Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Japanese Visual Culture) 9004216723, 9789004216723

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painting circles

japanese visual culture Volume 11 Managing Editor John T. Carpenter

Painting Circles Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan

by John D. Szostak

Leiden – Boston 2013

Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Published by BRILL Plantijnstraat 2 2321 JC Leiden The Netherlands brill.com/jvc Design SPi, Tamilnadu, India Studio Berry Slok, Amsterdam (cover) Production High Trade BV, Zwolle, The Netherlands Printed in Slovakia ISBN 978-90-04-21672-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Szostak, John Donald. Painting circles : Tsuchida Bakusen and nihonga collectives in early 20th-century Japan / by John D. Szostak. pages cm. -- (Japanese visual culture ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-21672-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Tsuchida, Bakusen, 1887-1936--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Kokuga Sosaku Kyokai (Japan) 3. Painters--Japan--Social conditions--20th century. I. Title. ND1059.T745S96 2013 759.952--dc23 2013026477

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Cover image: Tsuchida Bakusen, “Hair,” 1911. Color on silk. University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts.

For my father

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

introduction 1

1

bakusen’s early life and works: towards a rural genre painting Early Life on Sado Island Early Training under Suzuki Shōnen The 1904 Shinkoten and the Kyūha-Shinpa Dynamic Studying at Chikujōkai Exhibition Debut: Manchurian Summer Heat (1905) Rural Fūzokuga: Punishment (1908) and Tax Collection Day (1909)

2

beyond chikujōkai: expanding influences and new encounters The Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting Tanaka Kisaku, the Nameless Society, and Chat Noir Exhibiting at Le Masque and the Bunten: Hair (1911)

3

challenges, changes, and evolving strategies at the bunten The Division of Bunten Nihonga Section and the Founding of the Inten Lure of the Exotic: Island Women (1912) and Abalone Divers (1913) Balancing Boldness and Restraint: Scattering Blossoms (1914) and Women of Ōhara (1915) Revisiting the Keichō Era: Three Maiko (1916)

4

gathering the higashiyama circle Ono Chikkyō: The “Impressionist Naturalist” Sakakibara Shihō: Harmony and Discord Murakami Kagaku: Painting the Profane and the Sacred Nonagase Banka: Testing the Limits of Tradition Results of the 1917 Bunten The Formation of the Kokuga Society

5

the inaugural kokuten exhibition of 1918: content and contexts The Kyoto and Tokyo Press Debuts The Kokuga Society Name, Manifesto, and Statement of Purpose Management and Organization of the Kokuten Exhibition

vii

11 11 13 16 20 27 30

37 38 40 45

57 58 62 72 84 91 93 96 99 106 112 116

119 120 124 127

contents

The Inaugural Kokuten and its Critical Reception Bakusen’s Bathhouse Maiden Kagaku’s Death of a Saint Banka’s Stream in Early Summer Chikkyō’s Village of Nakiri and Shihō’s Early Plums Other Significant Works at the First Kokuten The Impact of the First Kokuten: An Overview 6

artistic flowering: the second and third kokuten exhibitions The Death of the Bunten and Birth of the Teiten Overview of the Second and Third Kokuten Exhibitions (1919, 1920) Bakusen: Three Maiko (1919) and Spring (1920) Chikkyō: Gokayama in Summer (1919) and Island at Sea (1920) Shihō: Red Pines (1919) and Forest in Nara (1920) Kagaku: Hidaka River (1919) and Nude (1920) Banka: Time of Rest (1919) and Fishermen Returning at Sunset (1920) Other Significant Works at the Second and Third Kokuten Aftermath of the Three Kokuga Society Exhibitions

7

hiatus, expansion, and collapse: the kokuten’s middle and final stages Art Pilgrimage to Europe The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Japan Art Exhibition (1923) The Kokuga Society’s Expansion and Evolving Policies Bakusen’s Maiko in a Garden (1924) and Women of Ōhara (1927) Other Significant Kokuten Paintings, 1924–1927 The Eighth Kokuten and the Dissolution of the Kokuga Society

conclusions Kagaku, Shihō, Banka and Chikkyō in the Post-Kokuten Period Intellectual Formalism: Bakusen’s Later Years The Kokuga Society’s Legacy

129 131 133 136 138 141 149

153 154 156 158 161 164 167 173 178 184

189 190 195 196 200 206 212 221 223 226 229

Appendix 1: Documents Related to the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Statement of Purpose (Riyūsho), 1918 Kokuga Society Manifesto (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Sengensho) and Regulations (Kiyaku), 1918 Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Submission and Exhibition Rules and Protocols (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Tenrankai Shuppin Kiyaku), 1918 Kokuga Society Dissolution Notice (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Kaisansho), 1928 Appendix 2: List of Characters

234 234

Endnotes Bibliography Index

244 276 285 viii

234 235 237 238

Acknowledgements

I

have benefitted enormously from the encouragement, guidance, and support of a great many individuals as I researched and wrote this book. First of all, I must express my gratitude to Paul Berry and Michiyo Morioka, my first teachers who offered early crucial critical guidance as I gathered my foundational knowledge and formed my initial ideas about Nihonga. I owe them more than I can express. Griffith and Patricia Way also have my thanks for sharing their collection of modern Japanese paintings, which provided the material for my first art historical research on Kyoto Nihonga, and encouraged my interest in Japanese modern art. Other mentors during my doctoral studies at the University of Washington generously shared with me their expertise, knowledge and support, especially Cynthea Bogel, Jerome Silbergeld, and Patricia Failing. My research at Kyoto University was funded by a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship, and at Kyodai I thank Professors Sasaki Jōhei and Nedachi Kensuke for their generous time and guidance during that time, and Professor Iwaki Kenichi, who helped me work through several difficult problems related to the reception of Western aesthetics by Japanese artists and intellectuals in the early 20th century. A Robert and Lisa Sainsbury postdoctoral fellowship in 2010-2011 provided me with a focused year of research and writing without which this book would never have been completed. I am deeply grateful to the Sainsbury family for their support of Japanese art history research, to the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and its staff, including Mami Mizutori, Simon Kaner, Nicole Rousmaniere, Ulrich Heinze, Miwako Hayashi and Keiko Nishioka, all of whom did so much to assure my fellowship year was as productive as possible. I also thank John Carpenter, head of the SISJAC London office during my research fellowship, for his unflagging and constantly

cheerful support. Further development of the manuscript was supported by an Individual Grant for Advanced Research and Publication from the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies in 2011, and I offer my deepest thanks to the Center. I also thank the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, which hosted me during my year as SISJAC fellow. My work there was enriched by the generous hospitality and intellectual enrichment provided by SOAS staff Timon Screech, Shane McCausland, Charles Gore, Meri Arichi, and Angus Lockyer, and by Ph.D. students Noriko Horsley, Jenny Preston, and Eriko Tomizawa-Kay. Throughout the year, London artist John Tran lent his generous fellowship, stimulating conversation, and a thoughtful, critical ear. At the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, I thank Gaye Chan, chair of the Department of Art and Art History, and my associates in the department for enabling my fellowship year over 2010-11. I am very fortunate to be working in this department alongside such enlightened colleagues; my research is far richer for it. A Faculty Research Development Award supplied by the UH Japan Studies Endowment funded travel and research in Japan, and I thank the Center for Japanese Studies at UH, especially then-CJS director Bob Huey, for its support. In Japan, I thank the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, especially Yoshinaka Mitsuyo and Goto Yumiko, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, where Ogura Jitsuko was particularly generous with her time and resources. Uchiyama Takeo was director and Shimada Yasuhiro was curator at MoMAK when I did my initial research into the Kokuga Society, and they graciously facilitated access to the museum’s collection of paintings, drawings, and early 20th century journals. Shimada-san also shared his immense knowledge of Kyoto Nihonga, and suggested several avenues of inquiry ix

acknowledgements

that proved to be extremely fruitful, and his own pioneering research and curatorial work on Kyoto Nihonga has long been an inspiration. Hoshino Keizō of Kyoto’s Hoshino Garō has long been a generous source of research materials and paintings for study, as well as enthusiasm, advice and encouragement. Yamazaki Sumio of Kyoto’s Yamazaki Shoten, a treasure trove of books, journals, and visual materials, changed my life when he handed a then-young, poor graduate student an (expensive) copy of Kyoto ni okeru Nihongashi, insisting that I take it for my studies, and to pay him whenever I had the chance. The generous assistance, friendship and support of these individuals enabled my education in countless ways.

I also have many advisors, friends and colleagues to thank for sharing their knowledge, advice and assistance. I thank Kawai Masatomo, Toshio Watanabe, Ellen Conant, Timothy Clark, Maekawa Osamu, Satow Morihiro, Sarai Mai, Emura Tomoko, Rosina Buckland, Sherry Fowler, Kaneko Maki, and others too numerous to mention. I must also thank Brill editors Anna Beerens and Inge Klompmakers for their helpful input, and for their patience. Finally, I thank my parents for their love and support over many years, and my wife Hiroko and son Kai for bearing with me as I disappeared for days on end to work on this volume. I hope the results at least partly justify my long absence.

x

Introduction

the consistent selection of his submissions by the Bunten jury. Now, he and his friends complained, they could not bear to exhibit their paintings alongside the myopic and uninspiring works chosen for display at the national salon. They must break away, they announced, not only for their own sakes, but also for the sake of artistic freedom itself. If this narrative sounds familiar, it is because the formation of anti-establishment collectives and movements has been a constant in the global history of modern art, including that of Japan. The Kokuga Society was in excellent company in the Taishō (1911–1925) and early Shōwa (1925–1989) periods, when many breakaway art groups formed with practically seasonal regularity and persistence. For example, the Nikakai (“Second Section Society”), an oil painting exhibition group, broke with the Bunten in 1914 to protest a perceived conservative bias, which in turn catalyzed the formation of Mavo, a short-lived but dynamic artist collective that split from the Nikakai in 1923 on the very same grounds.1 These are just two of the dozens of collectives that rose up across Japan in the name of artistic freedom during the first decades of the twentieth century. What distinguishes the Kokuga Society is less the reasons for its establishment than the impact of the art produced by its membership, especially Bakusen, and of that selected from among public submissions for inclusion in the society’s associated exhibition, the Kokuten (an abbreviation of the official name, Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Tenrankai,

“Young painters, keep calm!” – Guillaume Apollinaire, 1912

I

n january of 1918, five Nihonga painters held a press conference in the city of Kyoto to publicize the founding of a new painting society and exhibition collective. This group, named Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai (“Society of the Creation of Japanese Painting), henceforth referred to as the Kokuga Society, resolved to challenge the hegemony of the Ministry of Education-organized, salon-style exhibition known as the Bunten. The Kokuga Society held that the members of the selection jury for the national salon had turned away from the noble goal envisioned for the Bunten at the time of its institution in 1907, namely, to lead the Japanese art world into the future by selecting and celebrating the best new art created by Japan’s most talented artists. Instead, the Kokuga Society founders complained, the function of the national exhibition had been reduced in the intervening decade to the maintenance of a hidebound and spiritless status quo. “Art is something born,” the painters asserted in their manifesto, “not produced by mechanism or institutions… The creation of art must be practiced with complete freedom.” The defacto leader of the Kokuga Society was a painter in his early thirties named Tsuchida Bakusen (1887–1936), who during the 1910s had developed a solid reputation through

Photograph of Tsuchida Bakusen seated outside his studio, 1935. Source: Tōei, vol. 12 no. 7 (July 1936).

1

painting circles

be unfounded. As Anthony Giddens explains, in the West, “Modernity, almost by definition, always stood in opposition to tradition,” while in nonWestern contexts, “the continuing influence of tradition within modernity remained obscure as long as ‘modern’ meant ‘Western’.”2 This is true even in Japan of today, where Nihonga is still often viewed by audiences as intrinsically tied to “traditional” Japan, putting it in a class apart from oil painting and other art media of Western importation. This presumption is widespread enough that it inspired curators at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art to organize an exhibition in 2004 that challenged it, by posing the question, “does Nihonga carry potential for an ‘avant-garde’ consciousness,” to which the curators’ selections answered resoundingly, “Yes, clearly it does.”3 The Japanese painting world was even more starkly divided in the public eye during the Meiji and Taishō eras, when Japanese cultural identity was threatened (or at least significantly muddled) by decades of a domestic national policy of Westernization. In such a situation, it is perhaps inevitable that outspoken voices of proponents and critics of the modernization process alike described their country as engaged in a cultural war. Many Nihonga and oil painters of both progressive and conservative bents also bemoaned how their respective artistic arenas were undermined by this polarizing tension of “new” versus “old.” This conflict between the forces of artistic progress and conservativism came to a head several times over the course of the Bunten’s history, most dramatically, perhaps, in 1912 and 1913. In those years, the Nihonga jury was split into two distinct bodies, the conservative First Section, and the progressive Second Section, and yet it is a mistake to assume that all artists necessarily felt compelled to join either the traditionalist or the modernist camp. During these two years of a split Bunten, when artists were free to send their Nihonga works for evaluation by judges who best reflected their own proclivities, many artists sent works to both panels, in a sense choosing not to choose between them. As a result, some artists, like the Kyoto painter Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883–1945)

the “Kokuga Society Exhibition”). These artworks, many of which have entered the canon of modern Japanese art history, shine light on the process by which the priorities of Western artistic modernism  were interpreted, took root, and developed in the early twentieth century specifically amongst Japan’s population of neotraditional painters, rather than those artists who self-consciously defined themselves as translators of imported Western modes of art. This is because the media of choice of the Kokuga Society was Nihonga, literally “Japanese (or Japan’s) pictures,” a system of painting that makes use of ground mineral pigments suspended in an animal-glue binder, an indigenous East Asia mode that stood in contrast to Yōga (“Western pictures”), that is to say, oil painting, although as we will see, practitioners of these two pictorial modes shared many attitudes and ambitions in the first decades of the twentieth century. As demonstrated in their art and as reinforced in  their writings from that time, Bakusen and Kokuten painters saw Nihonga as an expanding field with international implications, and viewed oil painting and the self-expressive modernist styles promoted in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as viable sources of inspiration for Nihonga. This is not to say the position  which Bakusen and company occupied was anti-traditional; on the contrary, like many painters  born in the Meiji era (1868–1911), they were committed to keeping Japan’s pre-Meiji painting  heritage alive and relevant in the modern age. But rather than preserving historical styles, techniques and motifs by rote, their goal was to inject new life and create contemporary relevance for Nihonga by integrating these traditional aspects with modernist Western referents and priorities. Today we are aware of sufficient examples demonstrating the resilience of tradition in modern societies to put to rest lingering perceptions regarding the mutual incompatibility of traditional and modern values. The myth that modernism posits, namely, that anything new trumps anything passed down to us from the past, is generally held today to 2

introduction

in 1912, ended up exhibiting works in both the Bunten’s First and Second Nihonga sections. In fact, many Nihonga painters preferred to occupy a stylistic middle ground, where they were free to be either more or less traditionalist or progressive depending on, say, the tastes of a patron, the circumstances of a commission, or the nature of the targeted juried exhibition for which the work was prepared. It was usually only at the most elite levels that style-based allegiances had significant political ramifications, but with these powerful artists making use of mass media news organs to play out their rivalries in the public sphere, we are sometimes left with the false impression that the majority of the Nihonga world in the early twentieth century was paralyzed by political feuding. Another threat to experience a degree of artificial inflation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mass media was that posed by imported Yōga painting to the survival of indigenous Nihonga. This suggestion of the noncompatibility of these two modes of painting, and the implication that one mode would inevitably gain total dominance over the other, was at the heart of the resistance mounted by conservative voices at the Ministry of Education and the Tokyo School of Art (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) against the introduction of oil painting into that school’s curriculum, and when Yōga was finally implemented in 1896 by school principle Okakura Tenshin (1862– 1913), his decision to do so contributed to his ouster two years later.4 Colorful episodes such as this perpetuate the perception that Yōga and Nihonga painters in the Meiji era generally regarded each other with distrust and even animosity, but here, too, the sparring that took place was among a comparatively small population of artists, critics, educators and politicians, and was largely played out by the turn of the century. In any case, Nihonga painters in the late nineteenth century who decried the influence or inspiration of Western oil painting were forgetful of Japan’s own art history. There are ample precedents in pre-Meiji Japanese painting of artists successfully integrating Western-imported pictorial

techniques and aesthetic priorities, including no less a figure than Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795), whose Maruyama school (Maruyama-ha), one of Kyoto’s most influential painting style lineages, was based in large part on Ōkyo’s understanding of Western perspective systems and his admiration for the capacity of Western pictorial art to express three-dimensional volume in space. Indeed, one of the leitmotifs to which this book often returns is the mutual high regard and esteem with which Yōga and Nihonga painters of the Meiji and Taishō eras held each other and their respective practices. Several Nihonga painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took up oil painting or pencil sketching in order to familiarize themselves with Western mimetic techniques, including Kawabata Gyokushō (1842–1913), who studied under the British artist-journalist Charles Wirgman (1932– 1891) years before he joined the Nihonga faculty at the Tokyo School of Art. Furthermore, Kyoto in the late 1900s and early 1910s saw the establishment of several art societies and exhibition collectives populated by practitioners of both these painting modes. In August 1901, for example, the Kyoto newspaper Hinode Shinbun reported on a new art society founded by Yōga artist Asai Chū (1856– 1907) called the Kansai Art Institute (Kansai Bijutsuin, a name Asai later gave to the oil painting school he opened in 1906). The report describes Takeuchi Seihō (1864–1942) and Yamamoto Shunkyo (1871–1933), two of the city’s most successful and influential Nihonga painters, attending the group’s first meeting, during which they produced several oil painting compositions alongside their Yōga peers.5 Ten years later, Kyoto witnessed the formation of Nameless Society (Mumeikai), Chat Noir (Sha Noaru), and Le Masque (Ru Masuku), discussed in Chapter Two, where Nihonga and Yōga painters gathered to debate fine points of their artistic practice, as well as paint and sketch together, and in the case of Le Masque, to exhibit their Nihonga and Yōga works side by side as equals. In short, the many points of intersection between Nihonga and Yōga in the 1910s and 1920s constituted not a new trend in Nihonga but the 3

painting circles

continuation of an ongoing one, albeit one that adapted to changing times. With this in mind, the image of a tug-of-war between the forces of modernism versus those of traditionalism, or between champions of Nihonga versus those of Yōga, does not accurately reflect the Japanese painting world in the early twentieth century. A better analogy might be that of a mosaic composed of myriad shifting cultural components, some of which were imported from the West, others of which were contributed by Japan’s own cultural legacy. Viewed up close, these individual components retain their distinct borders, and their placement may seem oppositional, even discordant, in relation to others placed in close proximity. When considered from a distance, however, these individual pieces merge in a state of complex and fluctuating mutual articulation. Such a model of modern cultures as amalgamative and multivalent, in the words of sociologist Stuart Hall, “accepts that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation.”6 If this is true about cultural identity at the macro level, it is also true at the micro level of individual Japanese painting practices. Bakusen and his companions nurtured an admiration for and solidarity with Japan’s greatest painters of pre-Meiji Japan, who represented, among other things, sensitivity to nature, consummate technical prowess with East Asian ink and colors, brilliant design, and native cultural validity, and simultaneously with the modern painters of Europe, especially France, who stood variously for humanism, self-expression, the spirit of experimentation, and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, they did so with no sense of contradiction. It was perhaps only the rarest of artist who could perfectly realize all of these qualities at once, but this did not stop Bakusen and his peers at the Kokuga Society from trying to do so, and the multivariate influences and inspirations they

embraced demonstrate the complex nature of the process of artistic identify formation, one that is never truly complete. This book follows Tsuchida Bakusen and his colleagues as they worked to achieve and stabilize an articulation of traditional Japanese and modern Western artistic priorities, a process through which they sought to carve out a niche for themselves in an art world that was becoming increasingly centralized and homogenized. I selected the Kokuga Society because there are ways in which it represents several significant aspects of modern art culture of the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods, from roughly 1900 to the mid 1930s. This group earned its place in Japan’s modern art historical narrative due to the unprecedented popular and critical success of the inaugural Kokuten in 1918, which transformed its founding members from a small circle of minor Kyoto painters into art world celebrities. Bakusen became the axial figure around which I built this study partly because of his role as the group’s main instigator and defacto leader, and partly because of his reputation in Japan as one of the most significant Nihonga painters of his generation, and yet his paintings remain little known outside of Japan today. One of the themes I wish to address in this book is the creation of artistic identity in the public sphere through participation in juried art exhibitions, that most modern of systems, but to understand how artists crafted and molded individual identities in this way, one needs to have a clear idea of an artist’s personal experiences and professional motivations. The preliminary part of the book title, “Painting Circles,” reflects the ironic fact that Bakusen, and indeed many Nihonga painters in the first decades of the twentieth century, chose to assert their individuated artistic identities in the public realm through association with or participation in one kind of institutional or collective endeavor or another over different times in their painting careers. In the case of Bakusen, in the early stage of his career we first see him switch from one private atelier school or juku to another, due in part to Bakusen’s belief that affiliation with the 4

introduction

second juku would propel his career further and faster. We follow Bakusen as he enrolls in Kyoto’s Specialized School for Painting, at which time he begins exhibiting at juried exhibitions, first at Kyoto’s Exhibition of Old and New Artworks or Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai, known colloquially as the Shinkoten, and later at the national governmentorganized Bunten exhibition, his venue of choice for most of the 1910s. We also see him participate a number of smaller exhibition collectives, including Le Masque, organized in Kyoto by young Nihonga and oil painters in 1911 to 1912, and in the Kokuga Society from 1918 to 1928, over which decade he succeeded in defining himself as one of the most important and influential Nihonga painters of his generation. The only period in which the adult Bakusen was not involved in a formal institution or exhibition society of one kind or another was a six-year interval from 1912 to 1918, during which time he dedicated his time and resources whole-heartedly to achieving success at the Bunten exhibition. But rather than viewing this period as one free from the pressures of conforming to exhibition collectives or art societies, Bakusen’s drive for selection at the national salon was in fact another kind of collective identification. In her discussion of the national salon and reasons for the dissatisfaction  voiced by many of its participants during the 1910s, Alicia Volk writes, “Perhaps most significant was their recognition that the Bunten, despite its pomp and power, was essentially just another bijutsu dantai [“art society”]. In the eyes of those young artists who came to shun it, the salon was merely one interest group among others.”7 Although Volk was writing primarily about oil painters, the dissatisfaction she describes is just as applicable to Bakusen’s situation, and those of many of his peers who gathered to form the Kokuga Society in 1918. Finally, I admit there are two practical reasons why I focused on Bakusen as the central figure in an examination of evolving artistic identification early twentieth century in relation to collectivism. First, insight into the nature of artists’ disappointments

and unmet expectations at that time is furnished by Bakusen’s wonderfully prolific letter-writing practice, and as his fame increased, by the many statements to the press and the essays he wrote and published himself in various mass media outlets. Bakusen’s letters in particular are a rich mine filled with important public and private information related to finances, relationships with patrons, evolving strategies for achieving selection at juried exhibitions, his candid evaluations of rival painters, the nature of his complaints directed against the Bunten salon, and most pertinently, with details regarding the creation of some of his most significant art works, from initial conception, through the research and development stages, to final execution. Thanks to his profuse writing, we learn more about Bakusen and the artists he worked alongside from than about nearly any other artist of that time. Second is the fact that Bakusen and his peers were deeply engaged in one of the most significant discursive issues contemporaneous in the Nihonga world of the 1910s and 1920s, namely the “pigment problem” (ganryō mondai). This expression first came into currency around 1910 among artists and critics who questioned Nihonga’s potential to function as a truly modernist mode of creative expression, and by 1918 Bakusen and his colleagues in the Kokuga Society believed it was a problem best addressed collectively. At issue were the material properties of mineral pigments, which lack the viscosity of oil paints, and thus do not preserve the same self-expressive traces – the lifts, folds and peaks – produced by the manipulation of the Yōga artist’s brush or palette knife. These traces were deemed to be a particularly important feature of Post-Impressionist painting, as propagated in Europe by the theories of Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935), which by 1909, as discussed in Chapter Two, had spread to Japan. Meier-Graefe believed that it was in these self-expressive traces that the artist’s own rarified personality was preserved for the viewer to discover, creating the potential for an emotional exchange. This romantic idea found traction in Japan, particularly among the contributors to Shirakaba, 5

painting circles

a seminal Japanese art journal of the 1910s. Therein was the problem, for when applied in the traditional manner, Nihonga’s mineral pigments lay more or less flat on the painting’s surface, and did not retain these self-expressive traces. Some argued that the calligraphic line, the foundation of most East Asian painting, served the same selfexpressive function as the textured surface of an oil painting,8 but such a traditionalist answer was of little interest to Nihonga artists searching for a specifically modernist manner of painterly expression by means of mineral pigments. Later, the question of ganryō as an appropriate tool to achieve pictorial mimesis, another quality closely associated with oil painting, also entered the debate. Bakusen and his fellow Kokuten painters were deeply engaged in the search for a proper balance between objective fidelity and subjective expression that was at the heart of the “pigment problem,” an issue that drove some of the most interesting Nihonga experimentation in the 1910s and 1920s. I have divided this study into two parts, the first covering Bakusen’s life until 1917, organized into chapters to mark significant personal and professional landmarks, and the second covering the Kokuten period, from the exhibition’s inception in 1918 to its dissolution in 1928, and its aftermath. Chapter One traces Bakusen’s early years, from his birth in 1887 on rural Sado Island to his move to Kyoto in 1903 and his first formal painting instruction there under Suzuki-school painter Suzuki Shōnen (1849–1918). Through Bakusen’s eyes and practice, we learn that the Kyoto Nihonga painting world was loosely divided into two camps, Kyūha (conservative) and Shinpa (progressive), and that the Shinkoten, the most significant juried art exhibition operating in Kyoto at the time, functioned as an artistic barometer of sorts to measure the relative strengths and positions of these two camps in local painting world politics. One of the most influential Kyoto artists at this time was Takeuchi Seihō, whose interest in Western-style realism attracted a large number of students, including Bakusen, who became Seihō’s student in 1907. The first chapter finishes with a discussion of Bakusen’s debut at the

Shinkoten, followed by his first submission in 1908 to the recently founded national exhibition salon, the Bunten. Chapter Two covers the years 1909 and 1910, a short but vital interlude during which several critical developments in Kyoto’s modern art history unfolded. First there was the founding of the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School of Painting, created to answer the challenge of the Bunten by offering advanced training to the city’s next generation of Nihonga painters. This chapter also considers the rapid expansion of knowledge among Kyoto artists and critics regarding modern Western art movements, and their introduction by two primary  means: artists and academics returning to Japan after periods of study and travel in Europe, and illustrated periodical art journals, the most important of which was Shirakaba. Both of these channels helped propagate Western paradigms of artistic modernism in Japan. Chapter Two also examines the activities of the Nameless Society, Chat Noir and Le Masque, three Japanese artist collectives organized by Francophile Yōga artist Tanaka Kisaku (1885–1945), who recruited the participation of several young Yōga and Nihonga artists, including Bakusen and other future Kokuten painters. Chapter Three examines Bakusen’s appearance on the national art stage as he disassociated himself from small, local exhibition collectives, and focused his attention completely on the national Bunten. From 1912 to 1916, Bakusen experimented with a variety of styles and approaches, emphasizing Nihonga’s more experimental capacities. In some works, he pushes against the limits of Nihonga’s mineral pigments, while in others he refocused his attention on Nihonga’s pre-modern artistic legacy and traditional roots. As Bakusen’s reputation at the Bunten rose, however, so did his dissatisfaction with it, fanning a growing sentiment that truly progressive art reform might not be achievable through such flawed institutional channels. Chapter Four introduces the Higashiyama group, Bakusen’s coterie of friends and acquaintances that gathered in his rented rooms in Kyoto’s 6

introduction

Higashiyama district. All members of the Higashiyama group were associated with Kyoto’s Nihonga academy, the Specialized School of Painting, and four individuals from it, namely Ono Chikkyō (1889–1979), Sakakibara Shihō (1887– 1971), Murakami Kagaku (1888–1939), and Nonagase Banka (1889–1964), would later join Bakusen as founding members of the Kokuga Society. The chapter discusses these four artists and the nature of their submissions to and evaluations of the highly competitive but increasingly dissatisfying Bunten. The chapter closes in 1917, when Bakusen and his four colleagues formally withdrew from participation in the national salon. Chapter Five discusses the founding of the Kokuga Society in 1918 by Bakusen and company, and their efforts to create and promote a progressive public identity through their publication of a manifesto, in which they state their commitment to artistic freedom. Since their first exhibition was in many ways the most important, a close study is made of all five founding Kokuga Society members’ contributions to the inaugural 1918 Kokuten, as well as other significant works selected by the membership from among the hundreds of public submissions they received for evaluation. Throughout these discussions, the critical reception of the works on exhibit is documented by reviews published contemporaneously in the mass media. Chapter Six covers the 1919 and 1920 Kokuten exhibitions, and takes measure of the effect of the Kokuga Society’s success on individual members. In this chapter we trace the impact of the Kokuten on the government-sponsored Bunten, which was dissolved, reorganized and reformed in 1919, a decision made in part by the unexpected and extraordinarily popular success of Bakusen and company’s alternative venue. We also examine and reflect on the pictorial trends that unfolded at the first three Kokuten, including experimentation with veristic styles closely identified with oil painting, or with flamboyant, pigment-based expression  inspired by Post-Impressionism, provoking heated discourse regarding the co-opting of Yōga-inflected styles by Nihonga artists, which

some critics and painters believed would only undermine the intrinsic strengths of ganryō mineral pigments. Chapter Seven begins in 1921, the start of a three-year long hiatus in Kokuga Society activity, during which Bakusen and several other members journeyed to Europe on an art pilgrimage of sorts. Bakusen’s activities in France, Italy, and Britain are described, including his efforts to build a collection of drawings and paintings by Western artists whom he admired, and his study of Italian fresco murals in Assisi, which rekindled his interest in the decorative potential of Nihonga’s mineral pigments. After the group’s return to Japan, and just as they planned to re-inaugurate the Kokuga Society’s annual juried Kokuten, the city of Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1924. As well as destroying the capital, the disaster traumatized the country’s economic and cultural spheres, permanently altering the system of patronage and commerce on which the Kokuga Society depended. The final four years of the Kokuga Society were characterized by rapid expansion of the group to encompass first oil painting and later prints, sculpture, and fine craft in order to preserve the economic viability of the Kokuten. These changes, however, were matched by a steady deterioration of the exhibition’s prestige among Nihonga painters, which ultimately led to its dissolution in 1928. The book concludes with a discussion of the post-Kokuten era, and examines Bakusen’s embrace of a new analytical formalism in the 1930s. The volume also features an appendix, which provides English translations of the public documents released by the Kokuga Society, including the Statement of Purpose (Riyūsho), Manifesto (Sengensho), Rules and Protocals of Exhibition  (Tenrankai shuppin kiyaku), and Dissolution Notice (Kaisansho). As the outline of chapters suggests, this book is not a traditional artist’s monograph per se. Rather, it is a focused study of Bakusen’s evolving artistic persona vis-à-vis his participation in juried exhibitions and artist collectives, especially the Kokuga Society, the group with which he had the longest 7

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body of art that circumscribed a wide range of native traditional values and modernist artistic principles. In some ways, their approach to Nihonga reminds one of that adopted by philosopher and cultural historian Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) in his best-selling Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples (Koji junrei), which recounts a tour of Nara’s temples he took in 1918, the same year as the inaugural Kokuten.10 In this travelogue, Watsuji describes a tourist’s experience typical in Japan of the 1910s, from rides in trains and automobiles, to evenings spent at modern hotels where he and his companions ate Western food and observed foreign visitors. At the same time, however, his admiration of Japan’s eighth century capital and its bygone culture shines through his prose, evoking Nara as an ancient exemplar of artistic and intellectual accomplishment and integrity, its temples the surviving traces of a golden-age civilization. It was perhaps in a similar spirit that Bakusen and the Kokuten painters engaged in their studies of Japan’s pre-modern painting, identifying with the past without necessarily wishing they had been born there, and reinterpreting what they decided was relevant to their contemporary Japan with a reflexively modern vision.

association. As such, discussion concentrates on the paintings he conceived of and executed as exhibition pieces, a unique category of art intended specifically for public consumption.9 Nor do I suggest this volume adequately covers all aspects of the Kokuga Society, for I limit my discussion to the Nihonga works contributed by its membership and selected from among public submissions. In the second half of its existence, the Kokuten expanded to include oil painters, print makers, sculptors and ceramics artists, who along with the Nihonga contributors showed nearly 900 artworks over the exhibition’s ten year history, and who merit more attention than could be accommodated in this Nihonga-centered study. With this focused examination of Bakusen and fellow Kokuga Society founders Chikkyō, Shihō, Kagaku and Banka, and of the Nihonga works they prepared for the public exhibition, I hope to shed at least a little light on how neotraditional painters in the early twentieth century maneuvered through the fluid cultural mosaic that defined their particular historical moment, deciding on their own terms what it meant to be Japanese artists living and working in the modern period. In the process, they generated a startling, and startlingly varied,

8

1 Bakusen’s Early Life and Works: Towards a Rural Genre Painting

I

n 1908, tsuchida bakusen made his debut at the national Bunten exhibition with a submission entitled Punishment (Batsu, figure 11). The work features three children standing in the hallway of a rustic schoolhouse, which the artist constructed out of details studied and recorded during sketching excursions to schoolhouses in the rural outskirts of Kyoto and during a trip to his hometown on Sado Island. The school building Bakusen recreates is an old one; its wattle-and-daub walls are worn and abraded, and its wooden floor shows signs of being patched, yet the hall has been kept neat, clean, and bright. The same is true of the children and their garments, which, though rumpled, repaired and faded, are clean and useworthy. As the title suggests, the children stand in the hallway in punishment for some rule infraction, and their reactions, ranging from petulance to bewilderment and shame, are intended to induce humor and, as I will argue, a sense of nostalgia in the viewer. This chapter focuses on Tsuchida Bakusen’s early years, starting with his birth and upbringing on distant Sado Island, followed by the initial manifestations of his youthful interest in painting, and his self-directed attempts to learn rudimentary brushwork. The chapter continues by describing the circumstances by which he began training as a

Buddhist priest, a vocational choice that brought him to Kyoto in his early teens, where he abandoned the priesthood in order to begin formal training as a painter, first under Suzuki Shōnen, and later under Takeuchi Seihō. In some ways, Punishment becomes a symbol of the rapid and radical changes in Bakusen’s own early life. I interpret his selection of this particular “rural genre painting” thematic as a way to create a public persona that acknowledges his own rural roots, generating a sympathetic portrait of “country life” that allows viewers to identify with the positive values associated with the Japanese countryside, including simplicity, frugality, and the warmth of small community. With Punishment, Bakusen successfully emphasizes his commitment to the Shijō style of his teacher Seihō, a quintessentially Kyoto tradition, and at the same time asserts his own rural, non-Kyoto roots.

early life on sado island Bakusen was born under the name of Tsuchida Kinji1 on February 9th, 1887 in Niibo village on Sado, an island in the Sea of Japan near Niigata city. Sado is perhaps best known as an historical place of political banishment, its remoteness, isolation, and harsh winter weather making it ideal for this purpose; the emperor Juntoku (1197–1242), the Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282), and the Noh dramatist Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443) are among

Tsuchida Bakusen, Punishment, 1908, detail of fig. 11.

