Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Work

installation view, 2020-25, Tsurko Yamazaki, Shōhei Tomatsu, Jasper Johns, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, at MoMA, photo: Jonathan Muzikar for MoMA From its acquisition in 2019 following the artist’s death until last year, Work, Tsuruko Yamazaki’s mesmerizing aniline dye on tin painting from 1957 was shown in a quietly bold installation about the moment of its creation. Beginning in 1955, Yamazaki, one of the original Gutai artists, showed startling works made of tin containers cast off by the occupying US troops. Shōhei Tomatsu’s photos of occupied Japan from 1960 include some of those troops. Jasper Johns, meanwhile, made Flag beginning in 1954, after returning from a year in Japan, where he’d been drafted as one of those occupying soldiers. Self portrait in Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Work, 1957, aniline dye on tin, 28 7/8 × 32 1/2 in., collection MoMA Now, Yamazaki’s Work hangs in a gallery with more formalist resonances: postwar abstraction, messy process. It’s not easy to photograph, at least…