Jiro Yoshihara was a Japanese painter. In 1954, along with Shozo Shimamoto, he co-founded the avant-garde Gutai Group* in Osaka. He was a businessman and scion of a family that owned a cooking-oil company, along with a group of young, Hanshin-region artists. Yoshihara had taught Western-style painting before becoming Gutai’s leader.

Yoshihara wrote the "Gutai Manifesto" in 1956, and was the leader of the so named group of internationally acclaimed avant-garde artists representative of Japan's post-war art world. He worked in surrealist* and abstract expressionist* painting styles before turning, in his final years, to the repeated depiction of circles reminiscent of "satori," the enlightenment of Zen. This white circle was made by le...