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1

Tsuchida Bakusen, sketches, circa 1900. Ink on paper. Sado History Museum. Photo by author.

sor of philosophy at Kyoto University. Kyōson wrote a description of his brother’s youthful days on Sado, published in memoriam shortly after Bakusen’s death in 1936. Kyōson describes Bakusen’s prodigious talent with the brush emerging when his brother was four, and notes that he developed this talent largely through self-learning, complimented by rudimentary lessons in calligraphy at elementary school and the occasional advice from local amateur artists and traveling painters. Kyōson identifies the various artworks Bakusen studied at local temples and in local private collections, or encountered in periodic journals, as his most important teachers, rather than any living instructor. It was from these paintings and images, Kyōson explains, that Bakusen absorbed a variety of brush styles and painting techniques until he was

the notable personages in the medieval and early modern periods exiled there. Bakusen was the second of three surviving sons born to Tsuchida Chiyokichi, a successful farmer, businessman and village official for Niibo; a fourth son, the family’s firstborn, died in infancy. The Tsuchida family had risen to local political and social prominence on Sado in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and although the tenancy reforms of the early Meiji era drastically affected the family’s wealth and holdings, these had largely been recovered by the time of Bakusen’s birth, allowing him to grow up in comparative privilege.2 Most of what we know about Bakusen’s early years we learn from the family’s youngest son, Tsutomu, who made a name for himself as Tsuchida Kyōson (1891–1934), an essayist, critic, and profes12

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painting at a professional level by the age of ten.3 From Kyōson’s narrative, the image of Bakusen as a gifted, self-taught painting prodigy emerges, one that is recounted in most biographies of the painter. The Sado Museum of History (Sado Rekishi Hakubutsukan) is one of the few locations where samples of Bakusen’s artworks dating to his childhood years in Niibo are available for study. These offer some evidence to support Kyōson’s description of his brother’s self-directed boyhood regimen of studying painting primarily by copying other works. Bakusen’s works preserved in the museum are primarily ink drawings and sketches collected in nearly forty bound volumes tentatively dateable to various stages in his career, from childhood in the late 1890s to just prior to his death in 1936.4 The earliest of these volumes are dedicated to Bakusen’s boyhood copy exercises as described by Kyōson; these feature sources representing a wide range of historical periods and diverse style traditions, from Itō Jakuchū’s (1716–1800) Wild Goose in Reeds, a work from the series Colorful Realm of Living Beings created around 1760, to Kishi Chikudō’s (1826–97) Tiger of 1893, which was widely reproduced and circulated in Japan after its inclusion in Chicago Columbian Exposition that year (Figure 1). Other copy studies by the youthful Bakusen include figural works in the Yamato-e mode, Chinese academic and literati style ink landscapes, and Buddhist monks and deities rendered in the expressive brushwork mode associated with the Zen tradition. This variety suggests Bakusen’s ambition when he created the copies was not to master any particular historical painting style or mode; instead, it appears he chose whatever images captured his interest. As for Kyōson’s claims that his brother achieved expert skill with the brush by the age of ten, the quality of Bakusen’s early sketches certainly demonstrate a level of technical competency that, if falling short of professional, is nevertheless impressive for a child with no formal artistic training. By the time Bakusen reached his early teens, his broad interest in painting became more tightly focused on the practices of two living artists, Kawabata Gyokushō (1842–1913), a Maruyama-school

painter, and the Kano-school trained Hashimoto Gahō (1835–1908), although here, too, his experience of their works was limited to reproductions in art periodicals. Nevertheless, his esteem for Gyokushō and Gahō led to his selection of the nom-de-art “Gyokuhō,” which borrowed a character each from their names.5 During those early years his enthusiasm for painting was fanned by the encouragement of his elementary school teachers, especially an instructor named Aihara Gosaburō (1865–1928), who seems to have been particularly supportive of Bakusen’s early painting practice, so much so that Bakusen continued his correspondence with Aihara for many years after he achieved professional success. For a while, his parents were happy to allow Bakusen to pursue painting as an avocation, but as he approached the end of his compulsory education and his family considered his need for vocational training, it was deemed that the Buddhist priesthood was a more practical path for a second son of a respectable family. Thus it was arranged for Bakusen to apprentice at Shōkakubō, a local Shingon temple of the Chizan order (Chizan-ha). Rather than resist this decision, Bakusen showed aptitude for the priesthood, and made steady progress in his training for the next two years, at which stage his instructors recommended him for advance training at the order’s head temple, Chishakuin, located in Kyoto.6 Thus it was that in 1903, the sixteen-yearold novice priest from rural Sado was transplanted to cosmopolitan Kyoto, setting in motion a chain of events that would ironically culminate in Bakusen’s abandonment of the priesthood in favor of the very career path his family had turned him from, namely, that of a professional painter.

early training under suzuki shōnen At Chishakuin, Bakusen shared his interest in painting with his new mentors, who, like his elementary school teachers at home, supported and nurtured his talent, on occasion even asking him 13

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merchant-painter Shen Nanpin (c. 1682–c. 1780), and somewhat contradictorily, the looser and less formal “Southern style” of Chinese ink painting, known as Nanga in Japan, often considered the antithesis of the academic approach. Other styles have also been variously named as referents for Hyakunen and by extension the Suzuki school, including Kano-style brushwork and aspects of the Maruyama and Shijō schools.10 In the last few decades of his career, however, Hyakunen became increasingly devoted to Nanga, with many of his students and disciples, including such talented practitioners as Imao Keinen (1845–1924), Kubota Beisen (1852–1906), and his son Shōnen, closely following suit, and the influence and inspiration of the literati style remains one of the strongest and most readily identified aspects of the Suzuki school today. By the time of his father’s death in 1891, Shōnen had already earned a reputation as an important and influential artist, having won participation and honors at such auspicious exhibitions as the second Kyoto Exposition (Kyoto Hakurankai) in 1873, and the Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions (Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) of 1882 and 1884. His paintings were also featured at the Domestic Industrial Expositions (Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai) of 1890 and 1895, and the Japan Painting Association Juried Exhibition (Nihon Kaiga Kyōkai Kaiga Kyōshinkai) of 1896. Abroad he won prizes at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. As head of the Suzuki school, Shōnen was grouped among Kyoto’s top three painters alongside Kishi Chikudō and Kōno Bairei (1844–1895), who were collectively referenced by the moniker Shō-ChikuBai, an abbreviation formed by taking a character from each of their names but also a reference to “pine, bamboo and plum,” three significant themes associated with Chinese-style ink painting since time immemorial.11 By 1903, the year that sixteenyear-old Bakusen entered his juku, Shōnen’s painting largely reflected the strong affinity for Nanga themes and styles of brushwork seen in his father’s late work, and deemphasized the Maruyama and

to give painting demonstrations to guests at the temple.7 One such visitor named Mine Yoshikichi (dates unknown) was a merchant by profession who specialized in the sale of Buddhist robes and paraphernalia, and by avocation an amateur artist with close connections to the Kyoto painting world. Impressed with the boy’s nascent talent, Mine became Bakusen’s confidant and benefactor. After learning of the boy’s frustrated artistic ambitions, Mine applied on Bakusen’s behalf to Suzuki Shōnen, an important practitioner of the Suzuki school of painting, and succeeded in obtaining a place for him at Shōnen’s private teaching atelier, or juku in Japanese.8 Bakusen wrote of this development in a letter to Aihara in which he expressed his delight at finally having the opportunity to formally study painting, countered by remorse, for to leave the temple was tantamount to a betrayal of his family, who expected him to enter the priesthood, and of his mentors at the temple responsible for his training. “Must I renounce painting, which I love,” he wrote to Aihara, “or should I shamelessly rebel against everyone’s expectations and kindness?” In the end, the allure of dedicating himself fully to painting proved to be stronger than his feelings of filial duty, and he closed his letter to Aihara with a vow: “If I ever become a famous painter, I will return to you and apologize for my shameful behavior. If I fail, you will never see my face again.”9 In fact, Bakusen was more fortunate than he knew, for to be accepted as Suzuki Shōnen’s student would have been widely deemed a remarkably propitious opportunity, especially for a youth with no previous formal training. The Suzuki school (Suzuki-ha) of painting, of which Shōnen was the head, occupied a prestigious place in the Kyoto art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a direct result of the talent and popularity of the school’s progenitor, Suzuki Hyakunen (1825– 1891), who was Shōnen’s father. The Suzuki style was an eclectic one, reflecting Hyakunen’s own varied artistic interests. These included aspects of Ming-era academic styles of landscape and birdand-flower paintings introduced to Japan from China by such figures as the Nagasaki-based 14

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Shijō elements associated with the Suzuki school at large. A representative work by Shōnen from the period of Bakusen’s study with him is Composing a Poem among the Pines (Shōkan bekishi zu, Figure 2) from 1905; at over three meters in height, its monumental size suggests it may have been created for display in an exhibition hall. The painting showcases the diverse sumi or India ink brushwork methods for which Shōnen was known, including extensive application of demulsified shukuboku (“rested ink”), which he applied most extensively on the faces of the cliffs and rocky bluffs in the painting. Shukuboku is typically used in a wash, and produces a range of interesting effects; at some times it can create feathery textures and ripple patterns suitable for smoke or water, and at others it produces a mottled or stippled appearance appropriate for woody or rocky surfaces. In unskilled hands, the results are hard to predict and to control, but Shōnen’s expert use of demulsified ink is a highlight of this painting, evidence that supports his reputation as a master ink technician.12 Bakusen arrived at Shōnen’s juku in May of 1903, an occasion marked by his teacher granting his newest student the name Shōgaku (“pine cliff”), which borrowed a character (“pine”) from Shōnen’s own art name, a common practice that emphasized the filial-like relationship between master and pupil. Over the next year, Bakusen undertook a training regimen that focused mostly on rote copy of model paintings, a course of study that was intended to expand his repertoire of literati-style brushwork. During these months, it was the juku head’s son, Suzuki Shōsen (dates unknown), rather than Shōnen himself, who supervised Bakusen’s day-to-day studies, and Bakusen’s interactions with the head teacher, when they occurred, could be strained. In an interview held around the time of the Kokuga Society’s founding, Bakusen shared an anecdote from his early days at Shōnen’s juku, when his teacher lent him a painting for copying  purposes. Bakusen returned to his quarters, unrolled the scroll, and immediately noticed a spot in the center of the work. “It could have been dirt

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Suzuki Shōnen, Composing a Poem among the Pines, 1906. Ink on paper; hanging scroll. Image © Trustees of the British Museum.

or an ink stain, maybe even pine sap,” he recalled, “but it hardly mattered what had caused it. I was only worried that I could be blamed for the damage.” When it was time to return the painting, he dutifully pointed out the stain to Shōnen, at which 15

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in 1895 by the Kyoto Art Association (Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai), a group dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Kyoto’s artistic heritage both past and present.17 Like the prototype event eight years earlier, the new Shinkoten featured both contemporary and antique examples of Kyoto arts and crafts, with a jury of peers appointed to evaluate submissions and to award prizes for the best works. By 1900 this exhibition had became the primary benchmark by which Kyoto’s Nihonga community measured professional success, and to have a work accepted there for the first time was viewed as a coming-of-age moment for the city’s rising young artists. The Shinkoten remained the most prestigious competitive art exhibit for Kyoto artists until 1907, the year the Ministry of Education established the Bunten, which captured the attention and ambitions of the city’s most talented painters.  For the next six years, the Shinkoten slowly diminished in prestige and importance, until the Kyoto Art Association finally ended the nearly twenty-year history of the Shinkoten by terminating the exhibition in 1913.18 In 1904, however, the Shinkoten was at its zenith of prestige and popularity, and the exhibition still functioned as an artistic barometer measuring the relative influence and status of Kyoto’s painters, old guard and new. It was here that Bakusen became aware of the expressive power and the popularity of alternative approaches to Nihonga painting than those taught at Suzuki Shōnen’s juku, especially those styles practiced by artists loosely grouped by the mass media under the rubric Shinpa (literally “new school” or “new faction”). In a letter Bakusen wrote in May 1904 to Aihara, the young painter describes how profoundly this exhibition affected him, causing him to reevaluate his training under Shōnen, and even to question the long-term benefits of Suzuki school affiliation:

point his fears proved justified, for his teacher became angry to learn about the damage, and strongly rebuked Bakusen for ruining a work that cost 40 yen, a very substantial sum in 1903.13 This episode confirms a mercurial temperament, a characteristic for which Shōnen was widely known in his lifetime, and Bakusen’s strained relations with the Suzuki school leader may have been one of the factors that led to his disillusionment with Shōnen’s juku, and with the Suzuki style in general, within a year of beginning his studies there. In the end, however, it was Bakusen’s eye-opening experience at the 1904 Shinkoten exhibition that finally convinced him of the need to find a new teacher.

the 1904 shinkoten and the kyūha-shinpa dynamic The Shinkoten was Kyoto’s most important largescale juried exhibition of the Meiji era, and the high point of the year for the Kyoto art community in the 1890s and 1900s. Its origins go back to the first Kyoto Exposition (Dai Ikkai Kyoto Hakurankai) of 1872,14 which became an annual event intended to promote Kyoto-based industries and commercial products, with some sixty-four categories of items and products on display. These included items grouped under the heading “New and Old Works of Calligraphy and Painting” (Shinko shoga), although a scan of the exposition’s catalogue suggests that art and fine craft items played a smaller role than industrial resources (lumber, charcoal, et cetera), agricultural products, and food stuffs.15 A directed effort was made at the fourth exposition to more prominently feature Kyoto’s traditional arts and crafts industries, with prizes offered for the finest examples, but it was not until the fifteenth exposition of 1887 that a separate, dedicated exhibition of “New and Antique Art” (Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai) was organized in honor of the planned visit to the exposition that year by members of the imperial family.16 This one-time event in 1887 proved to be immensely popular, and its success inspired the creation of an independent annual exhibition series

Things have changed since I benefited from the unexpected stroke of good fortune when I started my studies at Shōnen’s juku just a month after arriving in Kyoto. Maybe I am speculating too much about my future, but it seems that Shinpa paintings are enjoying the best

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military analogy of his own in his description of the Shinkoten by comparing it to the Russo-Japanese War, which at the time of his letter had been underway for four months with wide support from a patriotic Japanese populace. In likening the awardwinning Shinpa paintings to the powerful and impressive Japanese military, Bakusen was tacitly equating Kyūha works with the Russian army, which had recently lost its first major engagement of the war and seemed destined for defeat.21 The metaphor is a powerful one, and suggests an overwhelming Shinpa victory was inevitable. This in fact may have been the case, for a look at the published results of the 1904 Shinkoten shows that nine of the ten artists awarded prizes by the exhibition’s judges were Shinpa-associated painters, among them Kikuchi Keigetsu (1879–1955), Nishiyama Suishō (1879–1958), and Konoshima Ōkoku (1876– 1938). The sole prizewinner on the list associated with the Kyūha approach, a Nanga painter named Fujii Keihō (dates unknown), is mentioned in no subsequent Shinkoten exhibition results, and little is known about him today.22 What did Shinpa paintings at the 1904 Shinkoten look like? Few of the paintings featured at this exhibition are known to survive today, thus making this question difficult to address. One of the few extant works, and one that might have helped inspired Bakusen’s military metaphor, is Falling Flowers (Rakka, 1904; Figure 3) by Kikuchi Keigetsu, which earned a third prize award from the judges. In 1904, Keigetsu was a rising figure in the Kyoto Nihonga world and a protégé of Kikuchi Hōbun (1862–1918), who, along with Takeuchi Seihō, Taniguchi Kōkyō and Tsuji Kakō, was a pivotal agent in the modernization of Kyoto Nihonga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Keigetsu’s theme for Falling Flowers, a poetic reference to warriors fallen in battle, is ultimately based on an episode from The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), a fourteenth century collection of stories from the Genpei War (1180–1185).23 The incident in question is “the Death of Kiso” (Kiso no saigo), a section of the epic that describes the last stand of Minamoto Yoshinaka (1154–1184), also

receptions these days, not just in Kyoto but all over the country, while the Suzuki school is viewed as just one style among many others. Recently several members of our juku submitted paintings to the Shinkoten, but all of them were passed over. Instead, the judges saved their awards and praise for Shinpa works, which shone before me with all the power of the rising sun, in the same way that the Japanese army must appear before the eyes of the Russians.19

The term Shinpa was commonly used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a general heading to group together Nihonga paintings that featured novel subjects, new approaches to brushwork, or other progressive qualities. Standing in contrast to Shinpa were paintings categorized by the related term Kyūha (“old school or faction”), which was applied to paintings that relied on established themes and conformed to traditional modes of composition, coloration, and brushwork. Depending on the user, however, the terms Shinpa and Kyūha could also connote more specific, even ideological meanings and associations. Both conservative critics and progressive supporters of the Shinpa approach applied the term to Nihonga works that openly emulated the pictorial realism of Westernstyle oil painting as part of a larger strategy to update historical styles, with one camp using the term pejoratively and the other complimentarily. In the same way, to its admirers, the term “Kyūha” suggested such positive values as technical mastery, refinement of taste, and cultural authenticity, while to its detractors it meant blind obedience to outdated and unfashionable ways.20 Although the Shinpa and Kyūha labels did not connote any formal or institutional associations between artists, their common usage by critics emphasized the popular yet simplistic view that the contemporary Kyoto Nihonga world could be divided roughly into two cliques, one consisting of agents of artistic progress, the other of cultural custodians. This reinforced the impression of the Shinkoten as a virtual battleground where conservative and progressive factions battled for control of the Kyoto art world. Indeed, Bakusen makes a 17

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3

Kikuchi Keigetsu, Falling Flowers, 1904. Ink and colors on silk; six-panel folding screen. Mizuno Art Museum.

known as Lord Kiso, whose retinue famously included the woman warrior Tomoe Gozen. Later versions of the “Death of Kiso” story, including several that were adapted for performance as Bunraku and Kabuki dramas, also feature a second female attendant named Yamabuki Gozen, and since Keigetsu’s painting illustrates two women warriors rather than one, it is possible his painting was inspired by one of these later theatrical productions, possibly a contemporary revival of the famous story, rather than the medieval version presented in The Tale of the Heike.24 Falling Flowers features a dynamic depiction of Yoshinaka, rendered on the far left side of the composition on a brown horse and bearing his distinctive rattan-bound bow.25 Tomoe Gozen, known by the triple-whorl tomoe crest pattern on her garment, gallops on the far right of the painting,  astride a white horse, her long hair bound in an elaborate chignon. Yet the most remarkable figure is not Lord Kiso or Tomoe Gozen but the spear-bearing Yamabuki Gozen, identified through the yellow yamabuki blossom pattern on her robe, whom Keigetsu places in the center of the group on a chestnut mount. What makes her appearance so startling, even outlandish, is the white, veil-like fabric draped over her head and torso, and without knowledge of period armor and costume, it is difficult to ascertain why Keigetsu depicted her

turned out in this particular manner. According to the Gunyōki, an Edo-era treatise on period arms and armor written by Ise Sadatake (1717–1784), horsemen of the Kamakura era (1185–1333) sometimes affixed a gauzy cloak (horo in Japanese) in this fashion in order to hinder frontal missile attacks.26 Keigetsu includes several flying arrows aimed at the riders as if to reference this function, thus demonstrating his historical knowledge of Kamakura-era armor and military equipment while offering the viewer a very striking and memorable image. Paintings with historical themes such as Falling Flowers are categorized in Japan as rekishiga or “history painting,” a rubric that was imported from the academic fine art traditions of Europe where “historical” themes (including subjects from myths and legends as well as factual events) were highly esteemed for their potential to promote public virtues and nurture patriotism among the citizenry.27 In Japan from the 1880s onward, Nihonga and oil painters alike were active in creating large-scale exhibition works inspired by recorded histories, stories, and myths of premodern Japan as a way to bolster national pride and promote a shared historical identity among the body politic. It mattered little if the subjects celebrated in the history paintings lacked true historicity, as is the case in Falling Flowers, the theme of which originates in fictional literature as much as in historical fact. 18

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This is because history paintings were never intended to illustrate history in any objective way. Instead, they were meant to speak to the present, thus when artists selected “historical” subjects for their paintings, they did so with Japan’s contemporary situation in mind. Keigetsu’s painting may feature twelfth century warriors rendered in historically accurate arms and armor, but it was Japan’s contemporary military conflict with Russia that made this theme timely, and through the figures of Lord Kiso and his two retainers, Keigetsu honors the prowess and bravery of modern Japanese men and women, fighting abroad and working at home  for the realization of Japan’s imperialist ambitions. In this way, Falling Flowers functions as a mirror of sorts, but one that reflects an image of the present day in the guise of Japan’s auspicious and glorious past. Keigetsu’s nod to Japan’s contemporary situation in Falling Flowers is one of the Shinpa-related characteristics in the work. Another is, of course, the painting’s illusionistic style, so openly Westerninflected, which Keigetsu used to particularly dramatic effect in Yoshinaka’s acutely foreshortened steed. Yet it is important to note pictorial illusionism itself was not new to Japan in 1904; in fact, there are examples of realistic horses painted by Japanese artists as long ago as the sixteenth century, the time when Japan first came into regular contact with European cultures. Nanban screen paintings (Nanbanzu byōbu) featuring Western landscapes and figures, Japanese-made copperplate prints modeled after European engravings, Edoperiod Ukiyo-e prints composed with Western single point perspective (uki-e), the “Western-style pictures” (Yōfūga) painted by Shiba Kōkan (1747– 1818) in proto-oils, the work of Akita-based painters of “Dutch pictures” (Ranga), and other seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century precedents to Western-style pictorial realism were largely forgotten in the Meiji period with the systematic importation and promotion of oil painting as part of the Japan’s modernization project. Japan’s contemporary encounters with America and Europe loomed far larger in the country’s

collective mind than Japan’s historical engagements  with Western art, culture and technology in centuries past, contributing to an historical amnesia that allowed exhibition-goers to view works featuring Western-style pictorial illusionism as something entirely new.28 The one-sided results of the 1904 Shinkoten and the personal impact of the Shinpa paintings on display at the exhibition led Bakusen to reevaluate his apprenticeship with Shōnen, and to consider a new mentor in the figure of Takeuchi Seihō, who ran an important juku in Kyoto where several of the city’s emerging young painters had trained. Later in his letter to Aihara written in the wake of the Shinkoten, Bakusen explains he has made up his mind to leave Shōnen’s tutelage and enter Seihō’s juku: Even though I feel fortunate to be studying under Shōnen, I am beginning to think I will be stuck making endless copies of Nanga paintings as long as I continue with him, which I fear will hinder my professional advancement. With this in mind, I and several of my fellow students have decided to study with Takeuchi Seihō, the best of the so-called “Four Heavenly Kings” (Shitennō) [trained by] Kōno Bairei, who was a painter to the Imperial Household. I have already passed my request [to Seihō] through an intermediary, and I hope it will be approved.29

Bakusen does not tell Aihara what event elevated  Seihō’s stature in his eyes, but he may have encountered Seihō’s paintings at the special memorial exhibition marking the ten-year anniversary of painter Kōno Bairei’s death, held in February 1904, two months before the Shinkoten. In addition to honoring the career of this talented and influential painter, the exhibition was also a celebration of Bairei’s legacy, and included paintings contributed by multiple generations of his followers.30 As befitted one of Bairei’s most successful students, Seihō exhibited a massive screen painting that in terms of theme and style seems paintedto-order for a memorial exhibition dedicated to his teacher. The painting in question was Bleak and Lonely (Shōjō, Figure 4), a melancholic evocation of 19

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4

Takeuchi Seihō, Bleak and Lonely, 1904. Ink on gold-leafed paper; pair of six-panel folding screens. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

willow trees on a misty evening – an apt theme with which to express an artist’s remembrance of his departed mentor. Bleak and Lonely is a tourde-force of atmospheric ink wash, providing the composition with a strong sense of volumetric space inside which the willows rhythmically emerge and dissolve in the mist, and attesting to new possibilities for the combination of Edo-period painting techniques with both Western-style illusionism and emotionalism. Ono Chikkyō, who in 1904 was shortly to join Seihō’s juku himself,  later recalled how powerfully this painting  affected him when he viewed it at the Bairei memorial exhibition:

As strong as Bakusen’s resolve may have been to move to Seihō’s facility, in the end more than half a year passed before he finally managed to change teachers. He accomplished this by leaving Shōnen’s juku in September 1904, ostensibly due to an acute illness that forced him to return to Sado to be nursed at home.32 Just three months later, however,  he was back in Kyoto and enrolled as a new student at Chikujōkai (“Bamboo Cane Society,” as  Seihō’s juku was named), and possessor of the  new art moniker “Bakusen,” imparted by his new teacher.33

[Seihō] captured both the flexibility and strength of the

At the time of Bakusen’s enrollment in Chikujōkai, the juku’s roster listed several senior members with reputations as successful artists in their own right, such as Nishiyama Suishō, Nishimura Go’un (1877–1938) and Uemura Shōen (1875–1949). Bakusen’s peer group, however, included students closer to his own age and proficiency, including Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883–1945), Ishizaki Kōyō (1884–1947), and especially Ono Chikkyō. Chikkyō, born Ono Eikichi in Kasaoka, Yamaguchi prefecture, came to Kyoto at the age of fourteen, one

studying at chikujōkai

willow branches, each of them painted in a single slow, magnificent stroke of the brush. The trees created a lasting impression in me, and appealed to me even more strongly than the actual willows I encountered regularly on walks on Kiyamachi or Horikawa in Kyoto. When I viewed it, I felt I had finally learned how true painting works: it captures its subject just as it appears in nature, yet does so without denying its essential qualities as a painting. It is no exaggeration to say that this work by Seihō taught me how to view nature.31

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bamboo,” and teased that I would not be allowed to stop

year before Bakusen’s arrival from Sado, to study at Chikujōkai alongside his elder brother, Ono Chikutō (1880–1959), a Seihō student since 1900.34 At first the younger Ono was refused entry to the juku due to his lack of years as well as the immaturity of his paintings skills, but Seihō allowed Chikkyō a probationary year to perfect his foundational brush technique, after which he could reapply. During that year he lived with his brother at a boarding house in the Gokōmachi district of the city, along with several other members of Chikujōkai. Their landlord had set aside a small room to serve as studio space for his boarders, and Chikkyō later recalled the long hours he spent in these cramped quarters practicing his brushwork:

until my bamboo had grown high enough.35

Eventually Chikkyō was allowed to graduate from bamboo paintings to life sketches (shasei) of birds and flowers, then to landscapes, and after a year of rudimentary training, Seihō finally approved Chikkyō’s official entry to Chikujōkai, just about the same time that Bakusen began his studies at the juku.36 Bakusen and Chikkyō bonded over their similar  rural backgrounds and their shared status as newcomers to the city at a juku populated largely by born Kyotoites. They participated in organized  sketching excursions (Figure 5) and other juku-wide activities, but also frequently took trips together to explore the greater Kinki region, hitchhiking as far afield as Mount Kōya in Wakayama, and to Kushimoto, the southernmost point on the Kii peninsula, drawing as they went.37 Neither benefitted much in the way of financial support from home, and so their manner of living was spartan. Ishizaki Kōyō, who shared living quarters with Bakusen, recalled a time when they got by on a monthly budget of fifteen sen apiece, which, after the purchase of pigments, brushes and other painting materials, afforded them a daily diet of little more than a bowl of rice topped with a few

The studio room had very poor lighting… There were a number of square hibachi heating braziers spread about, filled with cigarette ends stuck in the ashes. The atmosphere was gloomy and oppressive. I spent almost every day in that tiny room, not speaking to anyone, completely absorbed in my studies. At first, I worked from a sample book of bamboo paintings lent me by [Seihō], and I made copy after copy from this book, day in and day out, waiting for permission to move on to something else. The others wryly referred to this as “growing

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5

Photograph of members of Chikujōkai on sketching excursion, summer 1904. Bottom row, right to left: Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, Nagata Taiko, Mitaka Shunko, Chigusa Sōun, Mori Togetsu, Yanō Suihō, Katō Chikusen. Second row, right to left: Tominaga Kōun, Yagi Suiei, Nagasawa Obune, Uchihata Kyōen, Imao Unryō, Ishizaki Kōyō, unknown, Katō Saihō, Kioka Katei, unknown, Ishida Hōkōdō, Tokuda Rinsai. Source: Tōei, vol. 12 no. 7 (July 1936).

students, especially Bakusen and Chikkyō.40 Seihō’s own artistic training began as a boy under the Shijō-school artist Tsuchida Eirin (1838-?), and continued from the age of seventeen under Kōno Bairei, a famously demanding but gifted teacher.41 Seihō made rapid and brilliant progress under Bairei, evidenced by his winning a prize at the 1882 Kyoto City Arts and Fine Craft Exhibition (Kyotoshi bijutsu kōgeihin ten) for Cat and Kittens Lazing in the Sun (Byōji fuken no zu), after less than a year of study under Bairei.42 A review of the exhibition published in the Kyoto newspaper Hinode Shinbun summarizes how Seihō’s painting came to be at the center of a critical debate regarding the suitability of blending styles of brushwork theretofore considered separate and distinct. The review reads,

vegetable greens and flavored with a little soy sauce.38 Bakusen and Chikkyō nevertheless thrived under Seihō, and made rapid progress in their studies, with both making their pubic debuts at a juried exhibition within a year of entering Chikujōkai.39 It is beyond the scope of this book’s mission to offer a complete account of Seihō’s long and varied career, his deep impact and influence on the Kyoto painting world, and his contributions to Nihonga’s national development overall as an artist, an educator, an art school founder and director, a critic, an exhibition jurist and a government-appointed artsand-culture policy advisor, a task that would require a multi-volume study. Yet at least a cursory summary of Seihō’s early life and painting career is required to account for the significant influence the teacher had on the artistic practice of his 22

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Takeuchi Seihō’s Cat and Kittens Lazing in the Sun

Earlier critics attacked me with the label nue-school, but

is a simple, very warm and agreeable painting, the

I never saw the need to contest it. In the past artists often

basic structure and brushwork of which follow the

created a single landscape that included a tree such as

Maruyama style. Yet it also features sharp rocks found

[Kano] Tanyū might paint, rendered alongside a build-

in Kano school works, as well as flowering plants the

ing in the style of Yu Jian [active mid-thirteenth century]

style of [Shijō school painter Matsumura] Keibun

or Sesshū [Tōyō, 1420–1506]. For an artist setting off in a

[1779–1843]. In other words, this one painting is

new direction… it seems to me that a nue-school ap-

endowed with no less than three brush methods.

proach is a good way to begin.47

Some, intending to crush the work, called it “nue-

Seihō continued to explore a stylistic combinatory approach for several years after the “nue-school” episode, and by the late 1890s he had expanded his list of referents to include European oil painting. Around the time of the above-quoted Kuroda  Tengai interview, Seihō was immersed in a reading of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters under the tutorship of Tokunaga Kakusen (1871-?), a Nihonga painter whose command of English and interest in Western aesthetics made him the perfect tutor for this task.48 Seihō valued these study sessions strongly enough to recommend Kakusen as a Ruskin expert to Taniguchi Kōkyō (1864–1915) and Kikuchi Hōbun, both senior figures in Kyoto’s Nihonga community, who also undertook to study Ruskin’s writings under Kakusen’s guidance.49 Why were Seihō and other Kyoto Nihonga painters interested in Ruskin? As Toshio Watanabe and Yūko Kikuchi have noted, Ruskin’s stature in Japan rose continuously after the introduction of his writings in 1888, until he became one of the best-known Western writers. By the early 1890s, Japanese art magazines were regularly quoting translated passages from Modern Painters,50 and Ruskin’s writings on landscape painting are today viewed as an important factor in the shifting of attitudes in Japan regarding landscape, away from the pre-Meiji concept of meishō, in which a natural site is remembered primarily in connection to some historical event, a fictional narrative, or an oft-cited poem, and towards fūkei, a term that, if not identical to the Western idea of a “scenic view,” held a landscape to be worthy of painting for the sake of its own inherent beauty, independent of any human activity or history.51 Ruskin’s ideas were comparable with writings on landscape painting recorded

school,” while others praised the painting, saying it gave rise to the possibility of a new style. In this way the work raised a lot of comment among viewers, both positive and negative.43

