ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the group of artists in order. These includes: to establish a genealogy of the genre in Brazilian art; to learn how calligraphic traditions influenced Brazilian artists; and to disrupt the traditional understanding of national art that excludes the history of Japanese immigrant artists and in the contemporary moment includes only geometric abstract art. The abstract paintings of the artists, Tomie Ohtake, Manabu Mabe, and Flavio-Shiro, formed part of a larger global network of artists practicing calligraphic abstraction, which synthesized tradition with the new and proposed abstraction as simultaneously non-figurative and legible. The art press often discussed Informalism and Tachism in connection with the new abstract art of Brazil, in particular with reference to the artists discussed. With the development of postwar abstraction artists in the United States and Western Europe also borrowed promiscuously from Asian traditions. Calligraphic abstraction describes the relation of their art to their biography, it defines a transnational innovation of abstraction.
