Yanagihara Mutsuo 柳原睦夫 Japanese, b. 1934

Yanagihara Mutsuo has taught art in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, his exposure to modernist American art instilled in him a great interest in and respect for American and European abstraction, one that would manifest in his later work. He is best known for pioneering vivid, monochromatic glazes inspired by Geometric Abstraction and Abstract expressionism. For example, his Yellow Oribe glaze inspired by color theories in art history developed by the work of Yves Klein.