Nue, the term used by critics to condemn Seihō’s painting, is an ancient name that refers to a mythical, chimera-like creature of Chinese origin,44 but in the Meiji era this word came to carry a distinct contemporary significance. Nueteki (“nue-like”), for example, was coined in the Meiji era to criticize the practice of haphazardly mixing aspects of Western and Japanese cultures, such as wearing a European silk top hat with kimono robes, or furnishing a Japanese-style zashiki room with Western tables and chairs.45 Thus when critics dubbed Seihō’s painting “nue-school” (nueha), they were dismissing it as tasteless pastiche, and reprimanding the artist for refusing to keep these three traditional painting modes distinct and inviolate. By leveling this criticism, however, detractors were forgetting that the origins of the Maruyama, Shijō, Kishi, Mori, and Suzuki schools, in fact nearly all the traditional styles of painting that emerged in Edoperiod Kyoto, were traced to the creative combining of signature brush styles associated with preexisting painting traditions. Furthermore, the same Hinode Shinbun reviewer pointed out that Seihō was hardly alone in pursuing his combinatory strategy, noting that Hashimoto Gahō had exhibited a painting the year before at the Great Tokyo Exposition (Tokyo Daihakurankai) composed of elements selected from the Chinese, Japanese and Western painting traditions.46 Seihō later reflected on this episode in an 1898 interview with art critic Kuroda Tengai: 23

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by Chinese artists since early antiquity, a critical literature in which many Japanese painters were well versed. If we consider the following quote from Modern Painters, for example, we find it would not seem out of place in the painting treatises of Shitao (1642–1707) or Guo Xi (c. 1020–1090), both of which were known in Japan since the Edo era.

and that this could be achieved solely using Western pigments and techniques and featuring Western subjects.55 It is well known that upon Seihō’s return to Japan, the artist marked this milestone by changing his name, substituting the first character sei (“dwell” or “live”) for the homonymic sei (“nest” or “den”), which includes within its shape the character for “West,” in recognition of his half-yearlong art pilgrimage in Europe.56 The first major work Seihō exhibited upon his return to Japan was Lions (Shishi), which was featured at the seventh Shinkoten of 1901. Seihō studied a wide variety of East Asian sources to prepare this work, including several antique paintings, such as a Chinese Buddhist votive to the bodhisattva Manjusri on his lion mount, and Kano Eitoku’s (1543–1590) famous sixteenth century screen painting of mythical Chinese lions (karashishi), as well as Japanese sculpture, including the guardian liondogs (komainu) installed at Nara’s Tamukeyama Hachimangu Shrine. He also considered several Western art precedents, such as the gilt lion of St. Mark on Venice’s Piazza San Marco clock tower, and the colossal bronze lions at the foot of Admiral Nelson’s column in London’s Trafalgar Square, both of which he sketched while visiting these cities.57 Furthermore, art historians Tanaka Hisao and Inaga Shigemi have both suggested that the origins of Seihō’s interest in this particular theme, as well as the realistic style with which he executed Lions, can be found in Seihō’s meeting with Gérôme, who was known for creating dramatic paintings of African lions.58 A look at the finished painted screens, however, suggests that Seihō’s most important sources were the shasei or life sketches he made of African lions in the zoos of London and Antwerp during his European tour.59 Lions, a large work painted over a pair of six-panel screens, is known today only through black and white photographs published on newsprint, images that tell us little about the brushwork and materials Seihō used.60 Fortunately, contemporaneous reports also included descriptions of the screens, and reveal that Seihō painted Lions using an unusual combination of black sumi ink,

There is a moral as well as material truth—a truth of impression as well as form—of thought as well as of matter; and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more important of the two. Hence, truth is a term of universal application, but imitation is limited to that narrow field of art that takes cognizance only of material things.52

For this reason, it could be said that Meiji-era Japanese painters were preconditioned to understand Ruskin, albeit through the somewhat distorting lens of Chinese painting theory. Seihō’s Ruskin studies were a preamble to his deeper examination of Western art in situ, for soon after he was invited to travel to France as part of Japan’s delegation to the 1901 World Exposition. While in Paris, apart from viewing the exhibits on display during the exposition, he also visited other important galleries and museums in the city, and met several French artists, including the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), known for his Orientalist fantasies set in Northern Africa.53 After the close of the exposition, Seihō remained in Europe for five additional months, during which he traveled extensively on the continent, visiting several important fine art museums in France, England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy.54 While in Europe, the work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) and J.M. William Turner (1775–1851) made the strongest impression  on him after he encountered the former artist’s paintings in Paris and the latter’s in London. In a letter written to his wife while abroad in the West, Seihō wrote how he marveled that artists like Corot and Turner seem to express an intuitive understanding of East Asian aesthetics in their works, 24

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European sepia and kinpun gold dust.61 Furthermore, after the close of the Shinkoten, the popular reception of Lions spurred Seihō to create several subsequent versions, including a hanging scroll owned by the Yale University Gallery collection (Figure 6), and an examination of these gives us a better idea of how the lost original painting may have appeared to viewers in 1901. In each of the later versions, Seihō utilized an ink-gold-sepia amalgamation applied using traditional kegaki fur painting techniques, realistically capturing the animals’ proportions, musculature, and underlying skeletal structure, all carefully recorded in the life-sketches he generated in zoos in Antwerp and London. Despite the Western-style realism on display in Lions, however, it would be a mistake to assume (as several critics did in 1901) that Seihō’s aim in creating Lions was solely to approximate oil painting’s capacity for pictorial mimesis using Nihonga pigments. In fact Seihō’s aims were more idealistic, insofar as he wished to demonstrate the possibility of creating a universal painting style that acknowledged and honored both East Asian and European aesthetic priorities without giving up Nihonga’s intrinsic nature, something he believed Corot and Turner had accomplished for oils. All the same, the realism of Seihō’s Lions came as a jolt to some viewers who openly questioned whether Seihō had abandoned Nihonga during his European voyage, and other, more alarmist voices wondered if Lions would precipitate the end of Nihonga itself.62 In response, the Kyoto Art Association, the exhibition’s organizing body (of which Seihō himself was a member), arranged for him to give a public lecture in order to rebut criticism and offer an explanation of the work. According to art journalist Kanzaki Ken’ichi (1889–1954), Seihō’s lecture had a sizable impact on the Kyoto art community, especially after it was reproduced and circulated in the Kyoto Art Association’s media organ.63 To briefly summarize the published text, Seihō never touched upon matters relating to Nihonga’s and Yōga’s divergent styles, instead he spoke at length about the strengths of Western oil painting medium,

6

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Takeuchi Seihō, Lion, circa 1901. Ink, sepia, gold on silk; hanging scroll. Yale University Art Gallery Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund.

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department store,65 as well as in Bleak and Lonely, painted for his teacher Bairei’s death anniversary. Both of these paintings were produced in 1904, and both demonstrate similar expert use of atmospheric lighting effects achieved through tightly controlled applications of graded sumi ink wash. As a result, Seihō generates a high degree of pictorial realism without sacrificing the quiet, melancholy ambience that imbues both paintings, achieving what John Ruskin described in the passage quoted earlier from Modern Painters as “truth of impression as well as form.” These qualities were also recognized in Lions by the 1901 Shinkoten jury head, Nakazawa Iwata (1858–1943), who noted how

which he describes as best equipped to record reality (shajitsu), versus those of East Asian sumi ink and mineral pigments, which he argued are superior for capturing the truth or essence (sha’i) of the artist’s subject. If, however, a painter could somehow successfully incorporate both these capacities into a single artwork, then he or she would effectively be able to capitalize on the strengths of both the Eastern and Western painting modes, as well as transcend their respective weaknesses.64 For the next several years Seihō continued to walk the path he blazed with Lions, as in his famous Moon over Venice (Benisu no tsuki, Figure 7), a massive work commissioned by Takashimaya

7

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Takeuchi Seihō, Moon over Venice, 1904. Ink, sepia, gold on silk; hanging scroll. Image © Takashimaya Department Store Collection.

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uncannily Seihō’s painting presented a lifelike image yet also managed to capture the universal conceptual truth (shinsō) of his subject, “a much more impressive feat than merely capturing the truth of form.”66 The fruits of Seihō’s visit to Europe and his larger interest in Western oil painting in general had an influence on the students of Chikujōkai that was far-ranging and deep, and helped shape the Nihonga practice of several generations of Seihō students and their followers. This influence was fed by the large collection of art books and folios Seihō brought back with him from Europe and made available for study and consultation by students of the juku, and for many, this library was the closest they would ever come to experiencing Europe’s most important and influential art firsthand. Furthermore, Seihō arranged for talks on European painting to be given to the juku by his Ruskin tutor Tokunaga Kakusen.67 These manifold opportunities at Chikujōkai to learn about Western art were rare at a Nihonga juku at that time, possibly unique. As for his teaching manner, Chikkyō described Seihō as never overly concerned with technical weaknesses in his students’ work, being far more interested in whether they were capable of developing a capacity for personal expression.68 Yamaguchi Kayō (1899–1984), who started at Chikujōkai a few years after Chikkyō and Bakusen, added to Chikkyō’s recollections by noting that Seihō rarely spoke directly about problems encountered in his students’ paintings, nor did he offer solutions, preferring instead to rely on oblique criticism that nudged the student in the necessary direction. For example, Kayō recalled, if a painting demonstrated excellent brushwork skills but showed little in the way of creative expression, Seihō might comment, “We can keep alive by eating properly, just to satisfy our body’s nutritional needs. But don’t you occasionally want to sample something just for the sake of savoring its flavor? Aren’t there times when you feel like having a little taste of saké?” In this way, Kayō explained, Seihō was able to critique his students without the

undermining their confidence, maintaining a critical reserve that nevertheless encouraged in his students the chance to develop their own creative solutions to artistic problems.69

exhibition debut: manchurian summer heat (1905) Bakusen’s debut at a juried painting exhibition occurred in 1905 at the tenth Shinkoten, approximately one year after he entered Chikujōkai. The painting in question was Manchurian Summer Heat (Seisho, Figure 8), which earned him a fourth prize award from the judges. As the work demonstrates, Bakusen largely severed his stylistic relations with his former teacher Shōnen in the months after coming under Seihō’s mentorship, substituting the muscular Chinese-style ink brushwork of the Suzuki school for the fine, supple outlines and restrained coloration of the Shijō school. Seihō’s direct influence is also apparent in Bakusen’s use of the sepia-and-gold ink wash to color the background, which provides the painting with a warm, hazy atmosphere well suited for expressing the sultry heat described in its title. Manchurian Summer Heat falls under the subject rubric of Chinese beauties (kanbijin), a genre that Edo and Meiji period Maruyama and Shijō painters alike explored with some frequency. In 1773, for example, Maruyama Ōkyo produced a painting of Xi Shi (Japanese: Seishi), one of the renowned four beauties of ancient China, kneeling by a stream to rinse freshly bleached silk in the flowing water (Figure 9), a pose and activity with which she was often associated. Alternatively, Xi Shi is sometimes painted standing with a basket and gathering mulberry leaves for silkworm provender, as depicted in a work by Kōno Bairei from 1885 (Figure 10). In Manchurian Summer Heat, Bakusen presents what might be called a double-image of Xi Shi by utilizing both of these poses in the figures of two washerwomen, one seated by a stream and rinsing cloth, the other standing with a basket, which in this instance holds laundry rather than mulberry leaves. Uchiyama 27

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8

Tsuchida Bakusen, Manchurian Summer Heat, 1905. Ink, colors on silk: hanging scroll. Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Nagaoka.

28

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> c·

9

Maruyama Ōkyo, Xi Shi Washing Silk, 1773. Ink, colors on silk: hanging scroll. Private collection.

10

29

Kōno Bairei, Chinese Beauty, 1885. Ink, colors on silk: hanging scroll. Kyoto Prefectural Library and Archives/The Museum of Kyoto.

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Takeo has identified another possible source for Bakusen’s painting in Kano Hōgai’s Kannon as Compassionate Mother (Hibo Kannon, 1888), already considered a canonical painting in Japan by 1905, pointing out how the placement of hands and the backwards-leaning pose in Hōgai’s image of Kannon are also present in Bakusen’s standing washer-woman.70 Bakusen’s growing confidence and brush control are abundantly apparent in the painting’s gently graded washes and skillful if somewhat stiff line work, confirming the youthful artist’s strong technical aptitude, and yet at this early stage his paintings were still conceptually weak, relying as they did on the selection and combination of pictorial elements from prototype compositions. This result stemmed, no doubt, from a continuation at Chikujōkai of the training regimen that he began at Shōnen’s juku, namely, the copying of model artworks selected by the teacher as a primary means of developing proficiency in a signature style. Now, however, rather than the “endless copies of Nanga paintings” he produced under Shōnen, Bakusen was steadily gaining a solid foundation in the Maruyama and Shijō style traditions.

Island, and how these rural origins helped cultivate the forceful personality for which he was later known. Chikkyō, for example, recalled Bakusen at the start of their studies as “a rustic right out of the country,” and earlier their shared experience of a rural childhood was noted as a factor that drew the two new students together.72 Even Bakusen’s daughter characterized her father many years after his death as a rarified individual who was deeply sensitive to the beauties of nature, yet unable to repress the feisty, stubborn character fostered in him by a rural upbringing.73 Later in life, Bakusen would try hard to replace this image with that of an urbane and sophisticated Kyoto painter, not in the least by selecting a quintessentially Kyoto theme, namely, that of maiko (as geisha-in-training in that city are known), as his signature motif.74 It is significant, then, that the painting marking Bakusen’s debut at the national salon features a rural theme, and that it was based mostly on sketches and studies made during a trip to his hometown on Sado (Figure 12). Rather than resist identifying himself as an artist with humble beginnings in the countryside, Bakusen chose to make his rural origins a point of strength, and emphasized them in a way that lent authenticity to his celebration of furusato or “country life,” a thematic that was largely unexplored up to that point in Nihonga.75 Translated directly, “furusato” means “old village” in English, and in the most literal usage it refer to one’s town of birth, or more broadly to the geographical region where one’s familial line is traced. In the context of the Meijiera, however, a time when Japan’s populace was becoming increasingly  urban, usage of the term furusato expanded to signify the positive, folksy qualities associated with rural hometown living, and the simple, honest character of those who made their homes in the countryside. Another label used in 1908 for this thematic is inaka fūzokuga, or “rural genre painting,”76 but no matter which rubric is used to describe it, Bakusen’s idealized images of country life allowed him to manufacture nostalgia for an imagined past golden age, and to awaken

rural fūzokuga: punishment (1908) and tax collection day (1909) Three years passed between Bakusen’s first appearance at the Shinkoten in 1905 with Manchurian Summer Heat and his debut at the Bunten with Punishment in 1908 (Figure 11), a crucial gap during which Bakusen gained significant technical and conceptual maturity, as well as confidence as a painter.71 As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Punishment was not only Bakusen’s debut painting at the national salon, it also represents one of his earliest attempts to generate a public artistic persona based on his own specific background. Much has been made in the past by Bakusen’s peers, and later by his biographers, regarding the painter’s upbringing on remote Sado 30

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11

Tsuchida Bakusen, Punishment, 1908. Ink, colors on silk: framed (originally six-panel folding screen). National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

where life and its problems were far less complicated. In this sense, Punishment reflects the salient facts about nostalgia observed by Svetlana Boym:

a longing for an idyllic life set in Japan’s preindustrial landscape.77 When we compare Manchurian Summer Heat with Punishment, we find an increased sophistication in the later work in terms of composition and mise en scène. The prominently displayed time schedule and a blossoming aster lying near the girl’s foot, for example, supply clues regarding the nature of the children's offense, suggesting the three young students dawdled on the way to school picking flowers. The scene, enhanced by an enveloping warm golden glow, seems tailor made to arouse nostalgia in the viewer for a past time (childhood) and place (Japan’s rural countryside)

At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.  In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.78

Overt sentimentalism of the sort on display in Punishment is rarely associated with artistic modernism 31

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Tsuchida Bakusen, sketches, c.1908. Ink on paper. Sado History Museum. Photo by author.

In light of this statement, Bakusen’s sentimental painting of school children can be interpreted as his attempt to disrupt the staid and lifeless status quo he felt dominated contemporary figure painting, and to challenge his fellow Kyoto Nihonga artists to look beyond formal description and consider art’s emotional potentiality. Artists responded to this challenge, including Bakusen’s own teacher, Seihō, who six years later exhibited a similarly sentimental work entitled Posing for the First Time (E ni naru saisho, Figure 13) at the 1913 Bunten. Although Seihō’s painting surprised many viewers for its suggestion of nudity, Nishiyama Suisho later remarked that Seihō’s goal was not to titillate his viewers but to create a psychological portrayal (shinri byōsha) of his model, capturing her feelings

today, especially since our contemporary values have been influenced by an intervening century of discourse on art, a significant part of which was dedicated to the promotion of a purely abstract and analytical model of modern painting, and which rejected overt emotionalism. Punishment, however, was created at a time when emotionalism was seen in Japan as breaking exciting new artistic ground precisely by evoking sentiment in its viewers. In a letter dated January 1907, the year before his Bunten debut, Bakusen wrote a letter to Aihara in which he candidly voiced his low opinion of Kyoto painters as producers of lack-luster paintings bereft of emotional content, “a thoroughly deplorable and unacceptable situation, and one I hope to reverse for the sake of the future of Nihonga.”79

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bakusen’s early life and works

13

the Second World War, is known today only through black-and-white photographic reproduction. Tax Collection Day was Bakusen’s sole success in a competitive exhibition that year, winning him second prize award at the Shinkoten.81 Here, too, sentimentalism is at the heart of the Bakusen’s strategy for this painting, even more than it was for Punishment, but the sentiments he elicits here are of a different order. Gone are any invocations of furusato nostalgia, replaced by a candid social-realist description of rural hardship and poverty. In his review of the Shinkoten that year, critic Kuroda Tengai expressed his admiration for Bakusen’s exploration of this remarkable new subject category, even coining the Japanese phrase “social painting” (shakaiga) to characterize it, and noting how rich in potential it was for future exploration by Nihonga painters.82 Tax Collection Day provides an interior view of a district government office during the mid-winter tax season, including various local resients, mostly elderly women, who wait to have their taxes assessed. On the right side of the composition Bakusen placed a woman standing with a cane before a payment window, with a young boy dressed in mismatched layers of oversized cotton kimono at her side. He stoops toward several coins lying on the floor beside them, a gesture that speaks of a frugal economy of a family with little to spare. Three other women wait on a narrow wooden bench pushed against the left wall; one examines her official documents while the other two rest in poses that suggest stoicism or even ennui. The only sign of cheer in the otherwise joyless tableau is found in the form of a young mother standing in the corner and smiling at her bundled baby, a symbol, perhaps, of the resilience of country folk, or perhaps a promise of better lives to come in the wake of future social reforms. Although Tax Collection Day won Bakusen a prize at the Shinkoten, critics offered much more muted praise for the painting than he received the previous year for Punishment. Even Kuroda Tengai, who applauded Bakusen’s choice of theme,

Takeuchi Seihō, Posing for the First Time, 1913. Ink, color on silk: framed. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

of awkwardness and shyness in the instant before she completely disrobes.80 Bakusen continued to explore rural genre painting over the next two years, resulting in Tax Collection Day (Chōzeibi, Figure 14) of 1909, which, like so many important Nihonga works created prior to

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14

Tsuchida Bakusen, Tax Payment Day, 1909. Work not extant. Source: Dai 14-kai Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai Shuppin Mokuroku (Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai, 1909).

take up socially conscious painting themes.84 By 1913 the term “Humanist school,” or Jinseiha in Japanese, had come into use in Kyoto to describe painters who featured socially conscious themes,85 influenced, perhaps, by the publication that year of a critical biography of Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) in the journal Shirakaba, which spread interest in European social realism among Japanese painters of oils and mineral pigments alike.86 With this timeline in mind, Bakusen appears to have been one of the earliest Nihonga painters in Kyoto to explore social-realist themes, creating “Humanist” works even before the genre had a label. Nevertheless, Tax Collection Day proved to be one of Bakusen’s last explorations of this direction, for according to Chikkyō, their Jinseiha stage lasted

disapproved of the illusionistic effects achieved through his dramatic rendering of atmospheric light and shadow, and voiced the view that such effects, while suitable for oil painting, were best avoided by Nihonga artists.83 Issues of style aside, social-realist themes were typically viewed around 1910 as chiefly the prerogative of oil painters, such as Mitsutani Kunishirō (1874–1936), whose Family of a Rickshaw Driver (Shafu no kazoku, 1908; Figure 15), another frank illustration of the economically underprivileged, was exhibited   in the oil painting galleries of the same 1908 Bunten exhibition that featured Punishment the year before. Ono Chikkyō, however, noted that around 1910 both he and Bakusen were reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) and other Russian writers of realist fiction, and were inspired by them to 34

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15

for only a brief interlude, and ended after they concluded literature was a more appropriate vehicle for social commentary than painting. From that point, Chikkyō recalled, they resolved to stay with themes

Mitsutani Kunishirō, Family of a Rikisha Driver, 1908. Oil on canvas. Tokyo University of the Arts Museum.

that were more conducive specifically to painterly concerns.87 For Chikkyō, this proved to be Nangainspired landscapes; for Bakusen, it was images of women.

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2 Beyond Chikujōkai: Expanding Influences and New Encounters

T

he years from 1909 to 1911 were an important transitional period for the Kyoto art world at large and for Bakusen’s own painting practice in particular. This chapter begins with the establishment of the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting (Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō) in 1909, a pivotal moment in Kyoto’s modern art history. This was not the first art institute to open in Kyoto, a distinction that belongs to the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyotofu Gagakkō 1880–1901), but there are ways in which these two schools differed with regard to their respective missions and pedagogies. The Kyoto Prefectural Painting School’s curriculum was organized around four distinct styles, figuratively designated by directions of the compass: “Eastern,” focusing on the Maruyama, Shijō and Yamato-e schools; imported “Western” techniques of oil painting (Yōga), watercolor and drawing; and two categories of Chinese painting, the “Northern” Kano and Sesshū schools and the “Southern” literati style (Nanga).1 In addition to training painters, the school also offered instruction in commercial application of painting, for the school was partially funded with the support of leaders of the city’s arts and crafts industry, who saw painting as a foundational skill necessary for the design and decoration of ceramics, textiles, metalwork and cloisonné enamel  wares.2

In contrast, the Specialized School for Painting had a much more focused mission: to transform the city’s emerging generation Nihonga painters into fine artists, and in the process prepare them for success at the national Bunten salon. Since juried exhibitions presented fundamentally different challenges to artists than those encountered in commercial arts and crafts applications, the Specialized School for Painting's mission emphasized stylistic breadth over specialization and the nurturing of nimble- minded, creative intellects as well as technically proficiency. To this end, the school also offered courses in art history and the humanities as well as programs in advanced painting techniques. Many of the city’s most promising young painters passed through the school, ushering in a new era of creative experimentation among Kyoto artists. Enrolling in the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting was one of two important steps Bakusen took at this juncture to expand his artistic potential and enhance his professional standing in the Kyoto art world at large. The second step came in 1910, when he befriended oil painter Tanaka Kisaku (1885-1945), founder of the exhibition collective Chat Noir (Sha Noāru), which was later reorganized and renamed Le Masque (Ru Masuku). In 1909 Tanaka, then a recent returnee to Kyoto after a year of art studies in Paris, participated in the formation of the Nameless Society (Mumeikai), an arts discussion group before which he frequently

Tsuchida Bakusen, Hair, 1911, detail of fig. 18.

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fine showing, supplying roughly two-thirds of the Nihonga paintings on display.4 Some argued that this geographical disparity was the result of favoritism on the part of the judges; after all, ten of the fourteen painters sitting on the selection jury were Tokyoites, and only four were from Kyoto. Others had different explanations, including Takeuchi Seihō and Kikuchi Hōbun, who concluded that the unbalanced results stemmed from the fact that the young Tokyo painters had simply been better prepared to compete than their Kyoto counterparts, and they accounted for this advantage by pointing to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, an institute for the advanced study of the arts. This school, which was established in 1887 and opened its doors to students in 1889, was run by director Okakura Tenshin primarily as a Nihonga academy until Okakura’s removal in 1898. After this administrative shake-up, the school was without firm leadership until it was reorganized under the leadership of Masaki Naohiko (1862–1940) in 1901. At that point, the Nihonga department was revitalized by Masaki’s appointment of such talented faculty as Kawabata Gyokushō (1842–1913), Terasaki Kōgyō (1866–1919), Kobori Tomoto (1864–1931), and Shimomura Kanzan (1873–1930), who were all later named to the Bunten’s selection jury when the national salon was established in 1907.5 Seihō, Hōbun, and several other senior Nihonga painters in Kyoto concluded that the best way to level the playing field would be to establish a similar school for advanced Nihonga in their home city. There were of course ample private juku painting schools operating in Kyoto in the 1900s, as well as the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts (Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō),6 but while these institutions and private schools offered all levels of training in Nihonga composition, their instruction was oriented primarily towards developing skills in students that were necessary for them to function successfully as artisan painters.  What Seihō and Hōbun envisioned was a school that prepared students in the creation of

lectured. Before long he had gathered a circle of like-minded young Yōga and Nihonga painters around him, a group that formed the core membership of Chat Noir/Le Masque. Bakusen and Chikkyō were among the participants in this circle, and their interactions with Tanaka and other oil painters at this time inspired them to seek out stylistic and thematic points of convergence between Nihonga and Post Impressionism. Equally important was their tutelage from the media-savvy Tanaka regarding the utility of the mass media for the promotion of collective activities, valuable lessons they would later put to expert use at the time of the Kokuga Society’s founding. A painting by Bakusen from 1911 entitled Hair (Kami, Figure 18) is emblematic of this important transitional period, inasmuch as it was prominently featured in the first combined Yōga-Nihonga exhibition organized by Tanaka Kisaku that year, and also served as Bakusen’s graduation project at the Specialized School for Painting. Bakusen's thematic selection for this work, a courtesan (yūjo) dressing her hair,3 is ubiquitous in Edo-period Ukiyo-e prints and paintings, and yet the “woman at her toilette” thematic was also popular among French artists associated with the Post-Impressionism and Decadence movements. Bakusen’s rendering of the subject’s outlined form corresponds to the manner associated with Edo-period woodblock printed illustrations of beautiful women, while his delineation of bodily volume, seen in the press of her ankle, knee and thigh against her robe, and his modeled rendering of her hands, conjures connections with nikutaibi, or “beauty of the flesh,” a term used to characterize the emphasis on corporeality associated with the Western female nude tradition.

the kyoto municipal specialized school for painting The idea to found an advanced school for Nihonga studies in Kyoto was predicated on the results of the first government-sponsored Bunten salon in 1907, where Tokyo painters made a particularly 38

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“exhibition paintings” (tenji kaigai), a new class of artwork that required a very different set of objectives than art created for commercial enterprise. In mid-November of 1907, before the first Bunten exhibition had even closed, Seihō and Hōbun devised a plan for a new art school in Kyoto dedicated to the study of advanced Nihonga, with optional additional coursework in literature, ethics, language and history, modeled after a similar curriculum in place at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts that was intended to expand the cultural knowledge base of young painters, which would theoretically make them better, more creative artists.7 The Kyoto Mayor’s Office officially adopted their plan in early 1908, and applied to the national government’s Ministry of Education for supplemental funds to

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cover the building and management of the new school, which were granted to the city in March 1909. Takeuchi Seihō, who served as the institute’s first director, opened the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting in April, borrowing classroom space from the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts, since he was unwilling to wait for the completion of construction of the school’s new facilities.8 The first entrance examinations were held in April, and resulted in the admittance of seventy-six new students, including seven judged advanced enough to place into the second-year curriculum. This elite group, which included Bakusen, Chikkyō, Murakami Kagaku and Sakakibara Shihō (four of the five future founders of the Kokuga Society), became the school’s historic first graduating class of 1911 (Figure 16).9

Photograph of the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School of Painting’s faculty and first graduating class. 1911. Rear row, left to right: Ono Chikkyō, Tsuchida Bakusen, Irie Hakō, Sakakibara Shihō, Matsumiya Hōnen, Sakakibara Uson, Murakami Kagaku. Middle row, third from left: Nishiyama Suisho. Front row, left to right, starting third from left: Yamamoto Shunkyō, Takeuchi Seihō, Matsumoto Matatarō, Kikuchi Hōbun, Nakai Sōtarō. Image in public domain. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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tanaka kisaku, the nameless society, and chat noir

Students at the Specialized School for Painting enrolled in one of three courses or tracks of study, the first of which was the remedial “preparatory course” (yoka), intended to provide up to two years of fundamental training to students who were too advanced to send down to the more remedial Kyoto School of Fine Arts and Crafts, yet who still demonstrated technical deficiencies. Successful completion of the preparatory course allowed students to progress to the school’s main curriculum, which was divided into the standard (honka) and practicum courses (bekka). Most of the new students, including Kagaku and Shihō, enrolled in the standard course of study, which combined advanced studio training with an expanded program of humanities studies, including art history, aesthetics, painting theory, Japanese literary history, poetry composition, anatomy, classical Chinese, English, and “history of manners and customs” (fūzokushi, which focused on traditional dress, material culture, and social behavior of past periods of Japanese history).10 For those students who were uninterested in taking these additional courses, or who were insufficiently prepared for them, there was the practicum track, which focused solely on studio practice.11 Students of both the standard and practicum courses followed the same three-year progression, beginning with landscape painting in the first year under the direction of Yamamoto Shunkyo, followed by figure painting in the second year, supervised by Kikichu Hōbun. In the third year, students were allowed to specialize in one of these subject areas, or possibly others, such as bird-and-flower painting, overseen by Takeuchi Seihō.12 Students met regularly with their teachers (once a week for standard students, once a month for those in the practicum course), and were required to produce three complete paintings per trimester to advance to the next stage. The three-year curriculum culminated in the production of a diploma painting, which, if accepted, was featured in the school’s annual end-of-year exhibition, which soon became a highlight in the Kyoto calendar of art-related events.13

Since Bakusen, Chikkyō, Kagaku, and Shihō were all fellow members of the first and very small graduating class at the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting, it would be reasonable to assume their mutual association started in the halls and classrooms of the school, but this was not the case; indeed, it would be several more years before they would even make each others’ acquaintance.14 As practicum students, Bakusen and Chikkyō worked independently and off-campus, coming to school only for intermittent critiques with their teachers, thus they had very little contact with students enrolled in the main course of study. Around the same time they began their new lives as students at Kaisen (the nickname by which the school was known, abbreviated from Kaiga Senmon Gakkō), the two friends moved out of Chikujōkai and into rented rooms in Sūtai-in, a subtemple of the important Jōdoshū temple Chion-in in the Higashiyama district of the city. Over time, Sūtai-in became a popular gathering place for many of Bakusen’s and Chikkyō’s artist friends and peers.15 Bakusen’s and Chikkyō’s eagerness to widen their profile in the Kyoto art world put them into contact with oil painters like Tanaka Kisaku, creating the opportunity for their participation in the experimental Yōga-Nihonga exhibitions Tanaka organized in 1912 and 1913. This experience provided the two young painters with an important practical education unavailable at any art school or juku. Tanaka proved to be one of Bakusen’s most important mentors, despite being just two years his senior. In the early 1910s Tanaka succeeded in carving out a place for himself at the center of the Kyoto art world, first as leader of the discussion group the Nameless Society, and then as head of Chat Noir and Le Masque. Tanaka was born and raised in Kyoto, and received his early art education at the School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied design. In 1904 Asai Chū opened the Kansai Art Institute, one of the city’s first private Western-style art schools, and Tanaka left the School of Arts and 40

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Crafts to become one of the Institute’s first oil painting students. He finished his studies with Asai in 1908, at which point he left for France in the company of fellow Kansai Art Institute graduate Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986). Their destination was Paris, and their goal to enroll at the Académie Julian, a private art school popular with foreign students; when Tanaka and Umehara arrived in Paris and started at the school they found themselves studying alongside several of their countrymen, including Tsuda Seifū (1880–1978), Yasui Sōtarō (1888–1955), and Kawashima Ri’ichirō (1886–1971). Tanaka cut short his time in Paris after developing health problems and returned to Kyoto after less than a year abroad,16 but Umehara remained in France for a total of five productive years, studying first at the Académie Julian and later under the tutelage of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), with whom Umehara developed a close relationship.17 Although Tanaka spent less time in France than he had originally planned, when he repatriated in the spring of 1909 he was numbered among the very few Japanese artists to have traveled to Europe, to have met with and studied under Western artists, and to have experienced contemporary European art movements first-hand. Tsuda Seifū returned to Kyoto at around the same time, and oil painter Kuroda Jūtarō (1887–1970) later recalled the stir they caused when Tanaka and Tsuda, still in their twenties and with no professional reputations to speak of, began promoting themselves as experts on modern Western art theory and praxis, and publicly aired their views on the ailing state of the contemporary Japanese art world, as well as what was required to remedy it.

fundamental qualities of a true artist could hear [their message] and dismiss it as empty words. Our elders, who refused to listen at all, tried to stifle our excitement by speaking their own minds about how artists should proceed, but their breath would have been put to better use in blowing the dust out of their own ateliers.18

About a year after his return from France, Tanaka partnered with Nakai Sōtarō (1879–1966), the newly-hired teacher of art history and aesthetics at the Specialized School for Painting, and with Nihonga painter and Ruskin expert Tokunaga Kakusen, art critic Fujii Yōichi (dates unknown), poet Nakagawa Shimei (1849–1917), and Kyoto Hinode Shinbun reporter Tokumi Ōkokudō (dates unknown) to form the Nameless Society. Active from 1910 to 1912, the Nameless Society served as an important Kyoto-based ikenkai, or “opinion meetings,” a general term used in the late Meiji era to describe clubs or societies, formal or informal, that gathered in order to encourage and enable discussion and debate in a focused area of inquiry or interest. For the Nameless Society, this was modern Western art theory and its interpretation.19 Ikenkai were modeled in part after Europe’s tradition of holding discursive gatherings, whether in highbrow aristocratic salons or in bohemian café societies and tertulias. There were precedents in pre-Meiji Japan as well, and thus ikenkai can also be seen as modern extensions of Japan’s centuries-old practice of forming groups and circles around scholarly interests, such as Chinese studies, medicine, or astronomy, and cultural avocations such poetry composition, music, painting, or calligraphy, which served to create and maintain social, political and commercial networks across class and economic distinctions.20 Japan’s most famous ikenkai of the early twentieth century is perhaps Tokyo’s Pan Society (Pan no kai, active 1908–1913), founded by Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885–1945), a medical doctor by vocation but also a poet, a playwright, and a publisher of several art and literature periodicals, including the influential Subaru. Kinoshita was also a great admirer of modern French culture, and consciously

[Tanaka and Tsuda] witnessed the art of the great Western painters with their own eyes, and when we heard them describe these works and the passion involved in their creation, the fact that we were forced to remain in Kyoto, unable to experience it for ourselves, was hard to bear. Some rejected [their authority] when they heard them speak about the importance of artistic freedom and individuality, but only those who lacked the

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chose to hold Pan Society meetings at Europeanstyle restaurants overlooking the Sumida river (Tokyo’s answer to Paris’s Seine), where participants gathered to discuss the reform and revitalization of Japanese art, literature and theater over European food, wine, coffee and music.21 Tanaka Kisaku’s Nameless Society, which may have been consciously modeled on the Pan Society, served a similar discursive function in Kyoto, and stimulated debate on a wide variety of topics related to Western art and aesthetics. Furthermore, the presence of journalist Tokumi Ōkokudō in the group guaranteed the public dissemination of their lectures, discussions and debates, for Tokumi regularly published summaries of Nameless Society meetings in the pages of the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun.22 According to Kuroda Jūtarō, the group’s two most active organizers, Nakai Sōtarō and Tanaka Kisaku, developed a friendly rivalry within the Nameless Society as they jockeyed good-naturedly for authority and influence in Kyoto’s contemporary art arena.23 By mid-1910, just a few months after the group’s first meeting, Nakai was already involved in the running of another discussion group, Peach Blossom Society (Tōkakai), an ikenkai composed of current students and recent graduates of Kyoto’s School of Fine Arts and Crafts and the Specialized School for Painting, which Nakai soon helped transform into a school-affiliated Nihonga exhibition collective.24 Not to be outdone, in December 1910 Tanaka announced the establishment of an ikenkai of his own named Chat Noir (Sha Noāru, “Black Cat”), which was also retooled into an exhibition society within a month of its first meeting. Tanaka had noted how effectively Tokumi’s newspaper coverage of Nameless Society gatherings had enhanced that group’s profile, and he made similar use of the mass media by providing a press release that not only announced the new group, but also succeeded in generating a specific desired public profile for it, even before its membership had the chance to hold its first meeting. In the press release, Tanaka explains that the group was named after Le Chat Noir (“The Black Cat”), a

bar-cabaret run by Rodolphe Salis (1851–1897) in Paris’s Montmartre district from 1881 to 1897.25 In its heyday, Le Chat Noir functioned as a popular salon for Parisian artists, writers, composers, and performers. Salis was also an impresario, and in addition to his cabaret, he gave the name “Le Chat Noir” to a traveling entertainment group he managed (Figure 17), and to an arts journal he published. The fame of Salis’s cabaret, enhanced by the popularity of his touring company and of his magazine, stimulated the creation of numerous affiliated Chat Noir art societies across Europe. By also naming his group “Chat Noir”, Tanaka tacitly asserted that his new ikenkai-exhibition collective would serve as Japan’s own contribution to this international movement, and promote a similar style of fin de siècle-style artistic experimentation.

