James Lee Byars

In the twenty years since the death of the artist and aesthetic heretic James Lee Byars, episodes from his life have taken on the aura of urban legend. Born in Detroit in 1932, he spent much of his adult life outside the United States and died in Cairo, Egypt in 1997. No country, however, influenced his development as an artist more profoundly than Japan, where he lived for most of the decade from 1958 to 1967. While there he immersed himself in Zen Buddhism, Shinto, Noh, the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and numerous other elements of Japanese aesthetic tradition. Yet virtually none of the literature written about Byars discusses that period of his life in depth, and it remains largely unknown to art critics and historians today.

This book is the first thorough examination of Byars’s days in Japan, the evolution of his art there, and the experiences and relationships that shaped it as well as of his final days and death in Egypt. Written by an art historian who has spent fifteen years researching Byars’s life and work, this is a seminal volume that satisfyingly elucidates the link between his art and Japanese culture.