Kitasono Katué (1902–1978) was the best known
Japanese poet-artist in Europe and the US during the middle half of the 20th century.
Active from the mid-1920s as a pioneering avant-garde spirit, Kitasono made a priority of finding common ground with poets, artists and writers in Europe and the Americas. First entranced by
Dadaism and
Surrealism, he also thoroughly absorbed the ideas of
Futurism,
Cubism,
Abstract Expressionism and
Minimalism. His poems were often published in poetry and visual art journals, and he served as an editor and graphic designer for some of these, including the journal
VOU, published from 1935 to 1940, and then again from 1945 until his death in 1978. Kitasono edited and designed more than 500 magazines and poetry books, and created numerous covers for novels, trade journals and commercial magazines.
Plastic Poems, which fit in a category more broadly referred to as
visual poetry, adorned many of his book covers; Kitasono began to produce
Plastic Poetry after being inspired by the photographs done by members of the VOU group. In the last twelve years of his life, Kitasono continued to experiment with the limitless field of visual poetry, maintaining the clean form and finely conceived pairings of images seen in his earliest successful text poems.
