Born in Tokyo in 1913. She is regarded as a pioneer of important avant-garde female artists linking the prewar and postwar periods. In 1926, she entered a girl’s school and began studying Japanese painting under Shuho Ikegami at the urging of her parents, despite her strong interest in Western painting. Through Japanese-style painting, she learned to depict familiar plants and animals clearly based on detailed observation, which laid the foundation for her later oil paintings. After graduating from the girls’ school, she began attending the Avant-Garde Western Painting Research Institute in 1933 under the tutelage of Seiji Togo and Tsuguharu Foujita.

Rather than the Cubist approach to collage, which introduced reality into the picture plane, Katsura’s abstract collage works, which were inspired by her interest in the surface of materials and created following her own tactile sense, gradually attracted attention. In 1938, she joined the Nika Kyushitsukai along with Jiro Yoshihara and Takeo Yamaguchi, and continued to work energetically. From the late 1940s to the 1950s, Katsura worked on numerous children’s book bindings and illustrations, approaching the world of storytelling, and through her work Katsura developed a new social satirical expression that contained allegory. From 1956, she traveled around Europe from her base in Paris, interacting with various local artists, and after a stay in Central Africa, she moved to the United States in 1958. After returning to Japan in 1961, Katsura continued to be active in a wide range of fields, including winning the Mainichi Publication Culture Award for her book on her travels abroad, and until her later years, when she published her creations using red silk, she continued to produce works that always broke with conventional ideas. At first glance, Diary appears to be a collage, but the collage is meticulously rendered in oil.

Thus, in this work, in which the boundary between collage and oil painting is blurred, we can see Katsura’s quest to understand the subject more fundamentally by moving back and forth between the visual and tactile senses.