Takeo Yamaguchi was born in 1902 in Seoul. He graduated in 1927 from the Tokyo School of the Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts) and founded Joshakai Art Association together with Kenzo Okada and Takanori Ogisu. Later, Ogisu and Yamaguchi traveled to France together, where Yamaguchi was strongly impressed with Yuzo Saeki's work, as well as the sculptures of Ossip Zadkine. After his return to Japan in 1931, Yamaguchi painted in a semi-abstract manner, to some extent inspired by Fauvism, to express nature with a consciously reductive arsenal of shapes and colors. He joined the Nika Art Association in the same year.

In 1953, Yamaguchi founded the Japan Abstract Art Club, and in the following year participated in the 18th American Abstract Art Exhibition. In 1961, he received the Award of the Minister of Education. His works were also featured in the 1965 exhibition, New Japanese Painting and Sculpture, held in New York. Since 1979, Yamaguchi worked as a professor at Musashino Art University. A major retrospective, “Takeo Yamaguchi and Masakazu Horiuchi” was held at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art in 1980. Yamaguchi died in 1983.