Abstract
Shigeru Aoki is most often taken as the unfortunate and unfinished genius par excellence in modern Japanese art history. The range of criticism on his art is generally governed by the nature of this unfinishedness. Very little has directly been written on finito and non-finito in his pictures, although he is discussed in most works dealing with individual artists and in the various histories of modern Japanese painting. The salient characteristic of Aoki's art is uncompleteness, but this is not to suggest that his short life offers any clarification of non-finito in his pictures. To anyone regarding the subject, many questions will appear. In the first place, how far was "Gifts of Sea", Aoki's best known and most romantic work, completed? What caused the final uncomplete conditions after all? How far has "Palace under the Sea" been finished off in fact? How far have the contemporaries penetrated to the essential quality of these paintings they seemed to admire? His art seems to capture in his naive romanticism, in his sensitive symbolism and in his ruined mind the essence of subjectivism in modern art.
