Kiyoshi Awazu

Kiyoshi Awazu
Born	February 19, 1929 Meguro, Tokyo, Empire of Japan
Died	April 28, 2009 Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan
Nationality	Japan

Kiyoshi Awazu (Japanese: 粟津　潔, romanized: Awazu Kiyoshi, February 19, 1929 – April 28, 2009) was a Japanese graphic designer, active in the post-WWII era in the fields of poster design, architecture design, set design, illustration, and more. A self-taught artist, Awazu was

Biography

Early life

Kiyoshi Awazu was born in 1929 in Himonya, Meguro ward. Before he turned one years old, his father, an electrical lab technician in the Ministry of Communications, died in a train accident at the age of thirty. At the age of four, his mother remarried to a dressmaker and Awazu was sent to live with his grandmother and uncle nearby. After graduating from elementary school, he attended a trade school at night while working different jobs, including at a rotary print press factory, a construction materials production company, and at a used book store in Kanda, where he began to delve deeply into poetry and literature.

Though Awazu entered the vocational department at Hosei University, classes were largely cancelled owing to the war, and his home was burned down in the Bombing of Tokyo. After the surrender, Awazu dropped out of school and opted to become a subway employee at Meguro Station while becoming involved in a “Social Studies Study Group” near Hosei University, where he began to become involved in studies of Marxism-Leninism. In 1948, he quit his subway position and began working for the Japan Graphic Arts Association (Nihon sakuga kyōkai), a billboard and film pamphlet production agency while attending sketching classes at a small art studio in Ginza.

Awazu was a largely self-taught artist and credited his artistic education to reading numerous prewar art historical textbooks and journals and foreign graphic design magazines. During these studies, Awazu encountered the work of American artist Ben Shahn, best known for his social realist approach and expressive, graphic style, and Austrian-American graphic designer Herbert Bayer, who was trained at the Bauhaus and became a pioneering figure in modern typography. Shahn’s artistic engagements with political and social realities, as well as the lives of ordinary people, along with Bayer’s innovative use of photomontage and expressive handling of text as a graphic medium would serve as important influences on Awazu’s artistic development and his thinkings on the social role of design and visual communication in the modern world.

Career beginnings

From 1954 to 1958, he worked in the publicity department at film production company Nikkatsu, creating silkscreened prints that primarily featured simple line drawings alongside hand-lettered titles.

In 1955, after visiting Kujūkuri Beach (link) Chiba prefecture and witnessing the indignation of local fishermen in the area, who had been banned from conducting their

His style began to evolve and acquire a greater experimental sensibility through the 1960s, resisting the formal conventions of mid-century modernism and instead opting for more expressive, variable forms that made use of sketches, ideograms, motifs culled from folklore and mythology, as well a a vibrant pop color palette that became synonymous with his style.