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Theophile Alexandre Steinlen, Reopening of the Black Cat Cabaret (Reouverture du Cabaret du Chat Noir), 1896. Ink on paper. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

beyond chikujōkai: expanding influences and new encounters

the Japanese art world in the years that bookend the founding of Chat Noir. In April 1910, sculptor Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956) published the influential essay “Green Sun” (Midori iro no taiyō) in the journal Subaru, in which he lamented how frequently – and, he emphasized, unnecessarily – artists and critics were led astray by their narrow assumptions regarding categories of art media. The very label “Nihonga,” he complained, stifled the creativity of Nihonga painters, while oil painters labored under similar constraints, particularly at the hands of meddling critics who insisted Yōga should appear one way or another. Takamura advised artists to reject any and all external authority that worked to undermine their individuality, and called on the exhibition-going public to cast aside all preconceptions regarding art, and to solely recognize “the limitless authority of the artist’s own Personlichkeit [personality],” even if, as a result, the results were as strange and unexpected as a painting of a green sun.27 Furthermore, Paul Berry has noted that the media classification problem was mentioned in as authoritative a source as Bijutsu jiten (“Dictionary of the Fine Arts”), one of Japan’s first art dictionaries, published by art critic and oil painter Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958), Nihonga painter Yūki Somei (1875–1957), and architectural critic and historian Kuroda Hōshin (1885–1967) in 1914. Under the entry for “Nihonga” it is explained how some artists and critics disapproved of using different labels for Japanese paintings executed in mineral pigments versus those painted in oils, “feeling that regardless of painting style and painting materials, all paintings created by Japanese are paintings of Japan [Nihon no e], and thus should be called Nihonga.” This, the dictionary predicts, may well become the practice in the future.28 In any case, it perfectly reflected the philosophy of Tanaka, Bakusen, and the other members of Chat Noir. After the initial announcement of his new group’s founding, Tanaka continued to release regular reports on Chat Noir activities, often as statements released in the column “News from the Art World” (Geijutsukai Shōsoku), a regular feature in the pages of Kyoto Hinode Shinbun.

Other than these ties to a French group with avant-garde and Decadence bone fides, another noteworthy aspect of Tanaka’s Chat Noir was the mixed composition of its membership. In addition to five oil painters, Tanaka Kisaku, Tsuda Seifū, Kuroda Jūtarō, Arai Kinya (1884–1966), and Tanaka Zennosuke (1889–1946) (no relation to Tanaka Kisaku), it included six Nihonga artists, Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, Kashino Nanyō (1887–1956), Hada Teruo (1887–1945), Fukumoto Koyō (dates unknown), and Sugiura Kōhō (dates unknown).26 It was not uncommon in the 1910s to see both Yōga and Nihonga works displayed in the same exhibition, yet in such cases the two genres were typically kept distinct. At the Bunten, for example, Nihonga and Yōga were seen as equal but discrete genres of painting, each with its own panel of judges, the selections of which were exhibited in separate galleries. In Chat Noir, however, there was to be no such modal distinctions, in fact members were encouraged to produce works in oils, mineral pigments, or any other media for the exhibition, as their creative requirements dictated. This view of Nihonga and Yōga as not just equal but corresponding or even homologous artistic phenomena was a radical one in Kyoto of the early 1910s. Yet the time was ripe for a reevaluation of the estrangement between these two modes of modern Japanese painting. In chapter one, we learned of Takeuchi Seihō’s efforts around the turn of the century to create a hybridized nueteki style of painting that integrated aspects of Western-imported oil painting without compromising Nihonga’s core strengths and traditional values. We also saw how the Shinpa label evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century to describe Nihonga works that incorporated Yōga-associated characteristics, such as the illusionism used in Kikuchi Keigetsu’s Falling Flowers. For a Nihonga artist to try his hand at oil painting, or vice-versa, seems the logical next step. Meanwhile, a debate over the value and legitimacy of maintaining distinct media categories for Nihonga and Yōga was unfolding in other parts of 43

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In mid-February the group’s plans to hold an inaugural May exhibition appeared in the newspaper,29 after which Tanaka released regular updates on the group’s exhibition preparations. In March, Tanaka announced that the group had hired nude models, followed in April by an assurance that the public should expect only thoroughly modern art works to appear in the upcoming Chat Noir show, “insofar as modern art is the art of women, wine, and gambling.”30 Statements like these were intended to tantalize a prospective audience by stoking excitement and anticipation, and also served to reinforce Chat Noir’s affiliation with a French namesake that was closely associated with bohemianism and the Decadence movement of late nineteenth century Europe. By 1910, Bakusen had established a reputation as a rising young talent based on his recent successes at the Shinkoten and Bunten, and like Tanaka, he put his burgeoning celebrity to promotional use by providing frequent updates in the pages of Kyoto Hinode Shinbun on his exhibition preparations. In early March he reported his intention to include watercolor paintings as well as Nihonga works,31 and followed up a month later by announcing he had completed an oil painting for the show,32 exemplifying Chat Noir’s ideal by trying his hand at other media. As for his Nihonga production, he promised to avoid the historicizing impulse that characterized the work of so many of his fellow Kyoto Nihonga artists, “who seem to view historical referencing as an indispensable step in their painting processes.” Rather than turning to the past for inspiration, Bakusen explained, he wished to look instead at completely new approaches to Nihonga painting, such as the works created by Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1959) and Hishida Shunsō (1874–1911) during their “experimental period.”33 This was a reference to the style developed by these two Tokyo painters from 1901, given the pejorative label mōrōtai (“obscure or hazy in form”) and dismissed by unappreciative critics as “far removed from the sense of clarity that has been the defining feature of Japanese painting.”34 Bakusen’s interest in mōrōtai at this time is unexpected,

mostly because the style had never been seriously taken up by painters in Kyoto and had little currency there, and because Taikan and Shunsō had themselves largely abandoned mōrōtai within a few years of inventing it. As a Nihonga-Yōga cross over style, however, mōrōtai’s appeal to Bakusen is understandable, since its underpinnings corresponded so well with Chat Noir’s ambitions to transcend media-based divisions in contemporary painting practice. In his recollections of Bakusen dating to this period, Kuroda Jūtarō presents a profile of a sincere and idealistic young artist who, in addition to learning about mōrōtai, was keen on studying modern Western painting movements, particularly French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and on expanding his knowledge of pre-Meiji Japanese style traditions, including Yamato-e, the Kano school and Ukiyo-e: I first met Bakusen around the time Chat Noir was formed in Kyoto… He was already well known as a young painter responsible for such works as Punishment… but to my surprise, he turned out to be thoroughly unpretentious, with none of the affectations that often afflict Nihonga painters. He was constantly buying new art books, sometimes very expensive ones, making us all very envious… Whenever we gathered, he passionately talked about Renoir, Cézanne, and Rodin, or Utamaro and Sharaku, [Kano painters] Eitoku and Sanraku, and even the artists of the Tosa school.35

Kuroda’s statement suggests that Bakusen’s dabbling in oils and watercolors, his interest in mōrōtai, and his study of modern French art movements should not be interpreted today as a rejection of traditionalism, even despite his criticism of painters who relied unduly on historical quotation in their Nihonga practice. On the contrary, we learn from Kuroda that Bakusen was deeply interested in Japan’s pre-Meiji artistic legacy at that time, and he characterizes the scope of Bakusen’s interest in Japan’s pictorial heritage, spanning from popular  woodblock prints to the ink-based, Chineseinflected Kano school and the pigment-intensive 44

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Yamato-e style of the Tosa school, as truly sweeping in its scope. One might imagine these two conflicting trajectories of influence working at cross purposes: one of them faces West in order to examine new currents in European art (new in the sense of being  recently introduced to Japan in the early 1910s), while the other looks back at Japan’s own art history. If we recall the metaphor of a mosaic touched upon in this book’s introduction in reference to artistic identification, however, we see that there was no inherent conflict for Bakusen to experiment with imported Western art media while remaining committed to traditional painting  materials and techniques, or to nurture a fervent interest in modern French art movements while simultaneously retaining his esteem for Japan’s pre- and early modern painting legacy. In fact, if we reread Bakusen’s criticism of his fellow Kyoto Nihonga painters, we see that he did not rebuke them for looking to the past for inspiration, but because this was the only place they had thought to look. By the same measure, Bakusen might have been equally dismissive of any Nihonga painters who limited their research and inspiration solely to modern Western art movements, for the same reasons that lie at the crux of Takamura Kōtarō’s argument in “Green Sun,” namely, that both of these approaches require artists to conform  to the artificial constraints and expectations of specific art categories, and thus limit selfexpression. Only by navigating an individualized path through these two domains of influence, Bakusen seems to say, by subjectively exploring, highlighting and celebrating select aspects of East and West, modernist and pre-modern, can an artist hope to discover a truly new mode of artistic self-expression.

took place. On May 4, 1911, only one day before the scheduled opening, Kyoto Hinode Shinbun ran a story entitled “Chat Noir Breaks Up,” which reported the cancelation of the show, and the dissolution of the group. According to the very frank and revealing statement supplied by Tanaka to the newspaper, some in Chat Noir had never completely assimilated the decadent image so enthusiastically embraced by the others, and when the members gathered the night before the opening to preview the exhibition, these individuals complained bitterly about certain of paintings, believing them to be too vulgar and offensive to merit inclusion. Tanaka proposed that the issue be solved democratically, leaving the question of which works to include and which to exclude to group vote. Tsuda Seifū and several others roundly rejected this solution, however, calling it akin to artistic censorship, and they threatened to withdraw from the exhibition completely if a single work was excluded. So it was that, with gallery prepared, exhibition pamphlets printed, and art works prepared and ready for hanging, but facing insurmountable discord amongst the members themselves, Tanaka explained that he had been forced to cancel the exhibition and disband Chat Noir.36 This, however, was not to be the end. On May 5th, the very next day, Tanaka released a follow-up statement that another group named Le Masque (Ru masuku, “The Mask”) had arisen from the ashes of Chat Noir. Five of the participants of that now-defunct group – Tanaka Kisaku, Arai Kinya, Kuroda Jūtarō, Tsuchida Bakusen and Ono Chikkyō – had been unwilling to discard their efforts, and agreed to continue promoting progressive, collaborative artistic experimentation between Nihonga and Yōga painters.37 The first Le Masque exhibition opened without complications and on schedule one week later. When visitors arrived at the gallery they were greeted with a pamphletprinted manifesto text that explained the new group’s aims:

exhibiting at le masque and the bunten: hair (1911) In spite of all the careful preparations and promotional efforts by Tanaka, Bakusen and company, the much-anticipated Chat Noir exhibition never

On the occasion of a Rodin exhibition, Eugène Carrière once wrote, La transmission de la pensée par l’art, comme

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According to a review published in the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, which provides the most extensive discussion of the exhibition published at that time, the first Le Masque show was well attended and well received, despite the impromptu nature of its organization and the short length of its three-day run from May 13 to 15. The newspaper reported that the exhibition featured three works by Bakusen, an oil painting entitled Maytime (Gogatsu no koro), and two Nihonga works, Hazy Evening (Oboroyo) and Hair. Of these three, only Hair survives today (Figure 18), and is widely considered one of Bakusen’s finest extant early works. The review mentions Maytime in strongly positive terms, admiring its free and unrestrained brushwork, “the results of an amateur’s touch,” as the work’s finest virtue.40 It mentions Hair only in passing, noting it to be a fine painting with interesting subject matter, but perhaps too delicate a work for inclusion in an exhibition with such radical aspirations.41 As for his second Nihonga contribution, Hazy Evening, the review ignores it entirely. Nor does it comment on the novelty of a single painter

la transmission de la vie, est œuvre de passion et d’amour [“The transmission of one’s thoughts by art, like the transmission of life, is a work of passion and love.”]. These words describe what we group members had in mind for our paintings, but after a while, we realized that we wanted our art exhibit to be interpreted as a gesture of passion and love, not just [a collection of] individual works. Just as the ondulation [undulation] of line and arlequinade [self-indulgent play] of color in a single painting plainly divulges the mood of the artist who created it, so it is that we wish you to view this exhibition as the result of our collective play, our passion, our very life force, and to see the whole thing as one single work of artistic creation. By holding our humble exhibition in a traditional space such as this, we hope to destroy many conventions, a result that is perhaps unavoidable.38

Printed on the back of the pamphlet was another quotation attributed to Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917), which reads, “We are gunned down by the world, which then rifles through our pockets.”39

18

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Tsuchida Bakusen, Hair, 1911. Color on silk; framed. University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts.

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exhibiting oils alongside Nihonga works, despite the fact that of all the Le Masque participants, only Bakusen had realized the group’s ideal by executing works in multiple media. Hair was not created specifically with the first Le Masque exhibition in mind; in fact, its origins are somewhat accidental. In autumn 1910, shortly before the establishment of Chat Noir, Takeuchi Seihō requested Bakusen and four other senior members of Chikujōkai to assist him in the completion of a major commission, a Buddhist paradise scene to be painted on the ceiling of the main gate of Higashi-Honganji, one of Kyoto’s most important temples.42 Seihō hired a professional model from Tokyo named Midori to pose for the celestial maidens who would populate the scene, but in an ironic twist, just as Midori arrived in Kyoto, Seihō was called to Tokyo on urgent Bunten-related business.43 In their teacher’s absence, Bakusen and the other assistants took turns sketching the model to pass the time, and it was upon these drawings of Midori that Bakusen based his composition for Hair.44 Eventually Seihō and his helpers created a number of sketches, color studies, and even a fullscale mockup of the intended ceiling painting (Figure 19), but in the end the commission was canceled, and the paradise scene was never executed. When Bakusen completed Hair, he put it to triple use, for in addition to serving as his diploma project for the Specialized School for Painting and one of three works he contributed to the first Le Masque exhibition, Hair also served as Bakusen’s submission to the 1911 Bunten salon, where it was selected by the judges and awarded Honorable Mention.45 This high-profile success invited closer media attention to the work, and Hair was mentioned in several reviews of the Bunten and in universally admirable terms, exemplified by the opinion of critic Urahara Ariaki:

which can so quickly turn tawdry, and produce a work of such refinement and quality is an extraordinary accomplishment, one that has only been rivaled at the Bunten by Kitano Tsunetomi.”46

As Urahara suggests, the theme of the courtesan or prostitute was not yet a common one among Kyoto Nihonga painters in the late Meiji era, possibly due to vulgar associations. Despite the fact that many Kyoto painters in the early 1910s still relied heavily on Japan’s pre-Meiji pictorial legacy for subjects, styles, and techniques (sometimes exclusively so, a tendency that drew rebuke from Bakusen, as we saw), many were still reticent to make reference to the Edo-era genre known as Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” a euphemism for illustrations of the entertainment quarters, with its theaters and brothels. It was only recently that painters like Osaka’s Kitano Tsunetomi (1880–1947) had begun reasserting this aspect of Japan’s traditional pictorial heritage, starting with his successful submission of Chirping Insects (Sudaku mushi), lost today, to the 1910 Bunten,47 and the skill and sensitivity with which Tsunetomi created his neoUkiyo-e served to raise the status of floating world themes in general. Furthermore, the important role played by Ukiyo-e prints in inspiring many of the authors of European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism was acknowledged by this time in Japan, and indeed had become a point of cultural pride, providing Ukiyo-e with additional respectability.48 As we learned earlier in this chapter from Kuroda Jūtarō, Ukiyo-e was among Bakusen’s interests during this time, especially the print designs of Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) and Tōshūsai Sharaku (active 1794–1795). An examination of Bakusen’s sketchbooks from this period show numerous drawings of figures copied from prints designed by both these artists, as well as by Suzuki Harunobu (?-1770), Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815), and other Ukiyo-e artists. On one of these pages, alongside ink drawings of courtesans and their attendants, Bakusen included a handwritten reference to a German book, Geschichte des

“From what I hear, this painting is one of the first diploma paintings produced by a student of the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting, and I am told that it was highly admired by Seihō and by members of his juku. For an artist to take the subject [of a courtesan],

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19

Japanischen Farben-holzschnitts (“The History of Japanese Color Wood Cuts”) (Figure 20), authored by Woldemar von Seidlitz and published in 1897. A quick study of this text proves it was a source from which Bakusen drew, for several of the figures rendered in the sketchbook appear in the prints reproduced as plates in the book. For Bakusen to turn to a German book in 1910 in order to study images of Japanese woodblock prints is not as strange as it may sound, for starting in the late nineteenth century, German scholars like von Seidlitz produced some of the most important and influential early disquisitions on Japanese

Takeuchi Seihō, study for Paradise Scene, 1910. Color on silk; framed. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

woodblock prints at a time when the scholarly study of Ukiyo-e was still nascent in Japan. The subject of Hair, a courtesan at her toilette, was a ubiquitous one among floating world artists, and Bakusen’s outline brushwork, featuring gently modulated, calligraphic lines, corresponds to the style associated with print designers like Utamaro. As discussed in the opening of this chapter, however, Bakusen’s line work varies from that typically used in Ukiyo-e, for instead of using lines just to define the hems and folds of the woman’s garment and dispensing with the bodily form beneath, Bakusen delineates a shapely thigh, a rounded knee, 48

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21 20 Tsuchida Bakusen, sketches, c. 1910. Ink on paper. Sado History Museum. Photo by author.

Kitagawa Utamaro, Beauty Applying Makeup, 1796–1798. Color woodblock print. Image © Trustees of the British Museum.

prototypes and making their objectification and eroticization all the easier. We do not know if Bakusen ever saw this particular Degas study – in fact, it is likely he did not, considering the dearth of publications on modern Western art in Japan at that time – but in addition to Degas, many other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists of the late nineteenth century, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841– 1819), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), Marie Cassatt (1844–1926), Pierre Bonnard (1867– 1947) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), produced countless variations on this theme, which may have led Bakusen to view the subject of a woman attending her toilette as archetypal of modern French painting in general. Ironically, Edowoodblock prints featuring Japanese courtesans

and a protruding heel, emphasizing her corporeality. Another way in which Hair departs from floating world precedents is Bakusen’s thwarting of expectations associated with the “courtesan before a mirror” thematic, for in such prints the subject’s face, if blocked or obscured from direct sight, is often reflected in the surface of the mirror, affording a glimpse of her beautiful features, playing a game of concealing and revealing (Figure 21). Instead, Bakusen uses a compositional strategy also found in a pastel study created by Degas featuring a young woman arranging her hair before a mirror (Figure 22). Both Bakusen and Degas deny a direct view of their respective model’s face through strategic placement of their arms and orientation of their heads, effectively erasing their identities, turning them from individual women into beautiful 49

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that saw its most vigorous manifestation in the visual arts. The reverberations of such thinking took diverse, yet logically consistent, routes during the roughly six decades from the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868 to the end of the succeeding Taishō period in 1926.50

22

Here Volk speaks predominantly with Japanese oil painters in mind, but her explanation of reverse-Japanism applies equally to Nihonga as one of the “diverse but consistent routes” through which Western-derived essentialist notions of Japan and its arts contributed to that nation’s evolving modern artistic identity. On a micro scale, reverse-Japanism became one of the factors that turned Bakusen’s attention to Ukiyo-e artists such as Utamaro, Sharaku and Harunobu, and encouraged  him to engage their designs with freshly opened eyes. Hair was one of two courtesan-themed paintings Bakusen submitted to the 1911 Bunten, a fact that shows the depth and strength of his engagement with Ukiyo-e at that time. But, whereas Hair was chosen by the selection jury with accolades, his second submission, a hanging scroll entitled Prostitute (Yūjo), was rejected outright. Ono Chikkyō later described this now-lost second work:

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Woman Combing Her Hair, ca. 1888–90. Pastel on paper, affixed to original pulpboard mount. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

dressing before a mirror were among the original sources for this theme in late nineteenth century Europe, allowing us to employ the ironic expression “reverse-Japanism” to describe the situation whereby modern Japanese artists receive the influence and inspiration of Ukiyo-e indirectly through the European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters they studied and admired.49 Alicia Volk has noted how potent and persuasive this phenomenon was among artists in Japan working to construct a new modern cultural identity:

In appearance it was similar to one of Utamaro’s woodblock prints, since the garments were rendered in similar iron-wire brush strokes, which produced the same stylized forms. The courtesan’s face showed a Sharaku influence, but with a somewhat vapid cast to it. The eyes and other facial features were particularly striking, and its strongly realistic appearance made the work even more intriguing.51

From this description, it appears for his second submission Bakusen revisited thematic and stylistic features very similar to those he utilized in Hair, but rendered with more intensity, with his quotation of specific Edo-period artists becoming more overt, and his realism more strongly expressed. Such a painting would have lacked the subtlety and intimacy Bakusen achieved in his award-winning Hair, which may have been a factor in its rejection.

Though Japonisme was born in Europe, it was not only in the West that it came to define what was unique and particular about the Japanese and their art. The primitivist and Orientalist conceptions of difference that are the basis for Japonisme as we commonly understand it were also appropriated in Japan in a type of self-fashioning

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Ono Chikkyō’s contribution to the first Le Masque exhibition was limited to three Nihonga paintings, of which only Southern Country (Nankoku; Figure 23) remains extant today. Like Bakusen’s Hair, this work also served as Chikkyō’s diploma project for the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting, and of all Chikkyō’s Le Masque contributions, Southern Country received the most extensive and the most positive critical mention.52 Several decades later, Chikkyō reminisced about his period of activity with Le Masque, and discussed the artistic points of reference that intrigued and inspired him the most during that time, namely, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Nanga painting:

conciseness, and their substantiality. Looking back now, I see the influence of Cézanne very clearly in works from that period, even if I was not able to express it properly. On the other hand, when [oil painter] Kosugi Misei [1881–1964; later he painted Nihonga as Kosugi Hōan] praised my paintings in an exhibition review and specifically noted their Nanga-like qualities, I was particularly pleased … I was also deeply interested in [Tomioka] Tessai, and the reproductions of Cézanne I viewed held for me the same sort of freshness as Tessai’s [Nanga] paintings.53

Chikkyō does not mention specifically where he first encountered reproductions of Cézanne’s paintings, but a likely source is the journal Shirakaba, which featured a full-length illustrated article on the French painter by writer and Yōga artist Arishima Ikuma (1882–1974) in its May 1910 issue.54 Chikkyō was certainly not the only Japanese painter in the 1910s drawn to Post-Impressionism,

I was keenly interested in Cézanne at that time, although I only experienced his works through reproductions, and never saw an actual painting. I was deeply fascinated   with the richness of Cézanne’s paintings, their

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Ono Chikkyō. Southern Country, 1911. Color on silk; hanging scroll. University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts.

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and Cézanne in particular. Oil painter Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929), for example, confirmed in 1915 how heavily his own practice relied on Cézanne and van Gogh and their ideas about painting, “especially the way they simplified colors and forms, reducing them to their essentials.”55 Although the monochrome nature of most popular journals at that time meant Japanese artists learned little about Cézannne’s coloration from illustration plates in Shirakaba and other magazines, his signature compositional strategy of reducing forms, particularly buildings but also trees, rocks and other natural forms, into basic building blocks of spheres, triangles, rectangles and squares is on ample display in the artist's many views of Mont SainteVictoire, for example (Figure 24). It may well be to this strategy of geometrification that Chikkyō was referring when he spoke of the “conciseness” and “substantiality” of a Cézanne landscapes, inspiring him to attempt a similar treatment of buildings in Southern Country, particularly visible in the structures clustered at the bottom of the composition. What do we make of Chikkyō’s self-stated synchronous interest around 1910 in Nanga and one of its most authoritative Meiji-era practitioners, Tomioka Tessai (1837–1924)? In this regard, it is possible to point to the short, dot-like vertical and horizontal marks used by Chikkyō throughout Southern Country – from the masses of leaves in the spindly trees, to the tiled roofs of the houses, to the swaths of farmland, harvested and unharvested, in the hills around the island village – as closely related to the brush strokes used by literati painters to define forms and lend them differentiating textures. For that matter, however, it is also possible to locate similar kinds of daub-like strokes in landscapes by Cézanne, yet here again, it is not necessary to isolate Chikkyō’s source of inspiration to either Post-Impressionism or to Nanga. Indeed, the fact that similar effects were pursued by such culturally divergent painters may have afforded Chikkyō new respect for the Nanga landscape tradition as one brimming with potential for artistic self-expression, in much the same way that Post-Impressionist portraits of women at their

toilette directed Bakusen back to Ukiyo-e, enabling him to see it as a field ripe for creative exploration. There is also contextual evidence that suggests artists and critics viewed Post-Impressionism and Nanga as culturally distinct yet analogous modes of painting in matters of intention as well as style. From around 1909, a critical trend identified by Japanese art historians as characterism (jinkakushugi) took hold and began spreading widely in Japan, promoted by Takamura Kōtarō, Arishima Ikuma, Tanaka Kisaku, Tsuda Seifū, and other scholars, artists and critics returning home after periods of study in Europe.56 Characterism, so named due to its emphasis on celebrating an artist’s highly individualized character as traced in the self-expressive brush strokes or chisel marks of the finished art work, has no single point of origination, however the writings of Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935), a German art historian and critic whose work was well known in Japan by 1910, provided a popular model for a character-based approach to art criticism.57 Meier-Graefe made his reputation by promoting his own personality-based theory (Persönlichkeits-theorie) of modern art, beginning with his multi-volume study Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst of 1904 (translated into English in 1908 as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics). For Meier-Graefe, modern painting, especially Post-Impressionism, was an intrinsically auto-biographical medium. He posited modern painters as heroic figures who possessed great moral strength and lofty, spiritual natures, and that these traits were physically transferred to an artwork in self-expressive brush marks for the sensitive viewer to trace.58 In a very similar way, East Asian painters have long viewed ink landscapes as a vehicle for expressing the personality and lofty character of the artist, and that the experience of studying and truly appreciating a painting was akin to a meeting between two like-minded individuals, the artist and the viewer, a communion possible across both geographical and temporal distance. In short, Chikkyō and other Nihonga painters who were familiar with Nanga painting and its 52

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24 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley, 1882–85. Oil on canvas. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

connoisseurial evaluation were in a sense preconditioned to receive the character-based theories of Meier-Graefe and his Japanese interpreters, and would have been prepared (more so, perhaps, than we are today) to perceive Post-Impressionism and Nanga as analogous. As a boy growing up in rural Okayama prefecture, Chikkyō’s initial training had been in Nanga painting, but he set the literati style aside when he began studying at Seihō’s juku.59 The fact that Chikkyō did not re-embrace Nanga until sometime in 1910, around the time he was first learning about Cézanne through the characterism-informed essays published in Shirakaba, suggests his admiration for Post-Impressionism

may have brought him back to Nanga and its rich potential  creative  self-expression. Southern Country was mentioned in the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun critique of the first Le Masque show, and although the review failed to mark the painting’s twofold references to Nanga and Cézanne, it recognized that Chikkyō had succeeded in realizing Le Masque’s ideal by creating a Nihonga painting that was fully informed by Western modern art theory.60 The second Le Masque exhibition, held from the 17th to 19th of May, 1912, was larger in size and scope than the first. In addition to twenty-one divers works contributed by the group’s members 53

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(including oils, Nihonga paintings, and now drawings), the organizers added several watercolors by Okajima Kazuo (dates unknown), works by ceramics artist Arai Akio (1889–1912), three illustrations by Kitano Tsunetomi, the Osaka-based Nihonga painter known for updating Ukiyo-e themes, and, in what must have been one of the biggest draws of all, twenty-four lithographs by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, of which twelve were originals, and twelve reproductions.61 Chikkyō prepared three Nihonga paintings for this event, while Bakusen continued to expand his repertoire by contributing three drawings in addition to two paintings, one in oils and one in mineral pigments. The last of these, a hanging scroll entitled Winter (Fuyu), was also successfully submitted to the Bunten that autumn along with a screen painting entitled Island Women (discussed in Chapter Three). Winter also marked the first time Bakusen received notice in a foreign publication, after the painting was mentioned and reproduced in the English arts journal The Studio the following year (Figure 25).62 None of these paintings are extant today, but we learn something about them from a review of the show written by Tokumi Ōkokudō, an art writer for the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun reporter and co-founder of the Nameless Society: In Ono Chikkyō’s [contributions] we detect [the influence of] Impressionism in his manner of observing and painting his subjects. We also encounter, if only faintly, the same feeling of composure and dignity present [in modern French painting]. Chikkyō rejoices in his painting subject, and shows a pure and wholesome attitude towards nature, not unlike that of a child… Tsuchida Bakusen’s Winter is probably the most painstakingly created work in the entire gallery. A daikon radish field, an elderly woman, and a cat appear in a decorative, relaxed composition, giving meaning to the old

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expression “stillness in motion.” Experienced critics will always recognize talent when they see it, but this painting appears to be the results of pure diligence rather than raw talent … In Chikkyō’s work, I see a crystal effortlessly formed by nature, [but in Bakusen’s painting]

54

Tsuchida Bakusen, Winter, 1912. Work not extant. Source: The Studio, vol. 59, no. 246 (August, 1913). University of Hawaii at Mānoa Library collection. Photo by author.

beyond chikujōkai: expanding influences and new encounters

dissolved after only two exhibitions. Yet, as short as this phase proved to be, it marks an important transition in Bakusen’s and Chikkyō’s early careers, bookending the end of their student phase and their emergence as fully formed artists in the Kyoto Nihonga stage. Furthermore, the best work they created for the Le Masque exhibitions, Hair in Bakusen’s case, and Southern Country in Chikkyō’s, foreshadowed the two young painters’ future specialization. For the remainder of their careers, Bakusen would become best known for his lifemodeled portraits of women, and Chikkyō for his landscapes, which continued to assert the combined inspiration of literati painting and PostImpressionism.

we encounter of something hand-forged expertly from gold.63

The second Le Masque show proved to be the last, as one by one the group’s core members left Kyoto to explore opportunities in other parts of the country. Kuroda Jūtarō took employment in the design offices of Osaka’s Takashimaya Department Store, and Tanaka Kisaku moved to Tokyo to open one of the first commercial oil painting galleries in the country.64 Ono Chikkyō left for Okayama in May of 1913 to work on his Bunten painting for that year, and did not return until just prior to the Bunten submission deadline in October. In this way, deprived of its active membership, Le Masque

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3 Challenges, Changes, and Evolving Strategies at the Bunten

I

n the five years following the dissolution of the joint Nihonga-Yōga exhibition collective Le Masque, Bakusen produced some of the most adventurous and inventive paintings of his career. Energized by his recent successes at the Bunten, and radicalized to a degree by his interactions with Tanaka Kisaku and other progressive oil painters at Le Masque, the paintings he created for the Bunten exhibition between 1912 and 1916 are surprisingly varied. They demonstrate Bakusen’s engagement in some of the most important issues of the day, particularly with regard to pushing against the perceived limits of Nihonga’s mineral pigments. In 1912, reacting to increasing infighting among the judges of the Bunten’s Nihonga section, the Ministry of Education decided to divide this jury into two distinct bodies, the Kyūha-inclined First Section (Ikka) and a Shinpa-inflected Second Section (Nika). As many critics and artists projected, this split had the effect of encouraging conservative artists to retreat even deeper into orthodoxy, and provoking more radical experimentation from progressive artists. Bakusen rose to this opportunity by producing some of his most innovative works yet, including Abalone Divers (Figure 34) of 1913, which proved almost too radical even for the

ostensibly progressive Second Section. The segregation of the Nihonga sections persisted for just two years, after which the juries were reunited, and the number of seated judges reduced. This reshuffling of the Nihonga jury in 1914, which was in some ways undertaken as a political purge, had even more immense consequences, for it led to the reactionary creation of the Inten, the first non-governmental juried art exhibition to seriously challenge the Bunten’s art-world hegemony, and a momentous precedent to the Kokuten. An important issue in which Bakusen was immersed at this time was Nihonga’s so-called ganryō mondai or “pigment problem,” an expression that first came into currency in the early 1910s by artists and critics who questioned Nihonga potential to function as a truly modernist painting media, as touched upon in this book's Introduction. At issue was the fact that mineral pigments, unlike oil paints, were not viscous, and did not preserve the same self-expressive traces – the lifts, folds and peaks – produced by the manipulation of the artist’s brush or palette knife. These traces were deemed to be a particularly important feature of Post-Impressionist painting, at least according to Meier-Graefe’s personality theory, which, we recall, argued that the artist’s own rarified personality lay preserved in those marks for the

Tsuchida Bakusen, Abalone Divers, 1913, detail of fig. 34.

