
the cords and colored bulbs of the "Electric Dress." Some of them were
included in a 1966 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
"The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture."

In 2004, the Paula Cooper Gallery presented an exhibition of Ms.
Tanaka's late paintings and drawings, which ran concurrently with an
exhibition of her works from the 50's and 60's titled "Electrifying
Art" at New York University's Grey Art Gallery.

NY Times