Abstract Expressionist painter Taro Yamamoto was associated with the New York School in the 1950s. Descended from a long line of Shinto priests, the Hollywood-born artist moved to Japan as a young child to receive a traditional education. He returned to the U.S. in the late 1930s, studying Cubist painting at Los Angeles City College before relocating to New York, where he enrolled at the Art Students League of New York and Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. Yamamoto became involved in the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement. Unlike superstar Ab-Ex artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, however, Yamamoto took varied approaches to abstraction, including hard-edge and action painting, with both gestural and geometric forms, sometimes within a single work. Although not as well known as his peers, Yamamoto has achieved recognition through group exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Parrish Art Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Dayton Art Institute, among others.