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viewer to discover, thus creating the potential for an emotional exchange. This, as we will see, was at the heart of Bakusen’s strategy for his submission to the 1913 Bunten, the controversial Abalone Divers. Bakusen achieved many successes at the Bunten between 1912 and 1916, and yet in these same years, he grew increasingly ambivalent toward the national salon. It was also in this period that he underwent the first of several crises of confidence regarding his ability to produce art works that met both the Bunten’s and his own measure of excellence. In a letter written in 1916 to his patron and friend Nomura Itsushi (1881–1963), he seems to suggests that to struggle for one’s art was in effect to undertake a kind of moral trial requiring a mustering of the artist’s rarified character in order to complete a successful painting. What, then, if an artist is unable to paint to his own satisfaction?

government-appointed judges to pass over the submissions of better artists as an ethical failing (a greater crime, perhaps, than their failure of artistic discernment). Accordingly, his letters from this period show Bakusen’s reactions to the Bunten over the  years shift from disappointment to dudgeon and high moral outrage, and finally to utter disillusionment, pushing him closer with each passing exhibition to that final drastic, idealistic step: renouncing the national salon in the name of artistic freedom.

the division of bunten nihonga section and the founding of the inten By the time of the fifth Bunten’s closing in 1911, grave concerns had arisen among old guardsmen on the Nihonga jury who viewed with alarm the rising profile of progressive artists at the government-sponsored salon and who believed desperate measures were required. Their long-held concern was that the national salon was slowly but surely being transformed into a showcase for Shinpa-style artists selected by advocate judges at the expense of traditionalist painters. While friction of this sort was present to a lesser degree since the time of the Bunten’s founding, it had been greatly exacerbated two years earlier when a painting by Hishida Shunsō (1874–1911) entitled Fallen Leaves (Figure 26) was selected for a Bunten prize over the strong objections of several conservative judges. To make matters worse, Shunsō was made a Bunten judge the following year, an appointment that further weakened the panel’s conservative advocacy and resulted in a virtual clean sweep of awards by progressive painters that year.2 In 1911, tension and discord escalated to a point where a complete breakdown seemed imminent, as illustrated by an anecdote conveyed to Ono Chikkyō by his former teacher and seated Bunten judge Takeuchi Seihō regarding an argument over the selection of a particular submission, probably Chikkyō’s own. According to Seihō, Takashima Hokkai (1850– 1931), a conservative judge affiliated with the

After all, beauty can only arise out of a person who has a beautiful personality. Only someone whose character is full of love can produce a work of art that is also full of love. Only a person with a pious attitude towards nature can produce a work in which we see real nature present. I wonder why I have become so vain. I wonder if I can throw off my mask, and if I can become a natural person. This is causing me to suffer terribly… I worry that I will not able to develop into a moral person, like my teacher Seihō, and this is a source of great pain.1

In the end, as we will see, Bakusen succeeded in 1916 by producing an award-winning Bunten submission, a satisfactory result that did much to help him recover his aplomb. But the lingering belief that a fine painting was as much the product of an artist’s lofty character as it was of his or her creativity and technical skill helps account for his increasing dissatisfaction with the governmentsponsored salon, despite his steady rate of successful submissions during the 1910s. Simply stated, Bakusen grew increasingly unhappy, and eventually thoroughly dissatisfied, with the quality of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls alongside his own, and deemed the proclivity of the 58

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26 Hishida Shunsō, Fallen Leaves, 1909. Color on silk; pair of six-panel folding screens. Eisei Bunko Museum, Tokyo.

juried exhibition were capable of such petulant behavior, Seihō’s anecdote also serves to illustrate how bitterly the progressive and conservative factions fought and resisted each other in this highly contested arena. In the wake of this especially contentious judging session in 1911, Hokkai was joined by Mochizuki Kinpō (1846–1915), Sakuma Tetsuen (1850– 1922), and Mashizu Junnan (1851–1916), all likeminded conservatives and fellow members of the Japan Art Association, in authoring a statement to the press in which they denounced “the monstrous

powerful Imperial Household-sponsored Japan Art Association (Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai), refused to admit the work despite the strong support it received from Seihō and other progressive judges. “In response,” Seihō explained, “I sat down on the floor right in front of the painting, dressed in my formal hakama and all, and refused to budge until the work was accepted.”3 Seihō’s stratagem must have worked, and Chikkyō’s submission, a work entitled Harbor (Minato), was among those on display at that year’s  Bunten.4 As surprising as it may be to learn that the judges of Japan’s most prestigious 59

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experimental Shinpa works that consistently earn top prizes… while refined Kyūha works, based upon the pure and legitimate rules of painting, face intense discrimination.” They also announced their resignation from the Bunten’s Nihonga jury to protest its shameless liberal bias, which they predicted would inexorably lead to “the collapse and ruination of Nihonga.”5 Officials from the Ministry of Education attempted to mediate the dispute but ultimately concluded the factional rift was irreparable, and rather than risk the departure of such esteemed artists (especially those connected with offices of the Imperial Household), the Ministry decided to restructure the Nihonga jury in order to separate the mutual antagonists. As a result, the Bunten’s Nihonga jury was divided into two distinct panels, the First Section (Dai ikka), consisting of judges associated with the Kyūha faction, and the Second Section (Dai nika), populated with panelists who demonstrate Shinpa sympathies. Artists were invited to submit to Section One, Section Two, or to both, up to a maximum of three paintings in total, with artists eligible for one award per section.6 This solution apparently satisfied Hokkai and company, who returned to the Bunten as prominent judges of the First Section, yet when the new scheme was announced, the Ministry of Education was wary of creating the impression that this restructuring, which had required amending the exhibition’s charter, had been undertaken for the  sake of political expediency. In June, Bunten chairman Fukuhara Ryōjirō (1868–1932) claimed that the Ministry’s decision to create two distinct Nihonga juries had nothing to do with appeasing the conservative faction; rather, it had been concluded that twenty-four judges were simply too many for the jury to operate efficiently. “For this reason,” he continued, “we decided to split the jury into two groups, and then publish the names of the judges populating each of the two juries. This way, artists are allowed to submit to the judges of their choice… they can choose to enter one section or the other, or even both, they have complete freedom to choose.”7

Fukuhara’s explanation rang false, however, for a short study of the First and Second Section jury rosters showed the judges had been grouped precisely along progressive and conservative factional lines. Many questioned the wisdom of this new evaluation scheme, including the editors of the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, who noted that such as scheme would discourage independent thinking, since it basically forced artists to define themselves strictly along conservative or progressive lines. Worse still, they predicted it would encourage Kyūha painters to become even more stodgy and unadventurous, and motivate Shinpa painters to try their hands at even wilder, rasher, and more frivolous experimentation to emphasize their progressive bone fides. “The government desires harmony,” the newspaper complained, “yet as a result [of this scheme], they end up promoting the worst aspects of academism.”8 When the 1912 Bunten opened in autumn, the two-section jury system proved to be as ill advised as critics predicted, especially for the conservative faction. According to one reviewer, the general impression of the First Section galleries was largely one of dull homogeneity, for although most of the paintings demonstrated unparalleled technique, they featured conventional, even trite themes and subjects rendered in predictable orthodox styles. In stark contrast, the Second Section galleries were full of paintings that, if at times technically flawed, showed a wide variety of styles and subjects illustrated with rich colors in dynamic compositions. One reviewer remarked that these differences highlighted how deeply out of touch the First Section judges really were, “for while they talk about protecting Japan’s cultural heritage, in fact they battle to conserve something that has already fallen into ruins.” Rather than encouraging the development of Japanese painting, he argued, “they simply wish to preserve what has come down to them, as if it were an old building of special historical significance.”9 Matsumoto Matatarō (1865–1943), director of the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting and himself a member of the Second Section jury, also questioned whether splitting the 60

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Bunten’s Nihonga jury had not in fact further undermined the already weakened position of the conservative faction:

intensified and he first contemplated the formation of an anti-Bunten exhibition collective, he named the Nika Society as a potential guiding model. Matsumoto Matatarō’s predictions proved accurate, for the restructuring of the Bunten’s Nihonga section proved to be far more problematic and divisive than beneficial, and in 1914 the Ministry of Education restored the Bunten’s split Nihonga sections to their former unified state. Yet although the restructuring was deemed a failure overall, government officials had marked how comparatively smoothly each jury had operated with half as many judges, and decided to make the size reduction of the selection jury permanent. The first appointees to go were the critics, writers, academics, the government officials, in short all the nonartist judges whose dismissal was widely accepted as a regrettable but necessary measure. But when it became known that the Ministry had also identified several conservative painters for removal, protests of bias and injustice once again sounded, resulting in the additional removal of two progressive painters to restore the balance. One of these was Konoshima Ōkoku (1877–1938), a young artist from Kyoto who, having been named a judge only the previous year, made for an uncontroversial removal. The other, however, was Yokoyama Taikan (1868– 1958), one of Tokyo’s most prominent Nihonga painters and a protégé of Okakura Tenshin. Okakura performed many roles during his a thirtyodd years at the center of the Tokyo art world, including that of critic, art historian, educator, museum director and government official. When Okakura died the previous year, he left behind many devotees but also several rivals and enemies, some of whom now sat on the Bunten jury, and saw the current crisis as a chance to oust one of Okakura’s most important disciples and diminish his enduring influence. Yet they may have underestimated how serious the backlash would prove to be, for in response to Taikan’s ouster, Shimomura Kanzan (1973–1930), another Okakura follower, resigned from the Bunten jury in solidarity, and many of Taikan’s own followers and supporters, including

For some time now, the mainstream of Nihonga has been directed by progressive artists, who are now at liberty to continue in much the same way as prior to the restructuring. But I wonder about the First Section. The artists there say their works preserve those traditions found in old paintings, but in practice their results are not significantly different from copies made of antique works. Since their paintings offer no new ideas or technical innovations, viewers would fare better to study original antique works in museums and temples, instead their rehashes… Art is a reflection of the culture of its era; there is no life in art that is cut off from its own time… It is my belief the two-jury system will prove to be only a short-lived consolation to First Section judges and their friends.10

There were other unforeseen repercussions following the decision to partition the Bunten’s Nihonga section, for it triggered demands for a similar separation of the Oil Painting section. Early in 1912, a group of disgruntled young Yōga artists wrote an open letter to the Ministry of Education in which they pressed the observation that the Bunten no longer led the way in the development of Japanese oil painting as it once did. On the contrary, they argued, for years it had trailed sluggishly behind the independent efforts of progressive artists who were perennially locked out of the Bunten by the Yōga section’s overwhelmingly conservative body of judges. Their proposal called for a restructuring of the Oil Painting section similar to that approved for the Nihonga section in the previous year; “after all,” they argued, “no one can argue that Yōga artists require less freedom than Nihonga painters.”11 When the Ministry of Education rejected their formal proposal, they determined to create a “second section” of their own, thus in 1913 the Nikakai (“Second Section Society”) was born.12 Their bold resolve was an inspiration to many of their artist peers, and in a few years time, as we will see, when Bakusen’s own discontent with the Bunten 61

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Yasuda Yukihiko (1884–1978), Imamura Shiko (1880–1916), and several other rising stars in the Tokyo art world, announced their intentions to permanently boycott the Bunten to protest their mentor's dismissal. Furthermore, since their teacher’s death Taikan and Kanzan had been discussing the possibility of reestablishing the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin), an art school founded by Okakura that was active from 1898 until Okakura’s death in 1913. With Taikan’s dismissal from the Bunten jury serving as catalyst, he and Kanzan rededicated themselves to this endeavor, and in September 1914 they announced the establishment of the Reorganized Japan Art Institute (Saiko Nihon Bijutsuin). Their statement describes their idealistic motivations as follows:

Mitsukoshi Department Store in just one month’s time, and invited all like-minded individuals to submit paintings for evaluation and possible inclusion in the landmark event. The timing of this exhibition seems abrupt, but its organizers did not expect artists to create new paintings in the short span of four weeks; instead, their aim was to lure submissions away from the Bunten, and so they intentionally chose dates that overlapped with those of the national salon. This forced artists to choose between the two venues, and reinforced the character of the Japan Art Institute’s exhibition, known as the Inten,14 as unambiguously “anti-Bunten.” The Nika Society pursued the same scheduling strategy that year, and thus it was that in 1914 the Bunten suddenly faced serious challenges from two independent painting groups, one Nihonga and one Yōga, that shared similar anti-establishment agendas.

The realm of art is a realm of freedom, with no restrictions and no artificial standards. As we soar through this

lure of the exotic: island women (1912) and abalone divers (1913)

realm, our art is our own: it is not the art of bureaucrats, it is not the art of the socially privileged and powerful, and it is not art produced by copying one’s teacher. It is with this view in mind that we undertake to reestablish the Japan Art Institute, to which end we will apply all of

In mid-1912, Bakusen found himself free of institutional affiliations for the first time in his young career. He had graduated from the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting, and his association with the defunct Le Masque had ended, but instead of finding a new group of associates and reengaging in collective activity, Bakusen chose instead to focus his attention entirely on his next Bunten submission. In early July he set off search of a suitable theme for Hachijōjima, one of the Seven Isles of Izu (Izu Shichitō) that stretch south and east from the Izu Peninsula towards the Philippine Sea. At 290 kilometers from Yokohama by sail, Hachijōjima was the furthest and most remote of the Izu islands, and was accessible to travelers only by a monthly mail boat. Bakusen was not the only artist attracted to this distant and isolated island; other painters were making the same trip around this time, including Bakusen’s fellow Le Masque members Kuroda Jūtarō, Tanaka Zennosuke and Tanaka Kisaku, who traveled to Hachijōjima in the previous summer.15

our strength in order to create new opportunities for the development of Japanese art. In short, we refuse to create worthless copies of gourd paintings simply to curry favor… The new Japan is weary of “old art,” which conservatively and stubbornly sticks to outmoded ways. Everything under the sun undergoes renewal, and in order for art to develop and make progress, it, too, must stop clinging to archaic values.13

The announcement is part manifesto, part diatribe  against Taikan’s rivals on the Bunten jury, and against conservatism in general. Taikan and company’s refusal to make “copies of gourd paintings,” for example, was a dismissal of artists who uncritically perpetuated the styles of their teachers, a metaphor on the fact that the gourd was a standard subject featured in remedial painting method books and commonly used for student copy exercises. Taikan and his associates announced the Institute’s inaugural exhibition would be held at 62

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journal, over seven issues in 1911 and 1912.18 With so much active discussion of Gauguin in Japan at this time, Uchiyama concludes, it is not difficult to imagine how large he must have loomed in the minds of Bakusen and his friends in Le Masque, who may have viewed semi-tropical Hachijōjima, the furthest and most isolated of the seven islands of Izu, as Japan’s own Tahiti.19 Ikeda Shinobu postulates that another possible cause for this rise of interest among artists in the Izu islands, and Hachijōjima in particular, may be found in the widespread popularity of ethnographic  journals like Fūzoku Gahō (“Illustrated Journal of Manners and Customs”) in the late Meiji and early Taishō years. These magazines, Ikeda explains, may  have helped Bakusen and other painters select places and subjects of interest by introducing the lifestyles and customs of Japan’s remoter regions. With regard to Bakusen’s trip, Ikeda notes that Hachijōjima was the subject  of an essay published in the March 1909 issue  of Fūzoku Gahō, which included descriptions  and illustrations of the culture and lifestyle of the island’s inhabitants (Figure 27), and suggests that this essay may have stimulated Bakusen and  his fellow painters to explore this place as a

What were the reasons behind the unlikely popularity of Hachijōjima as a destination of choice among Japanese painters? After all, other islands in the Izu chain were famed for their natural beauty, whereas Hachijōjima was better known as the site of an Edo-period penal island. Uchiyama Takeo has suggested that the appeal of this small semi-tropical island, so distant and isolated from the mainland of Japan, was tied to an explosion of interest in Japan in Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), particularly in his Tahiti period. Gauguin was a ubiquitous presence in studies of modern European art authored in Japan from around 1910, when Takamura Kōtarō published a Japanese translation of German critic Julius MeierGraefe’s biography of the French Post Impressionist and Symbolist painter in the journal Waseda Bungaku, the same year that an essay by Ueda Bin (1874–1916) on the life and art of Gauguin appeared in Kyoto arts journal Bi in April 1910.16 Nakai Sōtarō’s and Tanaka Kisaku’s lectures to the Nameless Society in 1910 and 1911, as summarized in the pages of Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, also made frequent mention of Gauguin and his art,17 and the journal Shirakaba published a serialized Japanese translation of Noa Noa, Gauguin’s Tahitian

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“Reports of Interest from Local Regions: Hachijōjima.” Image in the pubic domain. Source: Fūzoku Gahō, March 1909. University of Hawaii at Mānoa Library collection. Photo by author.

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branches of a splendid fig tree and combing her hair,” observed on the island of Iejima.22 From this we can determine that one of Bakusen’s unstated objectives was to make a survey of local women inhabitants the Izu islands, possibly with the intention of revisiting the thematic of “rural genre painting” he had explored so successfully in earlier works like Punishment and Tax Day. Bakusen’s trip lasted nearly three weeks longer than he had intended, after his trip home was delayed by the slow and unreliable progress of his mail boat transport. His letters to Nomura written  after his return describe Bakusen working furiously to make up for the lost time, with frequent  anxious references to the Bunten’s autumn submission deadline.23 The resulting work was Island Women (Shima no onna, Figure 28), his largest painting to date, featuring a simple yet elegant composition spanning over a pair of two-panel screens, a composite visual record of the female subjects he encountered during his trip to Hachijōjima. These figures are set in a triangular arrangement against an ochre-toned plaster wall; on the left side stand two women pounding grain in a large mortar,

surrogate for Gauguin’s idealized South Pacific paradise.20 During his sojourn, Bakusen wrote several letters and postcards to a new patron named Nomura Kanjūrō of Ichinomiya in modern Aichi prefecture. Nomura was a merchant of imported Western textiles, and published poetry and composed songs as Nomura Itsushi, the name by which he is most widely remembered today. Sometime in 1911 Nomura came across one of Bakusen’s paintings and wrote to him regarding a potential commission, resulting in a meeting between the two men in early 1912, which proved to be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.21 During the trip, Bakusen corresponded frequently with Nomura (who may have underwritten the journey), and his letters describe the sights encountered as the mail boat sailed from island to island on its the way southeast, and after Bakusen disembarked at Hachijōjima, they relay his impressions of the island’s residents and scenery. His letters also include detailed summaries of the sketches he generated on the journey, many of which featured female subjects, including one of “a buxom female, nude to the waist, sitting under the

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Tsuchida Bakusen, Island Women, 1912. Color on silk; pair of two-panel folding screens. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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behind whom Bakusen places a girl carrying a water bucket and approaching a cistern, rendered in a manner reminiscent of the tableau included in the aforementioned Fūzoku Gahō essay, the text of which describes the sight of young women porting water as ubiquitous on the island.24 On the right, a half-nude woman squats and combs her hair, closely reproducing the sketch of the Iejima woman Bakusen mentioned in his missive to Nomura, the only variation being the type of tree, for he substitutes the green-leafed limbs of a loquat for the original fig. The branching trunk of the loquat tree serves as the painting’s central axis, its green umbrella canopy tying together the disparate elements of the composition, while the gaps in the branches and leaves work to frame and isolate the female subjects into distinct and separate groups. In rendering the women’s forms, Bakusen used long, gently modulated calligraphic lines, similar to those used in Hair of the previous year. Also similar to his diploma painting is the manner in which the garments of the figures in Island Women hang naturalistically to reveal the shape of the bodies beneath – a knee against a skirt, or a breast against a blouse –accomplished by the seemingly effortless

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application of single long and elegant ink strokes. Bakusen’s preparatory mock-up (shita-e), however, reveals that he toiled over the composition, trying various groupings and affixing layer after layer of fresh paper as his amassed trial lines became increasingly unintelligible (Figure 29). In the final work, however, Island Women depends much less on ink outlines than any of his previous compositions to define forms, relying instead on large swaths of unmodulated mineral pigments, so much so that Bakusen himself described Island Women as “a painting created almost entirely from color.”25 Bakusen’s growing interest in inventive pigment implementation is also seen in the aged and weathered appearance of the wall, which Bakusen achieved through an intentionally irregular application of the ocher pigment, thick in some areas, thin or even missing in others, to create a rustic, weather-beaten look. This was one of Bakusen’s first attempts to utilize ganryō in an unorthodox fashion in order to maximize Nihonga’s expressive potential. Island Women was well received by the Bunten judges, who selected it with Honorable Mention (Hōjō), and after the close of the exhibition, it was selected for purchase by the

Tsuchida Bakusen, compositional mock-up for Island Women, 1912. Ink, color on paper; pair of two-panel folding screens. Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Nagaoka.

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forced to wait two weeks for the return boat trip.30 Upon their arrival back in Yokohama, Tanaka, Hamada and Hakō boarded a train and returned to Kansai, while Bakusen boarded another vessel, this one headed for the largest of the Izu islands, Izu Ōshima, in search of his elusive camellias, but there, too, he had no luck in finding them. He returned to Kyoto in early March, no further along on his Bunten painting than he had been prior to his departure in January.31 In late April he set out once more in search of camellias, this time heading for the seaside village of Nakiri, known today as Daiō and located on the tip of the Shima peninsula in Mie prefecture. By 1913 Nakiri was gaining fame among Yōga artists looking for dynamic landscapes, and it may have been former Le Masque member Arai Kinya who recommended the location to Bakusen for its distinctive and picturesque features, including weathered wooden houses perched on its rocky red hillsides, unusual cut-stone buttressed walkways that meandered across the face of its high sea cliffs, and the deep cobalt blue color of the ocean off its shores.32 Soon after his arrival in Nakiri, Bakusen sent a postcard to Nomura offering his impressions of the locale, describing “an ocean colored a shockingly deep shade of blue,” and relating how startled he was in the evening to see the local fishermen “bring all sorts of monstrous-looking things out of their boats onto the beach, such as hoary old sea turtles and sharks as long as ten feet.” Perhaps the most intriguing sight of all was Nakiri’s population of working women abalone divers, ama in Japanese, who Bakusen could espy as he surveyed the blue watery expanse of the bay, their heads bobbing amidst the waves.33 Bakusen’s goal in traveling there, however, was not Nakiri’s dramatic scenery, nor its local inhabitants, but its camellia blossoms, and much to his satisfaction, despite the lateness of the season in April, there he found them. He set to work studying and sketching the flowers, but soon began experiencing what at first appeared to be symptoms of a light cold. Over the next three days his condition rapidly worsened,

Japanese Ministry of Culture, one of the very first acquisitions for a new museum for contemporary Japanese artworks known today as the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan). Having achieved success with one Izu islandthemed painting, Bakusen decided to follow up with another, and made plans to return to Hachijōjima and its neighboring isles the following winter. His plan was to prepare a double-paneled, spring-and-autumn-themed screen, one side of which would feature a room interior with a garden view of blossoming camellias against a mountain background.26 The slightly warmer clime meant that camellias bloomed in the Izu islands as early as January, thus by traveling to Hachijōjima, he would be able to create his necessary preparatory shasei sketches a full six months earlier than he had done the previous year, allowing him plenty of time to finish his painting by the Bunten’s October submission deadline. Forethought is not foresight, however, and Bakusen’s plans began to unravel even before he left Kyoto. The first sign that things might not go as he planned came in early January of 1913,  when his travel partner, an unnamed friend from Tokyo (possibly Tanaka Kisaku of the defunct Le Masque, who had moved there the previous year), became sick, necessitating a delay in departure.27 Rather than remain idle, Bakusen spent most of  January on a sketching tour of Uji and Nara, where he studied antique sculptures, paintings and architecture at Byōdōin, Hōryūji and Tōdaiji, and other temples.28 By the end of the month, he had  gathered new travel companions for the trip to  Hachijōjima, including another former Le Masque colleague, Tanaka Zennosuke, and two new acquaintances, Hamada Shigemitsu (1886– 1947), an oil painter and member of a circle of artists associated with the journal Shirakaba,29 and Irie Hakō (1887–1948), a Nihonga painter and member of Bakusen’s graduating class of the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting. But when the company arrived on Hachijōjima, Bakusen discovered he had missed the island’s short camellia season, and was 66

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forcing his immediate return to Kyoto, where he was hospitalized and diagnosed with sinus empyema, an advanced purulent nasal abscess that, if untreated, can lead to such serious complications as blindness or even death. Surgery was performed and his infection treated, but in the aftermath Bakusen developed a high fever that incapacitated him for several more weeks. His recovery took almost the entire month of May, costing him yet another month of progress on his Bunten painting.34 In early June, his health fully restored, Bakusen took to the road again, traveling first to Matsumoto, an Edo-period castle town, and then to Arima, a hot spring resort town in southeast Hyōgo prefecture, both known for the beauty of their camellia flowers. But by that time the season had passed, and recent heavy rains had stripped away any late-blooming flowers that might have lingered.35 Finally, after half a year of effort, travel and significant expense, Bakusen was finally forced to abandon his plan for a camelliathemed painting. With only four months to go until the Bunten submission deadline and still without a viable theme, Bakusen’s thoughts returned to his brief stay in Nakiri, and to the abalone divers who had caught his attention during his previous visit there. He wrote a letter to his patron Nomura describing a new idea for a composition:

composition. “Despite [Seihō’s warning],” Bakusen wrote to Nomura, “I have decided to go ahead with my plan, fully understanding the problems that might arise as a result.”37 Bakusen does not explain the exact nature of Seihō’s objections, and it is possible he simply felt the subject of abalone divers was too similar to that featured in the previous year’s Island Women. It is also possible that Seihō recalled the Bunten exhibition of 1908, when Chigusa Sōun (1873–1944), another former student, submitted a problematic ama-themed painting that was ultimately rejected by the judges that year. Sōun’s Abalone Divers (1908) (Figure 30) was not controversial for the artist’s choice of subject, but for his mode of painterly execution of the women divers, whose bodies he rendered mimicking the three-dimensional modeling techniques used by oil painters to achieves a sensual roundness of form. Some felt that Sōun’s experiments with pigment application were so far removed from the aesthetic qualities normally associated with traditional Japanese painting, particularly flatness, patternization, and line-dominated visual construction, that the resulting painting could no longer be considered Nihonga. Considering Bakusen’s close rapport with Yōga artists, his interest in French Post Impressionist painting, and his deepening attentiveness to Nihonga’s “pigment problem” (the first glimpse of which can be seen in the previous year’s Island Women), Seihō may have had a premonition, if not a warning, that Bakusen was planning something even more radical for his own portrayal of Nakiri’s abalone divers. Bakusen returned to Nakiri in mid June and stayed into early July, and for part of that time he was joined by Kobayashi Wasaku (1888–1974), a fellow graduate of the Kyoto Specialized School for  Painting.38 Kobayashi later spoke about their visit, and recalled the fervent pace at which Bakusen worked to prepare his composition, producing hundreds of sketches and color studies in the ten or so days they spent together.39 His breakneck pace, prompted, no doubt, by the fast-approaching Bunten submission deadline, was confirmed by Bakusen himself in his letters to Nomura; for

The painting will have four or five women stretched in a snaking line in the foreground. I will use a very soft outline to paint these figures resting in the sand. Behind them a fisherman – huge, virtually a giant – rises out of his boat. In the background a pure red sun shines and reflects off rocks jutting into the deep blue sea, and two fishermen pull a small boat out of the waves onto the beach.36

Before returning to Nakiri to create his preparatory drawings, he took the step of consulting Takeuchi Seihō, his former teacher and current Bunten judge. Seihō strongly cautioned him against the scheme, arguing it was too risky, and urged him to return to his earlier plans for a spring-and-autumn 67

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Chigusa Sōun, Abalone Divers, 1908. Color on silk; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

The girls teased the painters, and laughingly invited them to join the host relaxing in the sand. Kobayashi remembered how eagerly Bakusen had set off to follow them down to the beach, only to be halted by the proprietor of their inn, who was intent on protecting the young women’s virtue.41 Despite the suspicious nature of their innkeeper, Bakusen managed to secure the modeling services  of three divers, who agreed to come on a daily basis to the inn to pose for his sketches (Figure 31).42 Bakusen’s interactions with these women,

example, on one day Bakusen reported the production of over forty sketches in that morning, followed by an oil painting study that was completed by evening time.40 Kobayashi also offered several humorous anecdotes of the sojourn, most of which involved their interactions with the women divers themselves. The youngest of the ama-in-training, still in their early teens, were in the habit of gathering together on the beach to rest and nap, and Kobayashi recalled one occasion when they met several of the trainees on their way to this gathering place. 68

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Tsuchida Bakusen, sketches, 1913. Ink on paper. Sado History Museum. Photo by author.

becoming true of Matisse, starting in January of that year when a special issue of Shirakaba dedicated to the French artist appeared. Along with a translation of an essay by Matisse supplied by Takamura Kōtarō,46 the issue included several monochrome illustration plates, marking one of the very first times images of Matisse’s artworks were made available to a Japanese audience. Included in this issue was a photo-reproduction of a bronze bas relief female nude from around 1908 (Figure 32) and a painting entitled La coiffure (given the title La toilette in the journal; Figure 33) from 1907 that features flat, unblended application of color and taut outlines to define figures, both of which may have provided Bakusen with inspiration for the fleshy, semi-nude figures featured in Abalone Divers. While Bakusen would not have gleaned a clear idea regarding precise color tones from these monochrome image, Matisse’s and the Fauvists’ controversial assertion of raw color was discussed in detail by Takamura and Yanagi’s in their Shirakaba essay, as was their interest in Japanese woodblock prints, for Fauvism, like many modernist style movements in the West, developed partially in response to nineteenth century Japonisme. Learning of Matisse’s fascination with Ukiyo-e may have

however, had other unexpected consequences, for according to Kobayashi, up to that point Bakusen had had little experience hiring models on his own, and as a result he unknowingly paid them significantly more than the customary rate. His largesse had the unintended effect of disrupting the informal economy between Nakiri residents and visiting artists, as the divers began demanding the higher fees offered by Bakusen, and Kobayashi recalled with humor how several of the other painters working in Nakiri at that time resented Bakusen and his generosity.43 During the many conversations Kobayashi shared with Bakusen during their Nakiri sojourn, he recalled the subject to which they returned most often was Western modernist art, particularly the painting of the Post Impressionists. Kobayashi recalled that Bakusen spoke most frequently about two French painters: Gauguin, to whose paintings of Tahitian women Bakusen believed Nakiri’s ama divers were comparable;44 and Henri Matisse (1869–1954).45 We have already accounted for Gauguin’s prominence in Japanese discussions of modern Western art, thanks to the appearance of several essays on Gauguin in leading domestic art  and literary journals. By 1913, the same was 69

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The Back I (1908-09) by Henri Matisse as reproduced in Shirakaba, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1913). University of Hawaii at Mānoa Library collection. Photo by author.

La coiffure (1907) by Henri Matisse as reproduced in Shirakaba, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1913). University of Hawaii at Mānoa Library collection. Photo by author.

markedly from the scheme he initially outlined in his earlier correspondence. Gone is the colossal  fisherman, as are the two other male figures hauling their vessel to shore, meanwhile Bakusen doubled the number of women from four or five to ten. Other aspects of the composition remain unchanged, particularly the left panel, which features the same snaking line of female bodies reclining in the sand, as previously described in correspondence. Bakusen also confided his growing satisfaction and confidence in the work as the results unfolded, especially in terms of his handling of color, the aspect he predicted would provoke the strongest reaction on the part of the Bunten judges.49 Yet Bakusen’s letters offer no hint of how truly radical his handling of pigments would prove to be.

motivated Bakusen to revive his own interest in Utamaro, Sharaku and other Edo-period print designers, the earliest expression of which, we have noted, are found in Hair and the lost Woman of Pleasure, both of 1911.47 Bakusen finished his Nakiri-based field preparations for Abalone Divers in July, and returned to Kyoto with a completed compositional scheme in hand, but with just three months left before the Bunten’s submission deadline in October. He kept his patron apprised of his progress as he rushed to complete the painting in time,48 and, perhaps due to time constraints, the finished work departed 70

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True to Seihō’s prediction, the finished Abalone Divers (Figure 34) provoked heated discussion on the selection panel, so much so that Matsumoto Matatarō, then director of the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting as well as Bunten jurist, described the painting’s final selection as “nothing short of miraculous.” “Only the vigorous argument of several prominent judges saved the work from being rejected outright,” he explained to Bakusen, despite the fact that Bakusen had submitted the painting to the ostensibly progressive Second Section jury.50 Critical responses to Abalone Divers were also largely negative, particularly with regard to the loosely rendered, even rubbery appearance of the ama divers, a quality caricatured in a satirical cartoon published in the newspaper Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, which listed Bakusen’s painting among those pictures at the Bunten it drolly described as “likely to raise comment” (Figure 35). While several critics questioned Bakusen’s design decisions with regard to his ama figures, few critics made mention of the most extraordinary aspect of Abalone Divers, namely, his unusual handling of mineral pigments, which was so unorthodox it may have baffled the majority of reviewers into silence. When viewers encounter this work and notice its heavily scarred surface, they might conclude that, whether through neglect, mistreatment or accident, the painting has suffered significant pigment deterioration since its debut a century ago. Yet when we compare the work today with the photograph of Abalone Divers included in the 1913 Bunten catalogue, we find the images are remarkably consistent (Figure 36), and include the same patterns of abrasion. In short, the scratches and scrapes on the painting’s surface were intentional, something that represents an empirical breakthrough of sorts, since the East Asian painting tradition holds the application of ink and of pigment as deliberate and immutable acts. Only one review, published in the journal Bijutsu Shinpō, recognized the greater import of Bakusen’s scraping exercise.51 The author of this essay relates how the idea to abrade the surface of a painting occurred to Bakusen during his visit to Hōryūji

in Nara early that year, when he had the chance to examine the famous eight-century murals adorning the main image hall of the temple (Figure 37). In the millennium since their creation, the murals had experienced significant surface erosion, as a matter of course, but rather than try to look beyond this damage and imagine the paintings in a pristine state, Bakusen admired the deteriorated areas of the murals on their own terms, and was struck by the interesting aesthetic effects that were the direct result of the weathering process. Months later, with a mind to recreate the timeworn appearance of the ancient Buddhist mural, Bakusen took up palette knife and scraped away large areas of pigment on Abalone Divers, producing an uneven dry texture eminently suitable for rendering the grainy, gritty texture of a sandy dune.52 The fact that Bakusen produced the scrapes with a palette knife suggests he may also have been trying to find something equivalent to the gestural impasto textural effects, the lifts and minute curls, that come from using this tool to spread thick oil paints on the surface of a canvas. This possibility is reinforced by oil painter Satomi Katsuzō (1895–1981), who noted that his friend Bakusen’s manipulation of mineral pigments in the early 1910s was in fact similar to his own handling of oil paints at that time, and describes Bakusen’s experiments from that decade as “a search for matière (machiēru),” the very materiality of ganryō mineral pigments.53 Considering the narrow margin by which Abalone Divers was accepted for exhibition by the Nihonga Second Section jury, how did Bakusen feel his painting compared with the other Nihonga paintings included in the Bunten that year, especially those selected for awards? We can read Bakusen’s own assessment of the competition in a letter he wrote to Nomura in the aftermath of the exhibition’s opening, which occurred in the midst of a heavy rainstorm: After dashing out of the rain and into the gallery, I visited my painting and made a few corrections to its placement. I then toured the works on display. What a worthless, boring selection. I thought Chikkyō’s

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Tsuchida Bakusen, Abalone Divers, 1913. Color on silk; pair of six-panel folding screens. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

progressive judges alike, the harvest of which was the disappointing selection of paintings on display in the both the First and Second Section galleries.

painting and my own were the best in the exhibition. There was a Nanga work by Yamada Kaidō that was also good. There is nothing left to do but open an anti-Bunten show next year. All the other paintings were terribly

balancing boldness and restraint: scattering blossoms (1914) and women of ōhara (1915)

uninteresting and lifeless, and did not even deserve a glance… It is surprising to think that the judges [responsible for choosing these] would also deign to select our own works.54

As an aside, it is interesting to note that the only other painting Bakusen admired at the 1913 Bunten besides his own and that contributed by his good friend Chikkyō was a Nanga painting by Kyūha-affiliated Yamada Kaidō (1870–1924) selected for  inclusion in the First Section galleries; Bakusen, it seems, was willing to acknowledge artistic quality wherever he encountered it, irrespective of factional affiliations or arbitrary labels. By singling out Kaidō’s work as the sole praise-worthy painting in the First Section, he was in effect identifying an issue that went completely unaddressed by the Ministry of Education’s decision to split the Bunten’s Nihonga section in two: to wit, the lack of vision and courage on the part of conservative and

Bakusen’s perception of the Bunten as increasingly lackluster and uninspiring was a matter of deep professional as well as personal concern. After the near-rejection of Abalone Divers, he began to doubt whether even the Second Section judges would continue to recognize and validate his brand of progressive experimentation, yet at that time there was as yet no viable alternative to the governmentsponsored salon. Despite intimating to Nomura his desire to start a protest exhibition of his own as soon as the following year (inspired, perhaps, by the example of Tsuda Seifū and other oil painters who were in the midst of organizing just such an anti-Bunten exhibition), the time proved to be unripe, and he did not pursue this plan. He could also 72

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but Abalone Divers was very nearly rejected. If he wished to regain lost ground and return to the ranks of the prize-winners, he knew that his next work needed to be as bold and daring as his most experimental works, yet show a degree of restraint in order to maintain a general appeal. Buddhistthemed paintings had appeared in the Bunten’s Nihonga section since the exhibition’s inception, and Bakusen concluded his next work should feature just such an antiquarian theme.57 Furthermore, in the spring of 1914 the Nara National Museum held an exhibition of treasures from Kōfukuji temple, an event that made national headlines, making Bakusen’s chosen theme all the more timely. In April and June, Bakusen made several trips to Nara in order to visit the exhibition and study the Buddhist sculptures on display.58 He also visited Tōdaiji temple to study and copy the twelfth century Abhidharma-kośa Mandala (Japanese: Kusha Mandara), as well as Daianji temple, where he sketched a portrait of the Sanron school patriarch Gonsō (758–827; Figure 38).59 Bakusen also made the acquaintance of a pioneering photographer named Kudō Risaburō (1848–1929, also known as

have declined to submit to the Bunten on point of principle, a step taken by several of his peers,55 but Bakusen was young, proud, and eager to make his  mark on the national stage. Furthermore, selection by the Bunten judges brought significant financial rewards. Works featured in the national exhibition regularly sold for high prices, with prizewinners fetching princely sums.56 Even after the exhibition closed, artists could be inundated with requests for smaller-scaled versions of their Bunten works, guaranteeing them months of commissions. Finally, 1914 was the year the Bunten reunified the Nihonga section, and at the same time reduced the number of its judges by half, a change that encouraged many artists and critics alike. For these reasons, perhaps, and despite his mounting concerns regarding the decline of the national salon, Bakusen was not yet willing to walk away from the Bunten. Bakusen knew, however, that his next submission to the national salon would require careful planning and reflection. Of his previous three submissions, Hair and Island Women had both been awarded Honorable Mention by the selection jury, 73

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Kudō Seika), who, according to fellow Chikujōkai graduate Uemura Shōen, was an eccentric individual, then in his mid-sixties, fond of drinking, and generally down on his luck. Kudō’s disheveled air, however, hid impressive, even heroic accomplishments. In the 1870s, the early Meiji government ended its financial support of Buddhist temples, confiscated temple property, closed Buddhist institutions and ordered the return of priests and monks to the laity, all in the name of promoting a state-sponsored form of Shintō. As a result, many of Nara’s ancient temples fell into desuetude and disarray. Kudō, realizing that important cultural treasures were at serious risk, took up the selfappointed task of photographing thousands of Buddhist statues, paintings, and ritual objects (Figure 39), a great number of which are known today

Okamoto Ippei, “Pictures Likely to Raise Comment at the Bunten.” Source: Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, 1 November 1913.

only from his extensive photographic records, after the originals were lost through neglect, damage, theft, or after disappearing into private collections. “[Kudō’s] negatives should have been valued as a national treasure,” recalled Shōen, “but instead they lay in complete disorder, piled in boxes that completely filled the second floor of his house.” She recalled how Bakusen traveled back and forth from Kyoto to Nara to study Kudō’s archives, each time returning with another load of photographs and negatives.60 After two months of this extensive research, Bakusen finally selected a theme for his 1914 Bunten submission: the sange or blossom-strewing ritual held on the anniversary of the historical Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama’s death.61 We recall that Seihō, Bakusen, and several other senior juku students 74

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Comparison of Abalone Divers today (left) and at the time of the 1913 Bunten (right). Left image photographed by author. Right image source: Monbusho Dai 7 kai Bijutsu Tenrankai Zuroku — Nihonga no bu. Banbi Shoin, 1913.

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Detail of Amitâbha, from mural number VI. 8th century. Kondo, Hōryūji temple, Nara. Source: Hōryūji Kondōhe kigashū. Benridō, 1951.

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Tsuchida Bakusen, sketch of portrait of Priest Gonsō owned by Daianji temple, Nara, 1914. Ink on paper. Sado History Museum. Photograph by author.

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had explored the same theme for a ceiling painting commissioned by Higashi-Honganji temple, resulting several scale mock-ups and color studies featuring heavenly female devas scattering blossoms in flight (Figure 21) before the commission was canceled. Bakusen’s experience left an impression strong enough to encourage him to try his hand at the abandoned theme, resulting in Scattering Blossoms (Sange, Figure 40), which pictures the ritual as it might have occurred sometime in Nara’s ancient past. Bakusen utilized an unconventional three-part compositional format for this painting, with a pair of two-panel screens, each depicting priests posed in attitudes of prayer and reflection, flanking a larger center screen on which the forms of two female devas whirl, either in dance or in flight, amidst falling flower petals. As had become his standard practice, Bakusen engaged models to sit for his preparatory sketches,62 and adopted a novel strategy that allowed them to adopt gravity-defying poses, in which his models lay on the ground while Bakusen sketched from atop a ladder, from which viewpoint they appeared to be suspended weightlessly in the air.63 All this careful research and preparation, however, took more time than Bakusen anticipated,

Kudō Risaburō, photographs of Ten Great Disciples, Kōfukuji temple, 1890s. Tokyo National Museum of Art.

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leaving him unable to complete Scattering Blossoms in time to meet the October deadline, and forcing him to submit the painting to the Bunten judges in an unfinished state. “I need one more month to finish it,” he wrote to Nomura. “After all, it is three paintings, not just one. It was probably an impossible task from the start, but at least I am confident about the center section, which is complete, and has turned out well.” He also confided to Nomura that he had considered submitting Scattering Blossoms to the newly reorganized Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibition instead of the Bunten. “I definitely hope one day to show at the Inten,” he wrote, “but due to my relationship with Seihō, I decided to send [this year’s painting] to the Bunten as planned. I still do not know whether or not [the Inten] would be willing to accept Bunten-rejected works, but if I am turned away this year, then perhaps things will not have to end there, in disgrace.”64 Incomplete though it was, Scattering Blossoms was not only accepted by the Bunten jury, it was also recognized with an Honorable Mention award. Reviews of the painting, however, were mixed, as exemplified by a joint critique of the Bunten’s Nihonga section authored by several reviewers and published in the journal Bijutsu Shinpō. One reviewer suggested that dancing women in the

middle section, the area of Bakusen’s strongest confidence, was in fact the painting’s weakest point, the result of insufficient preparatory work on the part of the artist (considering the extent of Bakusen’s art historical research and the pains he took with his models, this criticism must have galled him). Yet just a few lines down in the same review, another critic complimented Bakusen’s brushwork and coloring, particularly those utilized in the execution of the dancing devas, and concluded Scattering Blossoms was a great improvement over Abalone Divers.65 Today it is difficult to evaluate these critiques, since Bakusen continued working on the painting to completion after the close of the exhibition, and thus it no longer survives in its original submitted state. What can be noted conclusively about Scattering Blossoms, however, is the careful, symmetrical stability of the composition, the formality of the figures, the elegant, ornamental line-work, and the reserved coloration, punctuated only by the bright red of the devas’ billowing skirts, all of which are strikingly different from Bakusen’s far more radical submission of the previous year. There can be no doubt that Scattering Blossoms represents a concession to the perceived proclivities of the Bunten’s Nihonga jury, and was strategically

40 Tsuchida Bakusen, Scattering Blossoms, 1914. Color on silk; pair of two-panel screens and one six-panel screen. Osaka City Museum of Modern Art.

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planned to avoid another disappointing reception. Bakusen himself suggests this, noting in a letter from early May that he was contemplating making just such a concession, after pondering “whether it would be better to persistently focus on my own work, fighting all the way, or to permit myself some kind of compromise.” He also noted that Chikkyō, who had also experienced disappointing results from his recent submissions to the Bunten, was also considering making allowances for the increasingly stodgy nature of the Bunten’s selection panel.66 Bakusen took this issue up with Chikkyō again in October after learning that the Bunten’s judges had selected Scattering Blossoms for Honorable Mention, leading to an earnest debate over the merits of splitting their artistic activities into two distinct practices, one for the creation of “safe” works intended for the Bunten, and the other dedicated to continuing the experiments so crucial to their artistic development. If they adopted such a scheme, Bakusen predicted, he and Chikkyō would undoubtedly emerge as “champions of the Nihonga world,” and yet he questioned the value of success bought at such a price. Where would they find the incentive to follow their artistic impulses, he wondered, if they were rewarded at the Bunten for suppressing these same impulses, year after year?67 In the end, Bakusen and Chikkyō concluded such extreme compromise was a form of slow artistic suicide, and they dropped the idea of separating their practices in this manner. When we bring this background issue into the fore, we see that Scattering Blossoms served as the mechanism or channel through which Bakusen grappled with this ethical problem, and that the solution he hit upon certainly involved compromise of a kind, but not in terms of the earnestness of his efforts, the extent of his preparations, or the quality of his results. From that point onward, however, Bakusen would turn away from matière-based experimentation, leaving Nihonga’s “pigment problem” for other artists to solve, and immersed himself in the study of Japan’s multifaceted premodern painting heritage, adopting a new approach to research and

experimentation that is perhaps best described as historicist. His goal in doing so was not to idealize the past by rotely preserving   traditional themes, techniques, and aesthetic priorities; this was the raison d’être of Kyūha-aligned artists, whose work held scant interest for him. Bakusen’s historicism was purposed to identify the most exciting and interesting aspects of Japan’s historical painting legacy, and then bring these to light by mingling them with modernist aesthetic priorities, thus making the past contemporary. Soon after his come-back success at the 1914 Bunten, Bakusen celebrated another auspicious event, his marriage in February 1915 to Ōmichi Chiyō, a former maiko whose acquaintance he had made when she modeled for his now-lost Woman of Pleasure, Bakusen’s Bunten-rejected, Ukiyo-e themed painting of 1911. To mark his new married status, he moved out of the bachelor quarters he shared with Chikkyō at Sūtai-in and into a home he had constructed in the Awataguchi neighborhood of Kyoto, and commissioned the building of a large studio on his new property, completed later that year. But Bakusen did not forgot his growing professional dissatisfaction with the Bunten, and in the midst of these life changes, he took his first tentative steps towards planning an alternative exhibition to the national Bunten salon In the summer of 1915 he wrote to Nomura that he had been in contact with several other Nihonga painters with the idea of creating an alternative to the national salon. “I am currently making big plans for next year,” he wrote to Nomura, “in consultation with Tomita [Keisen]. But our plans are still secret, so please keep the knowledge to yourself.”68 Tomita Keisen (1879–1936) was a Kyoto-based Nihonga painter whom Bakusen described as “the only artist in the Kansai area to whom I can bow my head.”69 In the end, however, nothing came out of their discussions. Keisen had participated in the inaugural Inten exhibition the year before, and his submission caught the attention of Yokoyama Taikan, who was keen on involving young Kyoto artists in the Japan Art Institute and its exhibition. In the months before the Inten’s second exhibition, 78

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was familiar to Kyotoites, for Ōhara women had been celebrated for their rustic, wholesome beauty for many centuries in the art, theater and literature of the old capital. Bakusen himself conceded that the subject was hardly new, and the popularity of oharame as a subject among contemporary Kyoto artists had not abated. But familiar or not, such a theme would allow Bakusen to combine his interests in updating the bijinga (“pictures of beauties”) thematic and exploring regional manners and customs, much as he had done with Island Women and Abalone Divers, this time featuring women from the greater Kyoto region. As he wrote to Seki Shinjirō (1861–1938), another friend and patron, Bakusen expected his personal take on oharame would include some surprises, enough to “shock that gang of old-timers” sitting on the Bunten selection panel.72 Following his standard practice, Bakusen hired several women from Ōhara to serve as his models,73 and proceeded to produce a large number of figural sketches and color studies to serve as the foundation of his composition. Bakusen also looked to art historical precedents for further inspiration, much as he had done with Sange the previous year. One of his objects of study was the famous mural of a blossoming cherry tree painted by Hasegawa Kyūzō (1568–1593) and located at Chishakuin (Figure 41), the very temple where he had lived and studied on first arrival in Kyoto.74 It must have been

Taikan courted Keisen’s continuing presence, offering the painter special status as “Friend of the Institute” (Inyū), which would allow Keisen to bypass the jury selection stage and contribute the paintings of his choice directly to the exhibition. Unwilling to sacrifice such a privilege, and aware that his honorary status might eventually lead to full membership in the Japan Art Institute, Keisen withdrew from participation in Bakusen’s ambitious plans.70 Left without a strong partner, Bakusen postponed his idea for an independent Nihonga exhibition until the time was right; until then, he would focus on producing exhibition works, and later decide whether to join Keisen and try his hand at the non-government Inten, or to continue submitting to the Bunten. Over March and April he and Chikkyō planned several short sketching excursions to Yoshino, Ōhara, and other local areas of interest and scenic beauty in the greater Kyoto area in search of a possible theme. By early May he had chosen to paint the women of Ōhara, a village located in the mountains to the northeast of Kyoto. Ōhara was known since the Heian period (794– 1185) for supplying reeds, brushwood, debarked lumber and other raw materials to Kyoto, and even better famed for the women of village, known as Oharame (“Ōhara women”),71 who bore these bundled goods on their heads on the long trek down from the mountains and into the city. The theme

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Hasegawa Kyūzō, Flowering Cherry, 1590s. Color, gold leaf on paper; mural. Chishakuin temple, Kyoto. Source: Shōhekigazenshū: Chishakuin, Bijutsu Shuppan, 1963.

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with mixed feelings of pride and nostalgia that Bakusen, now a twenty-eight year old awardwinning artist, returned to the site from whence he had fled twelve years earlier, his head filled with dreams of becoming a painter. By mid-summer, Bakusen had finished all the required preparatory work for the painting and was ready to begin execution, but with construction on his studio still underway, he had no workable space to accommodate his planned pair of four-panel screens, some seven meters in length. He found a temporary solution to this logistical problem in Saga, a village to the northwest of Kyoto, where he located a makeshift workspace on the second floor of the local civil meeting hall. It was a rundown structure in a noisy part of the village, he wrote to Nomura, but the space itself served his purposes admirably. It was large, consisting of a room of fifty tatami mats (approximately forty-six by ninety-two meters) with windows on three sides, allowing in ample natural light. Furthermore, the studio’s elevation allowed him a splendid panoramic view that included the grounds of Daikakuji temple, the

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Arashiyama mountains to the west of Kyoto, and the Arashiyama river (including, he added, a bathing spot frequented by local village women, which he joked was the most scenic distraction of all). Due in part to the merits of this impromptu studio, Bakusen reported to Nomura in early August that he was making excellent progress on the painting, noting that he was much further ahead than he had been on Sange that same time the previous year.75 The completed work, Women of Ōhara (Oharame, Figure 42) features a view of the peddler women of the title wearing their traditional indigodyed robes and arm and leg coverings, with sickles thrust in the belts of their ikat-woven aprons. They walk under cherry trees in full bloom, bearing their bundles of cut reeds along a golden mist-covered path between mounds of brilliant green mossy hills. These figures, their forms defined by outlines and only slightly modeled with color, retain a flatness often linked to Japanese prints, and yet the women here are not idealized in the manner associated with Ukiyo-e; instead they show a subjective deformation that evokes comparison with

Tsuchida Bakusen, Women of Ōhara, 1915. Color on silk; pair of four-panel folding screens. Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo.

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in Bakusen’s the rendering of the mourning doves (the most naturalistic of all elements in the painting) shown perched on the roof of the millhouse in the left-side panel. By featuring this eclectic array of painting modes (Post-Impressionism, Rinpa, the Hasegawa and Shijō styles) in a single work, Bakusen was revisiting the same kind of nue-style eclecticism practiced by his teacher Seihō in the late 1890s, as discussed in Chapter 1. But whereas Seihō’s efforts were denigrated in reviews for some twenty years as monstrous hybrids, Bakusen’s Women of Ōhara was lauded by the mass media, and its excellence was also recognized by the Bunten judges, who included the painting among the third prize winners, the first time for Bakusen to receive an award higher than Honorable Mention since 1908’s Punishment. Furukawa Osamu’s review, written for the journal Bijutsu Shinpō, called Bakusen’s painting “a highlight of the exhibition,” and marks with approval his reference to an even larger array of painting styles than those mentioned above:

certain Post-Impressionists, such as Maurice Denis (1870–1943), whose dry, matte-quality paintings emphatically assert the flatness of the picture plane.76 Bakusen also makes ample reference to pictorial and design strategies associated with Japan’s premodern painting traditions, particularly the Yamato-e style as reinterpreted by Edo-era painters of the Tosa and Rinpa schools; the green mounds of moss or grass transitioning into gold, for example, recall the landscape visions of Rinpa painter Suzuki Kiitsu (1796–1858) (Figure 43). The results of Bakusen’s study of the Chishakuin mural are also apparent in the general composition of the cherry tree, its branches and clusters of blossoms arranged in what is nearly a mirror-inversion of Hasegawa Kyūzō’s famous precedent. Reference to the Hasegawa style can also be found in the broad, striated ink texture strokes Bakusen used on his tree trunk, demonstrating his willingness to reengage with Chinese-style ink painting twelve years after trading the Suzuki tradition of Shōnen’s juku for the Shijō style, the foundation of Seihō’s teaching at Chikujōkai, most recognizably

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43

Suzuki Kiitsu, Camellias, first half of 19th century. Color on paper; 2-panel folding screen. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

with regret, “is the only erratic aspect of Women of Ōhara Maidens, and the biggest failing of the work.”78 It is certainly true that the women’s ropesandaled feet with light lines and little or no pigment seem to dissolve amidst the solid, confident outlines and thick, bold colors Bakusen used in other areas of the composition. Furukawa’s suggestion that Bakusen may have run out of time must be discounted, since we know from his letters that Bakusen completed the painting ahead of schedule; furthermore, the women’s faces are also rendered with similar sketch-like lines and left devoid color, suggesting an intentional, consistent strategy was at work. Among the most plausible explanations by art historians for this unusual feature is offered by Motoe Kunio, who repeats Furukawa’s proposal that the thin, shaky lines on the feet and face should seen as evidence of Bakusen’s awareness  of  Futurism.79 The earliest interest in this Western-imported art movement in Japan dates to  1909, when writer Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) supplied the first (partial) translation of Marinetti’s

From a critic’s point of view [Women of Ōhara] is the most interesting work in the show. It shows the results of the various styles Bakusen has studied up to this point, all rigorously refined for this work. The Tosa School, the Shijō School, [the artists Tawaraya] Sōtatsu and [Kano] Sanraku, and even post-Impressionism, all are part of his influences. Yet Bakusen has managed to digest all these elements completely, and comfortably make them his own… In the process, the figures in Women of Ōhara… are transformed into decorative figures, and succeed in producing an expansive feeling of halcyon spring.77

One aspect of Bakusen’s painting, however, puzzled nearly all who viewed the work, even those like Furukawa who were very favorably impressed with Women of Ōhara. This was Bakusen’s treatment of the women’s feet, which struck Furukawa as incomplete, as if left over from a rough preparatory sketch, and he wondered if the artist had intended this as a way to illustrate movement, adapting a strategy employed by the Futurists, or if he simply ran out of time. “This,” Furukawa notes 82

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Futurist Manifesto in the May, 1909 issue of the literary journal Subaru, only a few months after the  original document was published in Le Figaro in the original French. Gennifer Weisenfeld, however, has noted that Ōgai’s translation had little  if any impact on the contemporary art world, and that it was not until 1912 that art journals and newspapers began to run serialized articles to explain the new movement.80 Futurism was referenced in relation to Kyoto Nihonga at least as early as 1914, when a reviewer discussed the movement as a possible inspirational source for an award-winning Nihonga painting by Murakami Kagaku featured at the 1914 All-Japan Fine and Industrial Art Exhibition (the work in question, entitled Evening Cherry Blossoms, is discussed in Chapter Four of this book).81 In short, interest in Futurism was waxing in Japan around the time Bakusen created Women of Ōhara, and even if he did not yet fully understand Futurism’s message, he may indeed have been intrigued enough to reference its frenetic formal energy in a manner consistent with Nihonga-style ink work. Since the artist himself was silent on the matter, however, Bakusen’s interest in Futurism at the time must remain entirely conjectural. After the successful debut of Women of Ōhara Maidens, Bakusen wrote to Nomura with his personal evaluation of that year’s national salon exhibition, continuing what had become an annual, post-Bunten rite. This time, however, Bakusen’s disappointment gave way to far stronger expressions of indignation, and the critique he offered of the Nihonga paintings selected alongside his own was nothing less than belligerent. Paying special critical emphasis to the work of his fellow Kyotoites, Bakusen mocked an Ukiyo-e themed painting by Otake Kokkan (1880–1945), comparing it with the work of ezōya (an Edo-era illustrator of cheap popular novels), and he panned both Konoshima Ōkoku’s and Hirai Baisen’s (1889–1969) contributions as evidence of their steady decline, of talent in Ōkoku’s case, and of intelligence in Baisen’s. He dismissed Uemura Shōen’s painting as “banal,” derided Kikuchi Keigetsu’s as “the height

of imbecility,” and jeered at Kawamura Manshū’s (1880–1942) work, describing it as “a vomit of green paint.”82 It is important to keep in mind, however, that Bakusen’s gripes over the Bunten jury’s lack of critical acumen would be drowned out if matched against the complaints of artists whose works were perennially rejected, since for every one of Bakusen’s paintings accepted to the national salon there were a hundred others turned away. In 1911, Matsumoto Matatarō wrote an essay that addressed the dissatisfaction felt in some circles regarding the Bunten’s stringent selection standards, and suggested any such malaise was the result of unrealistic expectations. “Most people assume,” he wrote, “that if artists submit upwards of 600 paintings in total, then surely there must be a great many fine paintings among them. If that were the case, then the Japanese art world would be exceptionally healthy indeed; instead, it is my experience that typically three-quarters of all submissions are too immature, and are not worth examining.” Only 150 or so works out of 600 stand out to the judges for some reason, he explained, be it the excellence of their technical execution, their conceptual brilliance, or some other factor. But due to the judging scheme used by the jury, which selects by majority consensus, and the fact that so many diverging opinions need to be accommodated in the process, in the end only around 50 of the finest works are typically selected for exhibition, a rate of approximately 8%.83 If this was indeed the case, then Bakusen’s Bunten success rate was nothing short of extraordinary: of the eight paintings he submitted from 1908 and 1915, seven were accepted, five of which received additional awards or honorable mention (for the sake of comparison, over the same time period Ono Chikkyō saw four out of eight of his Bunten submissions selected for exhibition, none of which won additional awards). Considered in this light, Bakusen vexation was not that of an excluded outsider, but rather that of a privileged participant who had come to question the value of participation itself. 83

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revisiting the keichō era: three maiko (1916)

celebrated for the beauty of its yuna. On arrival, however, Bakusen discovered Arima to be very tawdry, and he found no models usable for his painting.87 Traditionally, the role of yuna in public baths and hot spring spas was to help customers wash their bodies, set their hair and arrange their dress, but in certain establishments they could also be complicit in the illicit sex trade, as suggested in a detail taken from the Sō’ōji screens, a seventeenth century genre painting that features illustrations of bathhouse attendants at their workplace, including one who retreats with a male bather for a private tryst (Figure 44). From Bakusen’s description, it appears that the traditional occupation of bathhouse attendant had largely disappeared in Arima, and the so-called yuna he encountered there were little more than prostitutes. He traveled to several other hot springs in the greater Kinki district, lingering the longest at Bokido Onsen in Wakayama, in search of viable subjects for his yuna-themed Bunten work, and returned to Kyoto in May with a sheaf of sketches and watercolor studies of the various yuna he encountered (Figure 45), as well as drawings of pine trees and wisteria, and began developing a compositional plan. By early June, however, he was thoroughly disheartened by the way the painting was developing, confounded as he was by his inability to capture the physical beauty of the yuna subject sans gratuitous eroticism. “Even as I write this letter,” he confided to Nomura, “I am trying not to look at my work. Every time I glance at it, I regret doing so. I have no time to fix it. It is a complete failure.”88 Bakusen would take up the bathhouse maiden theme once again in 1918 to create one of his bestknown works, but in 1916, he conceded defeat, and moved on to a different subject: that of maiko, young apprentice geisha who worked and trained in the tea houses of the city’s Gion district. Indeed, with the very favorable reception of Women of Ōhara, another subject with intimate historical and cultural ties to the Kyoto locale, he may have felt he had finally earned his bona fides as a Kyoto painter, and with them, the right to assert this identity by taking on a thematic with such deep local cultural

By early 1916, Bakusen had attained the fantastic goal he had set for himself as a youth by becoming  one of the most successful artists of his generation. In early February, he wrote to Nomura about how busy his painting practice had become, a result, he explained, of the strong economic climate. He describes himself going from one wealthy household to the next, winning commission after commission, “making money Ōkoku-style” (a reference to Konoshima Ōkoku, a fellow Nihonga artist in Kyoto who also had enjoyed professional success at a young age). Yet as lucrative as these commissions were proving, they left him with little time for anything else. The pace of work is becoming difficult to handle. Although an increase in commissions is a sign of a painter’s rise in the art world, I am just thirty years old and as yet independent [i.e. without institutional affiliation]. I do not need more money, although having it is certainly not a bad thing; nor do I need fame. I just want to be able to continue making paintings at a comfortable rate, without squandering my time. But though I am making more money now than ever before, I am concerned at the cost in terms of my research. Time is something I cannot buy.84

Bakusen continued working on private commissions until spring, when he began planning that year’s Bunten submission. In April he began taking trips to the public library, scanning folio art volumes and Edo-era illustrated woodblock printed books, hunting for inspiration. He wrote to Nomura that his first idea was to create an historical genre painting featuring women of the Keichō era (1596– 1615), but also mentioned an interest in painting yuna (“bath women”), the term used for female attendants of Edo-period bathhouses,85 idealized in Japanese art, song, and literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.86 In April, Bakusen took hold of this interest and set out for Arima, a famous hot spring spa located in the Rokko mountains near Kobe, historically 84

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44 Detail of Sō’ōji Screens, late 17th century. Color on gold-leafed paper; pair of eight-panel screens. Tokugawa Art Museum, Tokyo.

implications as the maiko of Gion. In a letter written to Nomura in July, however, he told his friend and patron that this new subject was proving to be equally problematic as the yuna theme: I have never suffered as much as I have suffered over this year’s maiko painting. I cannot rely on the same models coming every day, which has been a problem, and then they are so spoiled and childish that they simply will not listen to what I say. I have to watch my temper as I work… At first I worked at a small teahouse, but I was 45

unable to produce any good maiko sketches there, so

Tsuchida Bakusen. Study for Bathhouse Maiden, 1916. Watercolor on paper. University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts.

Yoshida [Chūsaburō] introduced me to [the teahouse] Ichiriki-tei. I have always depended closely on sketches

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(1876–1925), a textile magnate, a patron of the arts and a figure of significant local political and cultural influence. The cost of hiring Ichiriki-tei’s maiko, who appear in a photograph alongside the artist (Figure 46) taken during one of the daily modeling sessions held over a period of several weeks, would have been staggering. The fact that these fees were paid in advance is ample evidence of Bakusen’s access to the city’s most elite and affluent patronage. Bakusen completed his preparatory sketches by the end of July, his compositional shita-e mock-up by the end of August, and spent all of September rendering the final painting, barely managing to complete it in time for the Bunten’s submission deadline in early October. In fact, he wrote to Nomura that he had relied on the help of several friends working through the night in order to complete the painting in time to be picked up for shipping the next day.90 Unfortunately the finished work, entitled Three Maiko (Sannin no maiko, Figure 47), was destroyed by fire in 1969, but surviving photographs show the painting featured the maiko of the title seated in a semi-circle and playing a card game with Western-style trumps, unusual in its conception but not without historical precedent in Japan. Earlier we examined a Bakusen letter in which he spoke of his interest in researching images of women from the Keichō era, significant

of models, and so I have been going there every day… I was warned that this would be very expensive, but now I have no time to choose another theme, and if I do not employ the models, I will not be able to submit a work [to the Bunten] this year. I went home wondering how I could raise the necessary funds, for I had committed myself to completing this maiko painting, even if it bankrupts me. Then suddenly Yoshida informed me that I would not have to worry about the fees, since he had already paid for the models. Still, I am running out of money to meet living expenses, and I am afraid that this month I will again have to borrow another fifty yen from you; in October, I may need to borrow as much as another two hundred.89

It is interesting to note how in this letter Bakusen identifies with the image of a poor, struggling, yet morally committed artist, dedicated to seeing his painting completed no matter the cost. In fact, the situation he describes to Nomura bespeaks extreme privilege. At that time, Ichiriki-tei, a centuries-old teahouse in Kyoto’s Gion district, was one of the most exclusive and expensive of the high-end establishments that catered to the city’s most elite clientele, and remains so today. For Bakusen to gain access to this particular teahouse required the introduction of a highly influential and wealthy guarantor, whom he found in Yoshida Chūsaburō

46 Photograph of Tsuchida Bakusen with maiko models, 1916. Image courtesy of Gallery Sō, Kyoto.

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47

as a period that saw the germination of urban “floating world” culture of the entertainment districts around the turn of the seventeenth century. In terms of art history, the Keichō years produced some of the earliest explorations of an independent bijin (“beautiful woman”) thematic, associated with urban entertainment districts. Yet Bakusen adopted none of the Keichō-era hairstyles or kimono and obi types on display in the works from that period,91 and chose instead to feature contemporary maiko and current fashions. Bakusen has updated the style associated with early Ukiyo-e painting as well by blending a traditional flat, pattern-based ornamental treatment of the garments with a Westernstyle naturalism most clearly evident in the maiko’s hands, with using subtle flesh-toned shading to create the impression of three-dimensional modeling. Another possible inspiration for Three Maiko has been suggested by several art historians including Tanaka Hisao, who point to certain similarities in form between Bakusen’s figures and those in Cézanne’s Card Players from around 1890, today in the Musée d’Orsay collection, a reproduction of which appeared in the November 1915 issue of Shirakaba (Figure 48). Here Cézanne defines the imposing mass of his figures primarily through the bulky aggregate of their garments, and undermines any sense of naturalism by elongating their forms, stretching their torsos, necks, arms and legs in

Tsuchida Bakusen, Three Maiko, 1916. Color on silk; framed (originally two-panel folding screen). Work not extant. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

48 Card Players (c. 1890-95) by Paul Cézanne, as reproduced in Shirakaba, vol. 6, no. 11 (November 1915). University of Hawaii at Mānoa Library collection. Photo by author.

striking déforme. Tanaka suggests Bakusen may have been inspired by Cézanne’s painting to experiment with similar emphasis on garment, and to elongate the torsos and limbs of his painted maiko.92 In the process, Bakusen creates an impression of grandness, composure and substantiality, as if his models were marble statues rather than the young, petite maiko who actually sat for his preparatory sketches. Three Maiko was selected by the Bunten jury, and proved very popular with exhibition 87

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49 Matsuoka Eikyū, Murogimi, 1916. Color on silk; pair of six-panel folding screens. Eisei Bunko Museum, Tokyo.

visitors and critics alike. One critic complimented Three Maiko as “the most captivating painting in this year’s Bunten” due to the intentional naiveté with which Bakusen rendered the figures of the maiko, recognizing this as stylistic quotation  and applauding his extensive historical research.93 To Bakusen’s indignation, however, and to the surprise of many friends and critics alike, Three Maiko was not awarded Tokusen (“Selected with Distinction”) status,94 an honor enjoyed that year by both Ono Chikkyō and Murakami Kagaku (in fact, the failure of Three Maiko to secure this honor so puzzled Chikkyō that he wondered whether Bakusen had done something that piqued the judges, and was now being punished in return).95 Bakusen made no attempt to hide his resentment at being passed over for this honor, and offered Nomura the following frank evaluation of the exhibition that year.

Amitābha by Murakami Kagaku (earlier he painted a work entitled Around February, he is one of the painters I am paying close attention to) and Ono Chikkyō’s Two Island Works, show the qualities of a true artist. These two and my Three Maiko are in an entirely different class… As for “Selected with Distinction,” to earn that award is the same as being selected with dishonor… I enjoy works like Murogimi by Tokyo painter Matsuoka Eikyū, since viewing it is like watching a wonderful Noh drama, but it has absolutely no relevance in our daily lives.96

Bakusen singled out Matsuoka Eikyū’s (1881–1938) Murogimi (Figure 49), winner of Tokusen status, as the kind of attractive submission created solely with the goal of appealing to the Bunten judges, aesthetically exquisite but empty of the kind of artistic risk-taking Bakusen believed was necessary if Nihonga was to evolve as a modern art form. But there may have been more to Bakusen’s severe and in some ways unfair critique than meets the eye. Eikyū’s painting is based on a scene from a Noh play of the same name that takes place in the harbor town of Muronotsu, located in modern Hyōgu prefecture, and it is worth noting that Muronotsu was known and lauded for its skilled and beautiful

The Bunten has sunk to its lowest level yet. I do not know if [artists] are trying to endear themselves [to the judges], but they all make superficial studies of nature resulting in utterly commonplace works. Not a single painting showed any intelligence, there was nothing I could even provisionally admire. Only two works, one entitled

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prostitutes, just as Arima was admired for its attractive and sexually available bathhouse attendants. The parallels between his own abandoned composition and Eikyū’s award winning painting may have vexed him, and he ends his discussion of Murogimi by assuring Nomura that if he, too, had produced a “classical painting” (kotenteki na e), he would undoubtedly have been among the first to be selected with distinction that year.97 Bakusen concludes his letter with a condemnation of the other Bunten offerings, writing his most scathing review to date. For Hashimoto Kansetsu’s  Hanshan and Shide (Kanzan Jittoku) to receive Tokusen status is unconscionable, he

said, and made him furious. Odake Chikuha’s (1878–1938) work was also bad, but Kawamura Manshū’s saccharine Bamboo and Ducks was even worse. He saw Hirai Baisen’s Thirty-three Views of the Capital as evidence that Baisen’s mind must be slipping, and the paintings by Kikuchi Keigetsu, Uemura Shōen and the others “all showed that they were living in the past, or just amusing themselves in their own private worlds… It makes me angry to see such a miserable line-up on display. We have reached the stage where we can only expect to be discriminated against. It has become inevitable that we will be rejected, yet even if we are selected, it is no honor.”98

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4 Gathering the Higashiyama Circle

S

ometime in late 1917, Tsuchida Bakusen sat with five friends and acquaintances for a commemorative photograph to mark the founding of a new Nihonga painting and exhibition collective, the Kokuga Society (Figure 50). Joining Bakusen in the photo were four fellow artists, Ono Chikkyō, Nonagase Banka, Murakami Kagaku, and Sakakibara Shihō, as well as Nakai Sōtarō, teacher of art history and aesthetics at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized Painting School and co-founder of the now defunct Nameless Society, who would serve in the capacity of official advisor to the fledging Nihonga collective. Missing is a seventh associated individual, his absence marked symbolically in the photo by a gap in the center of the back row. This was Takeuchi Seihō, who agreed to serve alongside Nakai as an official advisor to the Kokuga Society, and to act as judge for its proposed juried exhibition. The Kokuga Society emerged in 1918 out of an initially nebulous network of informal relationships and acquaintances in the early 1910s, coalescing around 1916 into a tight-knit circle of friends  and colleagues bound together by mutual professional esteem as much as by shared creative interests and artistic ideals. The nexus of their slowly burgeoning coterie was Sūtai-in, the studio and living space shared by Bakusen and Chikkyō in Kyoto’s Higashiyama district, on the grounds of

the greater Chion-in temple complex. Sūtai-in was a popular gathering spot from the time Bakusen and Chikkyō moved there, initially among their juku-mates at Chikujōkai. As their professional reputations expanded, so did their circle, until a core group composed of Bakusen and Chikkyō and their friends Sakakibara Shihō, Murakami Kagaku, Nonagase Banka, Kashino Nanyō (1887–1956), Takayama Seika (1885–1950), and Hashimoto Kōei (1892–1956), had coalesced. Their gatherings were mostly given over to friendly discussions and general socializing, and they invented several mockserious epithets for themselves, including “the Chion-in School” (Chion-in ha) and “the Higashiyama Gang” (Higashiyama-ren). The friendship shared by this group (hereinafter the Higashiyama circle) was celebrated in an illustration inked sometime in late 1916 or early 1917 by Nonagase Banka (Figure 51), who portrayed the various members of this group out for a stroll. Banka humorously caricatured each painter’s physical attributes, giving Chikkyō’s and his own diminutive stature particular comic emphasis. He identified the figures from left to right as “K. Murakami” (Murakami Kagaku), “B. Tsuchida” (Tsuchida Bakusen), “N. K.” (Kashino Nanyō), “B. Nonagase” (Nonagase Banka), “S. T.” (Takayama Seika), “T. Ono” (Ono Chikkyō), and “S. Sakakibara” (Sakakibara Shihō). He also included an unidentified woman’s portrait tucked between Chikkyō’s and Shihō’s faces at the top of the page, which may represent Shihō’s wife, Sakakibara Shigeko, who was also a frequent

Murakami Kagaku, Amida, 1916, detail of fig. 58.

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participant in their gatherings. Underneath the drawing Banka wrote the following caption: “Idiots on Parade: As long as they mind their own business they will stay out of trouble” (Obaka no michiyuki, sawaranu kami ni tatari nashi). This legend notwithstanding, Banka’s image of the seven serious-faced artists standing shoulder-to-shoulder suggests they were in fact getting ready to cause some trouble of their own. Bakusen’s disappointing results of the 1915 Bunten (when his painting Three Maiko was passed over for special distinction by the judges, as discussed in the last chapter) convinced him to redouble his efforts to mobilize a group of artists in order to challenge the hegemony of the national salon. From around this time he began to test these waters by organizing a number of preliminary activities and events centered on his Higashiyama clique. In May 1916, a classified advertisement appeared in the pages of the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun requesting the services of models for group sketching sessions. The fact that the ad was collectively signed by Bakusen, Chikkyō, Shihō, Kagaku, and Banka inspired local gossip that the five painters were secretly planning a group exhibition.1 No such exhibition materialized, but two months later another item appeared in the newspaper to announce that Tsuchida Bakusen, Murakami Kagaku, Sakakibara Shihō, and Nonagase Banka would be joined by Tokunaga Kakusen and Nakai Sōtarō, founders of the defunct Nameless Society, and by Kawai Unosuke (1889–1968), editor of the Kyoto art periodical Korona, in organizing and founding a new, as yet unnamed art discussion society with monthly meetings to be held at Issatei, a teahouse located in Kyoto’s Maruyama Park.2 In the absence of any follow-up news, however, we must conclude that their efforts to form a new ikenkai in the model of the Nameless Society were abortive. More circumstantial evidence regarding Bakusen’s dogged efforts to establish a formal painting collective can be found in his surviving correspondence, which picks up the thread in December 1916. In that month, Bakusen sent a plain postcard to his friend and patron Nomura Itsushi with the short

50 Portrait photograph of the Kokuga Society membership, late 1917 or early 1918. Top row: Nakai Sōtarō (left), Sakakibara Shihō (right). Middle row: Murakami Kagaku (left), Nonagase Banka (center), Tsuchida Bakusen (right). Bottom: Ono Chikkyō. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

51

Nonagase Banka, Obaka no michiyuki, c. 1916–17. Ink on paper. Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama.

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dating to their early days at Seihō’s juku, their period of study at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting, and their participation in Chat Noir and Le Masque. Le Masque and its activities ended in 1912 and the following year marked the demise of the Kyoto Art Association-sponsored Shinkoten. The quantity and quality of public submissions to the Shinkoten steadily diminished every year since 1907, the year of the Bunten’s founding, and the inability of the exhibition to compete with the national salon was an important factor in the sponsors’ decision to terminate the exhibition in 1913. Like many young Kyoto painters, Chikkyō had long relied on the Shinkoten to promote his practice at the local level. He debuted as an 18-yearold artist there in 1907 with a painting entitled Kiyamachi in the Rain (Ame no Kiyamachi), and, with the exceptions of 1911 and 1912, when his attention was focused on Le Masque’s two exhibitions, he showed at every Shinkoten until its discontinuation; in the same seven-year period, he exhibited works at the Bunten only twice, in 1907 and in 1911.4 Finding himself bereft of his favorite local exhibition venue and freed from association with Le Masque, Chikkyō turned his attention entirely to the national salon, seeing three of his submissions accepted to the Bunten over the next five years. The first of these was a harvest scene entitled Autumn Wheat (Bakushū, Figure 52), which was accepted in 1913 by the Second Section judges and included in the newly divided Nihonga galleries. Autumn Wheat survives only as a monochrome photograph that offers no indication of coloration, but from this image we can glean that, in terms of style, Chikkyō continued in the direction he had explored in Southern Country, namely, a combination of Post-Impressionist and Nanga brushwork. In 1914 Chikkyō intended to submit a two-panel screen painting entitled Season of Ripening Millet (Kibi ururu koro) to the Bunten, but Bakusen wrote in a letter that Chikkyō fell ill in late summer of that year, thwarting completion of the work. This was the same year that Bakusen failed to complete his own Bunten submission, resulting in their both submitting unfinished works, but whereas the

but suggestive message, “It was an excellent meeting of those representing the future of Japan’s painting world,” signed by Bakusen, Kagaku, Banka, Shihō, Chikkyō, and Tokumi Ōkokudō.3 This missive brings to mind Bakusen’s letter to Nomura from 1914, in which he described his earlier attempt to form a Nihonga exhibition collective with Tomita Keisen, a plan he was forced to abandon when Keisen became more actively involved with Yokoyama Taikan’s Japan Art Institute. The postcard from 1916 suggests Bakusen had refocused attention on the idea and was marshalling the Higashiyama circle to form the group’s membership, with Nomura possibly serving in the capacity of financial backer. Once again Bakusen’s plans proved to be premature, yet his efforts were not entirely in vain, for when the Kokuga Society was formally announced to the world in 1918, five of the six names that were were floated in 1916 were eventually included among the group’s founding members. Because Chikkyō, Shihō, Kagaku and Banka all play such crucial roles in the organization of the Kokuga Society and in defining the quality and character of the affiliated Kokuten exhibitions, the rest of this chapter will be dedicated to providing a capsule summary of their lives and practices, particularly with regard to their successes at the Bunten, the yardstick against which all painters were measured at that time. All four of these painters had very rich and prolific careers, each of which is worthy of full-length and in-depth analysis in its own right. For the purposes of this study, however, we will give special attention to their activities circa 1916, the year in which their emerging collective association began to truly crystallize, marking the start of their transformation from the loosely defined Higashiyama circle into the formal Kokuga Society.

ono chikkyō: the “impressionist naturalist” We have previously discussed Ono Chikkyō’s practice in light of his close friendship with Bakusen, 93

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Ono Chikkyō, Autumn Wheat, 1913. Work no longer extant. Source: Monbusho Dai 7 kai Bijutsu Tenrankai Zuroku – Nihonga no bu, Banbi Shoin, Tokyo, 1913.

judges accepted Bakusen’s Buddhist-themed Scattering Blossoms, Chikkyō’s painting went unselected.5 Season of Ripening Millet, too, is known today only through a monochrome photo that shows a view of an island hillside where a women stoops amidst tall sasa grass, silhouetted against the dark of a thatched farm roof, with the millet field of the title glimpsed between leafy trees (Figure 53). Chikkyō continued to work on the painting after its  rejection from the Bunten and resubmitted it in  1915, this time to the second Inten exhibition. Earlier that year, Yokoyama Taikan paid a promotional visit to Kyoto on behalf of the Japan Art Institute, during which he met with Chikkyō, Bakusen, and several other promising young painters, hoping to coax them to submit to the Japan

Art  Institute’s exhibition with a guarantee of a place for their works in the galleries and the honorific title of “Friends of the Inten” (Inyū), an initial step towards full membership in the organization.6 Taikan was true to his word, for Season of Ripening Millet was selected for inclusion in the second Inten of 1915, and Chikkyō was duly awarded this honorary status. For whatever reason, however, the benefits of participation were not enough to convince Chikkyō to maintain his relationship with Taikan and the Japan Art Institute, and Season of Ripening Millet was both the first and the last work he contributed at the Inten. Judging from published reviews and critical reactions, Chikkyō’s Bunten submission in 1916, a pair of hanging scrolls grouped under the single 94

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Ono Chikkyō, Season of Ripening Millet, 1914. Work no longer extant. Source: Nihon Bijutsuin Dai 2 kai Tenrankai Zuroku – Nihonga no bu, Nihon Bijutsuin, 1914.

title Two Island Works (Shima nisaku, Figure 54), was one of his most significant achievements of his Bunten phase. Based on sketches Chikkyō made in Kamijima, a rural fishing village located on an island in the Seto Inland Sea,7 Two Island Works is a cohesive demonstration of Chikkyō’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of Cézanne’s compositional strategies, including his pictorialization of nature in terms of geometry (cylinders, spheres, cones).8 The paintings also make use of compositional mirroring, a pictorial strategy also frequently utilized in Nanga, in which shapes in the lower part of a painting (the foreground) are repeated in the upper part (the background). This is seen in Chikkyō’s repetitive rendering of polyhedral forms, wherein pyramids are echoed in

like-formed but diverse objects, including thatched roofs, grass-covered hillocks, and tree crowns. The rows of sprouting plants in the various farmer’s plots are echoed in the lines in the tiled roofs, and even in the profiles of distant mountains, creating a rhythmic harmony of forms that suffuses the surfaces of both hanging scrolls. Critic Furukawa Osamu enthusiastically praised this set of landscape paintings, noting how adroitly Chikkyō had captured the setting’s local atmosphere and color, inspiring him to label Chikkyō an “impressionist naturalist.” Starting with Southern Country and continuing with Autumn Wheat and Season of Ripening Millet, Chikkyō established a niche for himself as a landscape painter who identified in equal measure with Nanga and Post 95

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54 Ono Chikkyō, Two Island Works, 1916. Ink, color on paper; pair of hanging scrolls. Kasaoka Municipal Chikkyō Museum of Art, Kasaoka.

Impressionism. But it was with Two Island Works, Furukawa argued, that Chikkyō came closest to capturing the essence of modernist painting.9

Shijō style, and cultivated an early interest in the bird-and-flower (kachōga) painting genre, keeping a flower garden and a small menagerie of birds and  insects as an elementary school student to provide subjects for his studies.11 After finishing  his  compulsory elementary education, Shihō entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts, where he continued his tutoring in the Shijō style under Kikuchi Hōbun and Takeuchi Seihō. He also gained an initial understanding of Europe’s painting heritage from Tokunaga Kakusen, a co-founder of the Nameless Society who

sakakibara shihō: harmony and discord Sakakibara Shihō was the second of twelve children born to the Kyoto painter Sakakibara Rokō (1855–1914), five of whom eventually pursued careers as professional artists.10 He received his initial training under his father’s tutelage in the 96

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kyoku to nemuri, Figure 55), Minamizono being a reference to a neighborhood in western Kyoto. For this work, Shihō relied closely on the Shijō method, basing the forms in his composition on dozens of closely observed and recorded shasei sketches of plants and insects, which he then reinterpreted with an eye for decorative abstraction. This blend of verism and decorativeness  creates an unnatural, dreamlike impression, accomplished through Seihō’s subjective editing of elements. Like all of Shihō’s best paintings, Song and Sleep celebrates the contradictory but aesthetically agreeable convergence of objective and subject interpretation of nature. Another interesting aspect of this painting is its titular reference to music. Shihō was an enthusiastic collector of European classical music records, as Chikkyō affirmed many years after he and Bakusen first made Shihō’s acquaintance about the time Song and Sleep was exhibited at the Bunten:

was a lecturer at the school and Seihō’s former Ruskin tutor (although judging from diploma paintings, it seems modernist Western painting movements had little direct impact on the students until circa 1910).12 Shihō graduated from the School of Fine Arts and Crafts in 1907, and the following year made his debut at a juried exhibition when his submission to the 1908 Shinkoten, a painting entitled Warm Sun (Nichidan), lost today, was accepted and awarded fifth prize. In 1909 he joined the first class of the newly founded Kyoto Specialized Painting School, where he expanded his stylistic repertoire by studying the Rinpa tradition, the Kano style, and Song and Ming academic styles of Chinese bird-and-flower painting. As a student of the standard course, he also studied Western art and aesthetics under Nakai Sōtarō, but unlike his mentor Seihō and other Nihonga painters who worked to achieve a Yōga-esque realism through the use of mineral pigments, Shihō expressed his interest in European art and theory only obliquely, as exemplified in a large work he successfully submitted to the 1912 Bunten in the year following his graduation. The painting in question consists of a pair of screens totaling nearly five meters in length, bearing the lengthy title Song and Sleep in a Corner of Minamizono (Minamizono no hitosumi ni okeru

55

At the time, Shihō lived a more opulent lifestyle than us, and he had obtained a large collection of classical music records. When we visited him, we would hold our discussions about painting, and afterwards Shihō would play his records for us. I love music, so these sessions always held my interest, but Bakusen became bored if we listened for too long.13

Sakakibara Shihō, Song and Sleep in a Corner of Minamizono, 1912. Color on silk; pair of six-panel folding screens. Kyoto Prefectural Library and Archives. Image courtesy of The Museum of Kyoto.

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With this in mind, Song and Sleep in a Corner of Minamizono can be construed as a visual interpretation of a music composition consisting of two distinct movements. The right screen, a lively and bright allegro, features a crop of flowering spring onions surrounded with dozens of fluttering butterflies and bees, representing “nature in song.” On the left, Shihō rendered a relaxed adagio movement embodying “nature in sleep,” picturing young grape vines and a single black butterfly, shown clinging to a leaf tip, perfectly still and at complete rest. Shihō may have been encouraged to explore the relationship between music and painting by the example of the American painter James McNeill Whistler, who famously used musical terms such as “nocturne,” “harmony,” and “symphony” in the titles of his works. Among the avenues by which Whistler’s ideas on art and music came to be known to Kyoto’s painter was Tanaka Kisaku’s lectures on the Western painter’s polemic, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, delivered over several gatherings of the Nameless Society in spring of 1910 and summarized for readers in serialized form by the newspaper Kyoto Hinode Shinbun.14 In his lectures, Tanaka affirmed Whistler’s idea that the visual qualities of paintings could be successfully analyzed and understood in musical terms, “for painting is visual music, being the expression of an artist’s feelings through harmony of color and arrangement of line.”15 Furthermore, Whistler’s writing reflects a basic artistic relationship to nature that would have struck many Japanese painters as familiar, as demonstrated in the following lines from Whistler’s celebrated “10 O’clock” lecture from The Gentle Art of Making Enemies:

might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.16

Whistler’s language was intended to provoke a strong reaction from Western artists who viewed Nature as God’s perfect creation. Yet, at the most basic level of meaning, these lines reflect the fundamental principles of Japan’s shasei-based painting traditions, including the Shijō method, insofar as both deemed the objective study of nature as a preliminary step, a gathering of resources for the artist to subjectively rearrange, edit, and refine, to introduce spatial harmony, pleasing patterns, and idealized forms that are otherwise not present in nature, as exemplified in Shihō’s Song and Sleep in a Corner of Minamizono. By 1915 Shihō had married and living in Awataguchi, a short walk from Chion-in, and was a regular visitor to Bakusen’s and Chikkyō’s residence-cum-studio at Sūtai-in. By that time Shihō was known as a local artist of great promise, thanks to his remarkable record of six out of seven Bunten submissions accepted between 1908 and 1915, a record topped only by Bakusen among the loose coterie of Higashiyama painters. Shihō recovered from his sole failed submission to the national salon, which occurred in 1914, by sending the rejected work, the Rinpa-inspired Autumn Flowers (Akigusa), to the second Inten of 1915, where it hung alongside Chikkyō’s Season of Ripening Millet. He  was also successful at the national salon that year with a Kano-school inspired screen painting titled White Plum (Hakubai), giving Shihō the very rare distinction in 1915 of showing works at both the  Inten and the Bunten.17 As it had done for Chikkyō, the Japan Art Institute rewarded Shihō for participating by naming him a “Friend of the Institute,” yet he, too, must have also had second thoughts about aligning himself with Taikan’s organization, and he did not submit to the Inten again.18 It was precisely because of Shihō’s phenomenal record of success at the national salon that the 1916

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose… as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony… That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it

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rejection of Giant Bamboo (Mōsōchiku), lost today, was greeted with surprise and consternation not just by Shihō but also by many of his friends and supporters, who believed the work to be one of Shihō’s finest. Ono Chikkyō was particularly chafed and alarmed to see his friend’s painting rejected, prompting him to submit an anonymous angry letter to the editors of the national art journal Chūō Bijutsu, which they printed in the December 1916 issue. “To my shock,” Chikkyō wrote, “the quality of the paintings selected for the Bunten is steadily becoming worse and worse. It is a shame that Shihō was passed over, but I cannot help feeling that he is in fact better off not participating in this year’s Bunten.” Chikkyō noted his own works were usually kept at arm’s length by the judges, that year being one of the rare exceptions when his painting was deigned good enough to be selected, “but what about next year, and the year after that? How long will the Bunten continue to deem worthy works [like ours] to be too dangerous to display?”19

Kagaku showed a strong interest in painting while still very young, but, due to the boy’s poor constitution, his birth parents felt this interest was not something they should encourage. As Murakami Yoshiko, Kagaku’s wife, later explained: [Kagaku] loved making pictures even as a boy, and often spoke of his desire to become a painter. But he was extremely weak as a child, so much so that his father frequently repeated, “He will be lucky if he lives to see thirty-five.” His father and mother were afraid he would succumb all the sooner if he were allowed to become a painter.22

Kagaku’s new stepfather thought differently, for Murakami Gorōbei was an amateur Nanga painter who strongly supported the boy’s precocious interest in painting; indeed, it was his uncle who suggested the art name “Kagaku” to his adopted son, and perhaps out of gratitude and affection for his uncle, he used this name exclusively for the entirety of his career. As Kagaku grew, his talent and proclivity for painting became increasingly apparent, to the point where Kagaku began to attend meetings of his stepfather’s local literati painting circle, where he frequently delighted the participants with demonstrations of his developing but already prodigious brush skills.23 Kagaku finished secondary school in 1903, after which his stepfather allowed Kagaku to enroll in the School of Arts and Crafts. Yet even as his stepfather agreed to send Kagaku to the painting school, he was adamant in his opposition to Kagaku  becoming a full-time artist. “Please teach my son how to paint,” Kagaku recalled him saying to the school’s teachers as he stood listening, “but understand that I do not intend to let him become a professional artist. He can paint in his leisure time, but I will not allow him to earn a living through his paintings.”24 Perhaps his antiprofessionalism stance may have been rooted in Murakami Gorōbei’s commitment to the literati ideal of artistic amateurism, but whatever his stepfather’s reasons may have been, Kagaku originally had every intention of respecting his wishes. “But

murakami kagaku: painting the profane and the sacred Murakami Kagaku, originally named Takeda Shin’ichi, was born in Osaka into a once-prestigious family that traced its lineage to Takeda Nobuyoshi (1128–1186), a famous military commander of the late Heian period. Little trace of this prestigious family history remained by the time Kagaku was born, however, and he was initially raised in severely straitened circumstances by parents who eked out a poor living as peddlers at Osaka’s Tenma Tenjin night market.20 From infancy Kagaku suffered from a weak constitution, and concern for his health convinced his parents in 1901 to send him to live with an uncle, a prosperous Kobe merchant named Murakami Gorōbei (?—1926). Kagaku’s natural father, Takeda Akimitsu, died just months later in 1901, his health ravaged by the effects of poverty and alcoholism, at which point his uncle adopted Kagaku as his son and heir, and his family name was legally changed to “Murakami.”21 99

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rap on the door. Kagaku was standing without, and they watched his finger trace the kanji character for “gold” (kin) on the door’s glass window pane and then point at his own grinning face, as if to say they had given him a gold medal. In fact, Kagaku had just found out his submission had been rejected. According to Kobayashi such behavior was typical for Kagaku at that time, for although he applied himself diligently in his studies, he never seemed to take the competitive side of the artist’s vocation, particularly juried exhibitions, very seriously.26 Kagaku’s professional nonchalance may have developed partly out of personal experience, which taught him that a single artwork could evoke very different reactions from different evaluating bodies. For example, in 1913 Kagaku submitted a painting entitled Hirano to the Bunten, where it was rejected, yet the following year the very same work, retitled Evening Cherry Blossoms (Yozakura no zu, Figure 56), won third prize at the first All-Japan Fine and Industrial Art Exhibition (Zenkoku Bijutsu Kōgeihin-ten).27 Chikkyō later recalled viewing this painting when the exhibition came to Kyoto, and how delighted he and Bakusen had been by it, so much so that they became determined to seek out the artist responsible for Evening Cherry Blossoms and invite him into their Higashiyama circle.28 Evening Cherry Blossoms celebrates a custom associated with Kyoto’s Hirano Shrine, famous for the beauty of its flowering cherry trees since as early as the Heian period. Even today the shrine attracts large crowds of admirers when the trees are in bloom. During the Edo period, a practice developed in which the grounds of the shrine were converted during cherry blossom season into a flower-viewing festival and night-carnival, with braziers lit to illuminate the pink and white flowers. This is the theme featured in Kagaku’s Evening Cherry Blossoms, but just as is often the case in actual flower-viewing parties, the crowd focuses much more intently on food, drink, singing, and enjoying the special ambience of the night viewing. Evening Cherry Blossoms provides an historical genre study of Edo-period activities,

as time passed, a desirable alternative [to a painting career] failed to present itself. At the same time, I knew I would never be satisfied if I remained nothing more than an idle son of a wealthy family.” For this reason, the more he continued his studies, the more determined he became to succeed as a professional artist.25 During this period at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts, Kagaku became close to several classmates, including Sakakibara Shihō, with whom he developed a life-long friendship. After graduation, Kagaku enrolled alongside Shihō at the Kyoto Specialized Painting School, finishing the standard course and graduating as a member of the school’s first class. As a student, he set aside his childhood interest in Nanga and focused on mastering the shasei-based Shijō tradition. His stylistic interests expanded even further during his second period of schooling at the Specialized School for Painting, where Kagaku and Shihō developed a close student-mentor relationship with Nakai Sōtarō. By the time of his graduation in 1911, Kagaku’s repertoire had expanded to accommodate an eclectic range of artistic influences, including Ukiyo-e and East Asian Buddhist art, as well as Italian late medieval painting, Post-Impressionism, and perhaps most unexpectedly, the art of William Blake (1757–1827). Kagaku’s Bunten record was less extensive than the other painters linked to the Higashiyama circle, consisting of only four works selected over a decade’s worth of submissions to the national salon between 1907 and 1917. His disappointment at the  national salon may have been offset by his local success at the Shinkoten, where he showed works every year from 1908 until the last Shinkoten of 1913. According to Kobayashi Wasaku, another life-long friend, Kagaku’s frequent rejection by the Bunten judges never seemed to trouble him unduly, and he was even known to joke about it. For example, Kobayashi recalled the day the selections for the first Bunten were announced in 1907. He had gathered to wait for word on the judging results with several other students in a classroom at the School for Fine Arts and Crafts, when they heard a 100

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56 Murakami Kagaku, Evening Cherries, 1913. Color on silk; two-panel folding screen. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

Evening Cherry Blossoms demonstrates the artist’s keen interest in Ukiyo-e prints and its associated culture, which, according to Irie Hakō, Kagaku began to develop around 1911, the year they graduated from the Kyoto Specialized Painting School. At that time Kagaku and Hakō were roommates, and they would often go together to used book stalls at the city’s night markets in search of cheap woodblock prints and illustrated books, returning home with the treasures they had found and poring over them late into the night. Kagaku and Hakō

appearances, and manners on such occasions, from the private parties of lounging revelers in the painting’s fore, surrounded by picnic boxes, dishes of food and cups of sake, to the strolling couples and individuals in the mid-ground, who seem more intent on studying each other than on admiring the flowers. At the top of the painting, the background simmers with the pink-orange glow of distant lamps and burning braziers, suggesting that similar revels are unfolding all over the wide grounds of Hirano shrine. 101

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supplemented their incomes by painting Kabuki theater signs, and the Edo-period books and prints they collected became important sources for their billboard compositions.29 Their influence is also easily discernable in Evening Cherry Blossoms, for Kagaku infused the painting with his studied knowledge of Ukiyo-e. For example, the proportions of the figures, Kagaku’s narrow, delicate rendering of their hands, and the period clothing and hair styles all suggest the designs of Suzuki Harunobu (c.1725–1770) and his followers to have been an important source. Furthermore, Harunobu created multiple night scenes in which a courtesan is shown viewing cherry blossoms by the light of a bonbori lamp (Figure 57), any number of which serve as excellent candidates as possible referents for Kagaku’s Evening Cherry Blossoms. Kagaku finally managed to reverse his streak of Bunten rejections (at least temporarily) in 1916, when his Buddhist-themed Amitābha (Amida, Figure 58) was “selected with distinction,” the new award designation that replaced ranked prizes. Kagaku’s turn from very secular, Ukiyo-e inspired imagery to religious subjects seems a startling change, but it is in fact consistent with the wideranging interests he pursued in the 1910s, which included both Western and Eastern religious imagery as well as Japanese prints. Amitābha, a large painting measuring more than two meters in height, features an unconventional interpretation of a Buddhist subject known in Japanese as raigō, or “welcoming descent,” which depicts the Buddha of the West entering the human realm in order to accompany the soul of a dying devotee back to his paradise. Kagaku includes a full retinue of bodhisattvas, deva maidens, and celestial musicians accompanying the Buddha, suggesting the blessed deceased (the viewer) is of high religious or social status. The entire company sweeps through the air toward the viewer on clouds like billowing  waves, emphasizing the immense speed of their flight. Compositionally speaking, the Asuka era (538–710) Hōryūji temple murals (Figure 37)

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Suzuki Harunobu, Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Night, about 1766. Color woodblock print. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

undoubtedly served among the many and diverse pictorial sources Kagaku studied for Amitābha, a fact observed by several reviewers of the 1916 Bunten.30 However, in terms of style and overall atmosphere, the painting reflects the influence of several non-Japanese sources, such as a Tibetan thangka painting of the seventeenth or eighteenth century in the collection of the Tokyo School of Art, which Kagaku studied and copied in 1912 (Figure 59).31 There are also areas of stylistic overlap in the late fifth century image of the Bodhisattva Padmapani from Cave 1 from the Buddhist complex in Ajanta, India, of which Kagaku

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produced a study in 1916, probably modeled on published photographs (Figure 60). Kagaku’s own writing, however, suggests another, unexpected source for Amitābha, namely, William Blake. Kagaku did not express his interest in and admiration for the English artist and poet by integrating elements from any specific works

Murakami Kagaku, Amida, 1916. Color on silk; framed. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

or designs by Blake. Instead, Blake appears to have provided Kagaku with a prototype of how an artist might best address spiritual concerns in one’s creative practice. Hints of this admittedly oblique reference can be found in an essay Kagaku wrote in the mid-1920s in which he looked back at the previous decade and recalled the

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59 Murakami Kagaku, copy of 17th/18th century Tibetan thangka painting, 1912. Ink, color on paper. University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts.

various areas of artistic inquiry he pursued after graduating from the Kyoto Specialized Painting School:

Kagaku’s idea that William Blake’s philosophy and Heian-era esoteric Buddhism shared complimentary characteristics seems fanciful, to say the least, but Kagaku may have been thinking of Blake and Mikkyō with broader considerations of art’s function as a tool for spiritual or religious practice. Furthermore, his view of Blake as an artist-cum-mystic has much to do with the context particular to the introduction of the English artist-poet to Japan in the 1910s. The first critical biography of Blake, authored by Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961), appeared in a dedicated issue of Shirakaba published in April 1914, and historians of art and literature have

For a long while I was fascinated by Ukiyo-e, then I experimented with Western-style painting for another lengthy period. After that, I studied Christian art of the late medieval period, and I learned a great deal from this. Yet the artist I loved most was the mystic poet Blake. At that time, I was an admirer of East Asian esoteric Buddhism, particularly that of Kōnin era (810–824), and I felt that Blake and Mikkyō, the mystical branch of Buddhism, were complimentary.32

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60 Murakami Kagaku, Ajanta mural study, 1916. Ink, color on paper. Private collection.

“the quintessential Meiji Buddhist icon.”35 Yet modern religious-themed paintings like Hōgai’s were not intended for worship. They were, first and foremost, works of art, and as such they were not intended to illustrate or reflect orthodox religious doctrine, but rather to demonstrate the potential of art to function on the spiritual level, partly through the realization of beauty. In 1919, Kagaku wrote an essay entitled “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Buddhist Images” (Butsuzō zakkan), in which he offered his thoughts on the occasion of viewing at Kamakura-period sculpture of Arya Avalokitêśvara (J.: Shō Kannon) owned by Kyoto’s Kuramadera temple. Kagaku greatly admired this image, and wrote, “If I owned this sculpture, I would worship it unrelentingly.” Yet the impulse for this ecstatic reverence was entirely aesthetic: he compares the image of the Bodhisattva to a

commented on how Yanagi’s interest in Buddhism, influenced in part by Suzuki Daisetsu’s (1870– 1966) humanism-infused philosophy of Zen, colored his interpretation of Blake, his art, and his poetry.33 Yanagi propagated an image of Blake as an artist-seer in whom the ideals of spirituality and modernism (insofar as Romanticism was considered an important aspect of artistic modernity in Japan at the time) were successfully merged.34 It was this version of Blake that Kagaku would have come to know in the pages of Shirakaba. By the mid-1880s, premodern Buddhist art had received an aesthetic reevaluation in Japan, one of the fruits of which was Kano Hōgai’s important modernist re-imagining of traditional Buddhist icon painting in his two versions of Kannon as Compassionate Mother (Hibo Kannon, 1883 and 1888), an image that Martin Collcutt has described as 105

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Greek or Roman Venus, and identifies its physical beauty as the source of its power to overwhelm and spiritually transport him, leaving him convinced that “art and religion are, in fact, the same, indivisible thing.”36 Kagaku’s worshipful admiration (verging on fetishism) of his favorite Buddhist icon has parallels in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, but also in a tale from Record of Miraculous Stories of Japan (Nihon Ryōiki), a compendium of Buddhist-themed tales (setsuwa) compiled in the year 822. The story in question tells of a Buddhist layman who falls in love with a superb clay sculpture of Lakshmi (Japanese: Kichijōten). He worships the image incessantly, begging the beautiful goddess for a woman just as beautiful and the opportunity to satisfy his ardor. Finally his persistence and passion compels the statue to animate and allow the man to gratify his lust.37 Commenting on this story, art historian Yashiro Yukio notes that any maker of religious art who becomes too single-mindedly focused on corporeal beauty (nikutaibi) inevitably commits a similar kind of moral transgression, and destroys the artwork’s potential to function properly on the spiritual level.38 It is likely that Kagaku, too, was aware of this story (it is one of the most famous of this compendium), and he, too, noted the problems facing modern artists living and working   in what could certainly be described as a decadent age. “Are modernism and Buddhism in concordance,” he wondered, “or is Buddhism’s spiritual message negated by the sensuality of the modern age?”39 Amitābha was Kagaku’s answer to this question, the first of many responses to come.

or integrating select aspects of oil painting. The two artists’ positions vis-à-vis the arts establishment, however, were antithetical, for where Bakusen chose to work inside the national exhibition system, Banka opted to work entirely outside of it. When in 1918 a reporter asked him to explain his blank history at the Bunten, Banka replied that he had always accepted as a foregone conclusion that the government-appointed judges would never sympathize with any of his paintings. “I felt it was useless for me to submit works to the Bunten, as futile as throwing eggs against a rock cliff… I did not resent the judges or their standards of evaluation, I was simply aware that a vast gulf separated me from the Bunten.”40 Banka was born Nonagase Mitsuo, third son to a family of land-owning farmers in Nakaheji, Wakayama prefecture. His father and mother supported his youthful ambition to study painting, and enrolled him at the age of fifteen in the juku of the Osaka-based Maruyama-school painter Nakagawa Rogetsu (1859–1924), where he mastered basic brushwork skills and learned the fundamentals of the shasei-based Maruyama tradition.41 Rogetsu graduated Banka after four years, but realizing his potential, and aware of the fact that Banka wished to continue his studies in Kyoto, the teacher provided his student with a letter of introduction to Taniguchi Kōkyō (1864–1916), an influential Shijōschool painter in Kyoto who, along with Takeuchi Seihō, was considered one of Kōno Bairei’s most important followers and a senior member of the Kyoto Nihonga world.42 Kōkyō accepted Banka into his juku, but according to Wadaka Nobuji, Banka’s biographer, the young painter spent very little time there, usually showing up only for required jukuwide monthly meetings.43 In 1909, when Kōkyō was hired to teach at the new Kyoto Municipal Specialized Painting School, most of his senior students sat for the entrance examination, including Banka, who was accepted into the two-year practicum study course. It was also around this time that he adopted the art name “Banka,” which, according to Wadaka, he chose himself, after the name of a favorite flower.44

nonagase banka: testing the limits of tradition To a degree, the early painting practice of Nonagase   Banka resembles that of Tsuchida Bakusen, insofar that both artists specialized in figure painting, and both of their careers were marked at stages by strong interest in exploring the expressive potential of mineral pigments by means of referencing 106

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known as Shichi-go-san, when children of seven, five and three years of age are taken with their families to pay formal visits at local shrines. Girls in Drawstring Coats is probably an illustration of this festival, and features the kinds of colorful garments associated with this occasion. They explode with pigment, their abstract patterns recalling the loose brushwork of Pierre-August Renoir (1841–1919) and other Impressionists. Banka’s selection of materials was also unusual, for he chose Western watercolors   for the straw yellows, light reds and pale greens, as well as imported European cobalt pigment for the rich blue tones. His use of such unconventional colors made a strong impression on Banka’s peers, including Ono Chikkyō, who later recalled how he and Bakusen decided to seek out Banka and make his acquaintance after viewing Girls in Drawstring Coats, excited and intrigued as they were by the new possibilities for color in Nihonga made manifest in Banka’s painting.47 Of course Banka was not the first artist to utilize Western-imported pigments in this manner. Kano Hōgai was known to have utilized French watercolor pigments in his execution of Kannon as Compassionate Mother, and we previously learned that Takeuchi Seihō invented a new kind of ink by mixing imported Western sepia with gold powder, which he utilized liberally in his Lions of 1901. Few artists, however, had put imported pigments to such flamboyant use as Banka did in Girls in Drawstring Coats, and the Kyoto Nihonga world seems to have been fairly evenly divided between those who admired his experimental vision and artistic daring, and those who deplored his willingness to take such outrageous liberties with Japan’s received painting tradition. Among those who disapproved of this painting was the artist’s own former mentor, Taniguchi Kōkyō, who publically admonished Banka in a newspaper review of the exhibition in the following terms:

For reasons that are not known today, Banka dropped out of the Specialized Painting School after completing his first year, making him the sole founding member of the Kokuga Society who was not part of the school’s first graduating class. Banka’s decision to end his institutional education should not be interpreted as a lack of seriousness of purpose, however, for his school records show he produced a total of 257 works, including drawings, during his single year enrolled as a practicum student. While Wadaka suggests financial problems may have been at the root of his departure from the school,45 it is also likely that Banka simply grew tired of being a student, and was eager to make his mark as a fully-fledged painter on the Kyoto art world. The year after he left school, Banka marked his debut at the 1910 Shinkoten with a work entitled Caught by the Teacher (Sensei ni mirarete). The painting, lost today, evoked comparisons with Bakusen’s similarly themed Punishment from two years earlier, but otherwise raised little comment. His next contribution to the Shinkoten the following year made a much larger impression, and established his reputation as an experimental young painter worthy of notice. The painting in question, a framed work entitled Girls in Drawstring Coats (Hifu kitaru shojo, Figure 61), was selected the year that the Shinkoten moved to the newly constructed Center for Trade and Industry in Okazaki park. This venue had a smaller capacity than its previous location, requiring stricter judging; in 1910, forty-one paintings were given bronze medals, the highest award for which paintings were eligible, compared to only five in 1911, with Girls in Drawstring Coats included among this small number of prizewinners that year.46 Banka’s painting features several young girls and a toddler dressed in hifu, a smock-like garment with a drawstring neckline. Originally worn by men as a fashionable alternative to haori coats in the late Edo era, by the 1910s hifu were almost exclusively associated with the colorful formal kimono ensemble worn by young girls, particularly on the occasion of the coming-of-age festival

Nonagase’s Girls in Drawstring Coats is not as fine a painting as its initial excited reception suggests. It is true

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61

Nonagase Banka, Girls in Drawstring Coats, 1911. Color, watercolor on silk; framed. Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

that there appears to be something new and fresh in

The garments show us that there are possibilities for

his way of using color for the garments, but this is only

new kinds of color application. Also, one can read the

because he used watercolors, and chose cobalt blue in-

various personalities of each of the girls as they stand in

stead of the traditional ultramarine. I wonder how this

their [differently patterned] coats, and in this Banka has

work would appear if it had been created with pigments

successfully captured the feeling of the modern. The

with any real substance to them.48

only problem I found is in his handling of the faces. I feel the expressions are a bit indistinct; if they had been han-

Takeuchi Seihō, however, countered this bad press with a strongly positive evaluation of his own, applauding Banka’s inventive use of pigments and endorsing his painting as one of the few works in the entire exhibition worthy of careful study.

dled with a bit more skill, the painting would undoubtedly appeal to more viewers. Last year this artist showed some strength with a painting of a young student standing in front of a school blackboard. That work was not unlike Bakusen’s Punishment, but this painting is

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Banka was encouraged by Yumeji’s example to explore a similarly wide range of self-expressive avenues, the results of which went on display in January 1916 at the “Hanazono-sponsored Banka Exhibition” (Hanazono Shusai Banka Sakuhinten), a three-day event organized by the local art journal  Hanazono. The journal also produced a curious  commemorative document in the form of a pamphlet, part promotional material, part exhibition review, which is the most comprehensive record of the exhibition and its content available today. The pamphlet noted the wide variety of art works on display, including Nihonga and Yōga, painted kimono, chiyogami-e (mosaic-like pictures composed from cut or torn colored paper), and yaki-e (pyrographic pictures), and characterized the show as “a courageous art exhibit produced by a rather eccentric member of the Kyoto art world, one that reveals [Banka’s] strengths, and demonstrates his status as an artist worthy of careful and serious consideration.”50 Unfortunately very few works featured in the Hanazono-sponsored Banka Exhibition are known today; indeed, so few of Banka’s paintings survive from the 1910s that it is difficult to judge the nature of his Nihonga paintings from this period, other than to glean what descriptions we can from contemporaneous reports and reviews. One of Banka’s

radically different from anything else I have seen. I have the great hopes for this artist in the future.49

Not long after his successful exhibition of Girls in Drawstring Coats, Banka made the acquaintance of the Tokyo-based artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884– 1934), who became a close friend and informal mentor to the younger painter, serving Banka as an exemplar of an artist who managed a successful career while remaining on the fringe of the arts establishment. Primarily known today for his painting in both the Yōga and Nihonga formats, Yumeji was also an illustrator, a designer, a poet, and a lyricist who actively cultivated the image of a renaissance man by refusing to restrict himself to a single media. Yumeji spent time in Kyoto in autumn of 1912 in preparation for his first solo exhibition in that city, and was probably introduced to Banka through their mutual friend Hada Teruo, a Nihonga painter and participant in Tanaka Kisaku’s Chat Noir group who met Banka during the latter’s student days in Osaka (Figure 62). Yumeji’s exhibition ran at the Okazaki Kyoto Prefectural Library from November 23 to December 2, dates that coincided precisely with the Bunten’s exhibition in Kyoto that year, a fact that lent the event an antiestablishment character completely in keeping with Yumeji’s bohemian image.

62 Photograph of Hada Teruo (left), Nonagase Banka (center), and Takehisa Yumeji (right), circa 1917. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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few works from that time that survives to exemplify his radical potential is a six-paneled folding screen entitled Combatants (Tatakaeru hito, Figure 63). This painting was featured in a 1916 joint exhibition of Nihonga works by Banka and Tokunaga Kakusen, the Ruskin scholar and co-founder of the Nameless Society (Figure 64), held at Kyoto’s recently established Shijō Club (Shijō Kurabu). Modeled after such Western precedents as the Arts Club of London, Shijō Club was designed to function as a social hub where artists and patrons and supporters of the arts could mingle. A small gallery space was also provided for the use of members, and the Banka-Kakusen show served as Shijō Club’s first exhibition.51 Of all the works on display there, Combatants made the deepest impression on Nakai Sōtarō, who later recorded the circumstances surrounding its genesis:

suddenly interrupted by the sound of a male voice raining abuse on someone, followed by a woman’s crying. “A quarrel,” we thought, and suddenly two figures came into view, a large man and a woman who were simultaneously striking and clinging to each other. The sight of these two people battling each other in this way deeply affected Banka, and struck with an urgent inspiration he was unable to suppress, he flew to his studio, where he worked the rest of the night. The result of these labors was the painting Combatants.52

Combatants appears to viewers as a chaotic, writhing mass of human forms, their nudity depicted with a bold frankness hitherto rarely seen in Nihonga painting. The center of the composition is dominated by a scene of male figures enmeshed in a savage brawl, whose combat extends to the left and beyond the edge of the painting. The naked bodies are twisted and contorted as they grapple and pummel each other, and we witness the horrific consequences of this violence in the form of a bloodied and broken body lying in the bottom center of the screen. This brutalized corpse is flanked by two prostrate figures who seem to be reeling from

I do not recall exactly when it was, but one night a group of us were returning home after a bout of heavy drinking. We had paused to rest under a gas light, feeling the cold of the winter’s evening and listening to the sound of passing footsteps. This quiet and lonely night was

63

Nonagase Banka, Combatants, 1916. Ink, light color on paper; six-panel folding screen. Hoshino Garō, Kyoto.

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64 Photograph taken at the Kakusen-Banka Exhibition held at Kyoto’s Shijō Club in 1916. Kakusen is seated in the center; Banka stands on the far right. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

famous Scream was reproduced in the April 1912 issue of Shirakaba. Furthermore, in terms of style, Combatants seems closely indebted to the Fauvist paintings of Henri Matisse, an example of which, La coiffure of 1907, appeared in Shirakaba in January 1913 (Figure 33), as discussed earlier in conjunction with Bakusen’s Abalone Divers. Banka used a similar method of rendering human figures to that used by Matisse, insofar as both rejected naturalism in favor of defining figures by means of thick, loose black outlines, and modeling their body contours with only a nominal nod to light sources. Then there is the matter of Banka’s execution. The typical process of developing a Nihonga painting has several steps: first the generation of sketches to form the building blocks of a composition, then the production of a scale shita-e mock-up study in

bleeding wounds to their heads, while to their left, we see the inert form of one combatant, either senseless or dead, being hauled out of the fray. Banka included a group of women in the right side of the composition, including a young mother protecting her infant child, who offer a wide range of reactions to the violence, from grief and terror to grim satisfaction. Combatants is a highly unusual work for several reasons, the first of which is the fact that Nihonga was not typically associated in the early twentieth century with purely conceptual subjects. Combatants is based on an idea with no traceable presence in Japan’s received painting traditions, rather its closest conceptual parallels can perhaps be found in works by Western symbolists, particularly the self-consciously morbid art of Edvard Munch (1863–1944), whose lithograph version of the 111

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order to determine the placement of elements, brush lines and color, and finally the transfer of the completed pictorial scheme to a prepared ground, where it is carefully executed. For Combatants, however, Banka seems to have entirely ignored this sequence, and appears to have taken charcoal or pencil in hand and worked out the painting’s composition spontaneously, in a flurry of quickly executed gestures. Many superfluous lines remain unapologetically present in the finished work, clearly visible through watercolor washes blended directly on the painting surface, a strategy that allowed Banka to work with the desired quickness and immediacy but resulted in a streaky, mottled appearance. The painting, from start to finish, looks to have been driven entirely by impulse, an impression confirmed by Nakai’s anecdote of an inspiration-struck Banka working ceaselessly through the night. Combatants is not beautiful, nor was it intended to be. It is the aftermath of pure and raw emotional expression, as violent as the scene it illustrates. As such, it represents an outright rejection of two principles with which Kyoto Nihonga was intimately associated, namely decorative elegance and consummate brush technique. All the painters associated with the Higashiyama circle expressed an interest in modernist Western painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it was Banka who most directly quoted their work in formal terms, and did so with a disregard for traditional notions of aesthetics that verged on nihilistic. As we will see, Banka continued to explore this direction over the subsequent decade, questioning the conventional notions of aesthetics with which Nihonga had hitherto been associated, pressing against the artificial media-defined limits that often inhibited pure artistic expression.

we see that their paintings appear wildly dissimilar, yet they recognized in each other’s work a commitment to the priorities and principles of modernism as strong as their own. Indeed it was this mutual respect for artistic diversity that encouraged them to resist the homogenized and uninspiring model of contemporary Nihonga provided by the Bunten.53 In April 1917, Bakusen wrote to Nomura during a sketching excursion in Wakayama, in which he voiced his intention to prioritize his own artistic growth over artificial benchmarks of professional success, including recognition at the Bunten. “I must develop a closer devotion to nature,” he wrote. “Garnering approval at the Bunten really has become a frivolous concern. From this point on, I am going to face in the direction of my heart’s deepest desire, and carry on painting in my own way.”54 This, however, did not mean Bakusen was ready to withdraw from the national salon entirely, for he was contemplating his next submission to the Bunten, a bird-and-flower work, even as he wrote those lines. A few weeks later, Bakusen traveled to Tokyo with the goal of studying the art collection of Nezu Kaichirō (1860–1940), an industrialist who owned several fine examples of Chinese landscapes and bird-and-flower works dating to the Ming and Qing eras. Bakusen also spent several days at the Tokyo National Museum similarly immersed in study of the Chinese paintings there, and on his return to Kyoto, he sent the following report to Nomura: I spent every day at the museum studying Chinese paintings. The more I study Chinese paintings, the more insignificant works painted by Japanese artists begin to appear to me. I am thinking of submitting a bird-andflower work to the Bunten this year, but as I have not yet announced this to anyone, please keep this information secret. My initial plan was to submit a pair of six-panel screens featuring an old woman standing among bud-

results of the 1917 bunten

ding persimmon trees, but the composition became too unwieldy in places, and I got tired of it… I now have a

After this cursory examination of the Higashiyama circle and their works of the early and middle 1910s,

much greater purpose in mind, and so whether or not the judges approve, and even if critics laugh, I intend to

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Bunten painting confidential.58 Bakusen’s request for complete secrecy may reflect a conscious desire to surprise the Bunten’s judges, the critics, and the exhibition-going public with this new thematic direction, but it may also reflect Bakusen’s apprehension at working in this unfamiliar territory, and anxiety that his desire to demonstrate his range as a painter could backfire, resulting in the rejection of his composition. The resulting painting, Spring Birds in Clear Weather (Shunkin chinsei), is lost today, but a surviving photograph gives us an idea today how the painting appeared before the Bunten judges in 1917 (Figure 65). As Bakusen had suggested in his letters, the work consists of a pair of two-paneled screens, featuring a Japanese camellia on the leftside screen and a flowering pear on the right, with biwa trees, bamboo, and several species of birds scattered across the screens’ surfaces. Ono Chikkyō later recalled the work:

paint a profound bird-and-flower work… From this point on, I am going to follow my true path. My ambition is not to become fashionable  at the Bunten, but to finally arrive one day as a great painter.55

Bakusen’s survey of Chinese academic-style paintings continued after his return home. He visited Nanzenji, an important Zen temple in Kyoto, and sketched the sparrows, jays, and flowering camellia trees lavishly rendered on the sliding screens there by artists of the seventeenth century Kano School.56 He also turned to photographs, as suggested in a letter of thanks he sent in May to another patron, Seki Shinjirō, for sending him a photo of a flowering pear tree, without which, he remarks, he would never have been able to include pear blossoms in his Bunten painting that year.57 Bakusen wrote to Nomura one more time that year in August, when he noted that the painting would be somewhat smaller in scale than his usual Bunten submissions, but size notwithstanding, it was still proving be one of the most complex compositions he had ever attempted. The letter closes with yet another appeal to Nomura to keep all knowledge of his

The painting took Song and Yuan academic bird-andflower compositions as its point of departure, with Bakusen using a slightly wider line for the outlines than

65 Tsuchida Bakusen, Spring Birds in Clear Weather, 1917. Work no longer extant. Source: Tōei, vol. 12 no. 7 (July 1936).

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The Bunten jury accepted Break in the Rainy Season for exhibition, but like Bakusen’s work, it too was passed over for any additional awards. Chikkyō and Kagaku both had greater cause for complaint that year, since neither of their Bunten submissions was accepted in 1917. Chikkyō’s painting, a two-paneled screen entitled Scenery of My Native Home (Kyōdo fūkei, Figure 67), further explored the combined influence of Nanga and Post-Impressionism, a direction that had proved so personally rewarding, and was popular with exhibition audiences and critics in the past. Nevertheless, his submission did not pass muster with the jurors that year. Kagaku submitted a figural work entitled White-haired Old Man (Hakutō’ō), which is lost today, and about which little is known.61 For both of these artists’ works to be selected with distinction by the Bunten jury in 1916, only to see their submissions rejected outright the following year must have come as a shock, and underscored the government-appointed jury’s growing reputation as a temperamental and even unreliable judiciary. In fact, of all the painters associated with the

these sources, giving the forms a weightier appearance. The colors were exquisite, creating a brilliantly decorative patterned appearance for the birds. This amazing painting ended up being accepted, yet it was denied any special recognition, a result that made Bakusen livid with anger.59

Sakakibara Shihō’s Bunten painting that year, entitled Break in the Rainy Season (Tsuyubare, Figure 66), also featured a bird-and-flower theme, showing a stand of bamboo, a fruiting plum tree, and a single turtledove. Shihō recalled this painting almost twenty years later, and described the circumstances behind its creation: I was in a lonely bamboo grove at the rear of an Uji tea plantation in the damp and humid weather of the rainy season. The bright sun of early summer sparkled as it set, and moisture was thick in the air. I felt the pulse of life all around me, and just as I was experiencing these joys of nature, a turtledove flew into view, a felicitous sign. The work expresses a kind of stillness in motion, symbolizing the inner life of nature.60

66 Sakakibara Shihō, Break in the Rainy Season, 1917. Color on silk; pair of two-panel screens. Private collection. Source: Kanzaki Ken’ichi, Kyoto ni okeru Nihongashi, Kyoto Seiban Insatsusha, 1929.

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67 Ono Chikkyō, Scenery of My Native Home, 1917. Color on silk; two-panel folding screen. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Higashiyama circle, only Nonagase Banka managed to avoid disappointment at the national salon in 1917, but only because he maintained his steadfast indifference to the Bunten and declined to submit, as he had done annually in the decade since the exhibition’s founding in 1907. As had become his custom, Bakusen wrote a letter to Nomura Itsushi directly following the Bunten’s opening, offering his description of the galleries and his impressions of the works on display. On this occasion, the anger and bitterness that so vividly colored his previous reports were largely missing, replaced with a sad resignation that the national salon appeared to be beyond redemption:

carnival of this year’s Bunten, it was almost heartrending. Of course I knew when I selected [a bird-andflower] theme that it would be stuck in some lonely corner this year and laughed at…. Besides my own work, Tsuji Kakō’s and Sakakibara Shihō’s are the only ones I sympathized with. Real art, such as Ono’s and Murakami’s paintings, is not being accepted, and now the Bunten devalues works as expressive of artistic character as Tsuji’s and Shihō’s paintings [by not awarding them prizes]. Clearly the time has come to distance ourselves. In the next two or three days, Ono, Murakami, Sakakibara, Nonagase and I plan on getting together and talking things over. This is the year I finally give up on the Bunten, and for that reason I feel at peace. The next Bunten is certain to be a hollow affair [without us]… As a result of our meeting, next year

The results of the judging were so comical this time

the four or five of us will either form an independent

that I did not feel any resentment at all. My painting

exhibition group, like the Nika Society, or we will go to

looks so calm and composed on display amidst the

the Inten.62

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the formation of the kokuga society

painting instructor at his alma mater. Concerned about the repercussions of joining a group with an anti-establishment agenda, he was reluctant to take a prominent role, although he promised to submit a painting to the group’s first exhibition for their evaluation.64 In the end, just the five core members of the Higashiyama circle, Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, Sakakibara Shihō, Nonagase Banka and Murakami Kagaku, participated in the founding of the new exhibition collective. In fact, it was nearly four, for Kagaku, like Hakō, was initially concerned about being mislabeled a radical or extremist, and worried the cost of participating in the project could result in his being outcast from the art world at large.65 One of his close counselors, a wealthy wholesaler of kimono fabric named Naiki Seibei (1878–1955) who was well connected in the Kyoto art world, cautioned Kagaku about the complexities of working within a group dynamic. Furthermore, Naiki expressed his concerns about Bakusen’s role in the new group, for he worried that Bakusen’s forceful personality and personal ambition would eventually dominate any organization with which he was associated.66 According to Ono Chikkyō, Kagaku was finally convinced to participate only when Nakai Sōtarō, his former teacher and mentor at the Kyoto Specialized Painting School, agreed to serve as the new group’s official advisor, and promised to mediate between members if friction arose. With Nakai’s participation assured, Chikkyō recalled, Kagaku put aside all reticence, and swiftly became one of the most active and resolutely committed participants in the project.67 Nakai understood the important role the mass media could play to promote the new group, and agreed to serve as group spokesman as well as official advisor and member of the exhibition’s selection jury. He also volunteered to establish a periodical publication to serve as the organization’s official media organ. To help in the management and running of the journal, Nakai recruited the help of oil painter and former Le Masque member Kuroda Jūtarō, then living in Osaka, as well as

In the months following the Bunten’s close, Bakusen and company put their resolution into action and began polling their peers and canvassing participants for a new Nihonga exhibition society, but gathering members from beyond the sympathetic and genial but narrow Higashiyama circle proved to be a difficult prospect. Bakusen approached the Osaka-based neo-Ukiyo-e painter Kitano Tsunetomi, a fellow participant in the second Le Masque exhibition in 1912, who expressed interest. Tsunetomi also recommended Bakusen contact Kobayashi Kokei (1883–1957) and Maeda Seison (1885–1977), two Tokyo-based Nihonga artists of Bakusen’s generation, who had also expressed their dissatisfaction with the Bunten to Tsunetomi, and who he believed might be willing to join in the endeavor.63 By 1917, Tsunetomi, Kokei and Seison had all earned strong reputations as talented, progressive painters through their regular participation in the Inten exhibition, and a consolidation of this talent with that shared amongst the Higashiyama circle would have brought together some of the most dynamic and promising young Nihonga painters active at that time in both the Kansai and Kantō regions of Japan. In the end, however, loath as they were to abandon their association with the Japan Art Institute, Tsunetomi, Kokei and Seison all turned down the invitation to participate in the new exhibition society. Bakusen and company had trouble convincing peers and colleagues much closer to home as well, and even several of their friends in the Higashiyama circle deemed the venture to be too risky. Kashino Nanyō and Takayama Seika, for example, both included in Banka’s “Idiots on Parade” caricature, are absent from the roster of founding members. Irie Hakō’s absence is even more surprising due to his close friendship with Murakami Kagaku and Sakakibara Shihō that dated back to their time as classmates at the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts. In 1917, Hakō was a recently hired 116

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Takeuchi Itsu (1891–1980), an art critic and the son of Takeuchi Seihō. The first issue of the journal, entitled Seisaku (“Art Work”), appeared in December 1918, a few months after the opening of the new association’s first exhibition (Figure 68).68 Bakusen and company also invited another friend from Le Masque, Tanaka Kisaku, who in 1917 was the owner and operator of an influential Tokyo art gallery, and who represented several important contemporary Yōga artists, including Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929) and Yasui Sōtarō. Although Tanaka declined any official affiliation, he agreed to unofficially advise and support the fledgling exhibition society, and to promote its activities among Tokyo’s journalist community.69 After Bakusen and his associates had succeeded in assembling the new exhibition society’s core members and advisor, one significant concern still remained: how would Takeuchi Seihō react to their plans? By 1917, Seihō occupied a position of significant power and influence as one of the longestsitting members of the Bunten’s selection jury, and they were well aware that their en masse defection could potentially embarrass their former teacher, and might even be viewed as a betrayal. For this reason, they met with their shared mentor and informed him of their intentions.70 To their relief, not only did Seihō approve of their plans, he applauded them, noting that there was an urgent need for painters to join forces and work outside of the current institutional structure in order to preserve freedom for the arts. In fact, he admitted  that he had long expected them to take such as step, and wondered why they had waited so long to do so.71 Furthermore, he consented to join Nakai as an official advisor to the new group, and to serve on the selection panel for their proposed juried exhibition, which Bakusen and company knew

68 Inaugural issue of the journal Seisaku, December 1918. Private collection. Photo by author.

would lend their exhibition significant critical legitimacy and guarantee a much higher degree of public visibility. Seihō’s sole request was that they not ask him to resign from his position on the Bunten jury, believing as he did that effective reform of the national salon required advocates for change working inside the Bunten as much as it needed artists like themselves applying pressure from without, a condition to which the painters readily agreed.72

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5 The Inaugural Kokuten Exhibition of 1918: Content and Contexts

T

he first kokuga society exhibition opened to great anticipation in the galleries of Tokyo’s Shirakiya department store on November 1, 1918. The show featured just twentyone paintings displayed in five spacious rooms, several of which housed only three or four works. Some noted this to be a delightful change from other salon-style exhibitions, which packed as many works as possible into insufficient exhibition  space,1 most likely a reference to the Bunten salon, which in 1918 included 351 art works. Considering the prominence of Bakusen’s role in forming the Kokuga Society, it comes as no surprise to learn that of all the works on display, his contribution, a screen painting entitled Bathhouse Maiden (Yuna, Figure 69), was the most discussed in  the exhibition reviews. For this work, Bakusen returned to the theme of public bathhouse attendants, which he had originally explored but abandoned for his 1916 Bunten submission. After the Kokuten opened, Bakusen released an artist’s statement entitled “Feelings of Voluptuousness and Repose” in which he expressed his intentions for the painting. He explained that he was deeply absorbed in studies of the Kano school

painters when he first set his mind to this theme in 1916, and had originally planned a forceful, confident composition, with a monumentality associated with the paintings of Kano Eitoku (1543–1590) or Kano Sanraku (1589–1651). “But this year, “he explained, “I felt the urge to paint something soft and tender, and in summer I decided to try my hand at an image of a voluptuous woman relaxing  peacefully in a lush natural setting.”2 The left panel of Bakusen’s painting depicts blossoming wisteria and red pine trees, with a pair of pheasants,  a cock and a hen, resting on branches above a tumbling summer rill. On the right side, a young woman, the bathhouse attendant of the title, reclines on a veranda in a red juban under-robe. She appears to be listening to the strains of a song  played by a geisha sitting in the adjoining room, a visual reference to one of the sources of inspirations for the work: a hauta, a kind of love ballad of the Edo period typically sung to the accompaniment of a shamisen. In this case the ballad describes the scenery of Arima, and details the pleasant inertia and feelings of languor generated in the relaxed settings of a mountain hot spring spa. The song lyrics are reproduced in Bakusen’s artist statement: I want to sleep under the pines, the pines of Arima

Tsuchida Bakusen, Bathhouse Maiden, 1918, detail of fig. 69.

I wish to be wrapped in wisteria and to sleep

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69 Tsuchida Bakusen, Bathhouse Maiden, 1918. Color on silk; pair of two-panel folding screens. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

the kyoto and tokyo press debuts

Wrapped in wisteria, in wisteria wrapped And then sleep, sleep amidst the tender flowers of Arima3

After Bakusen and company had assembled the membership of their new Nihonga collective and appointed its official advisors, their next step was to strategize how best to announce their new society and communicate their intentions to the world. In the politically volatile arena of competing juried exhibitions, particularly vis-à-vis the Japan Art Institute’s Inten, the only other significant national, nongovernment Nihonga exhibition, and of course the Bunten, they knew they needed to stake out their position for themselves, or watch as journalists did it for them. Furthermore, when the role of official advising judge was taken on by Seihō, Kyoto’s most prominent painter and a senior member of the Bunten’s selection jury, the stakes were raised substantially. Now their announcement had the potential to be truly volatile, with possible wider implications regarding the stability of the national salon itself. Having watched Tanaka Kisaku use the mass media's persuasive power to maximum effect during his time with Le Masque, Bakusen knew that careful, discrete strategizing would be required

This chapter will focus on this and other art works featured in the inaugural Kokuten exhibition of 1918, with special attention paid to contemporaneous critical reception. Prior to that, however, it provides a detailed description of Bakusen and company’s activities leading up to the exhibition opening, including the crafting of the Kokuga Society Manifesto and Statement of Purpose and their efforts to raise capital among local wealthy and influential patrons of the arts. It will also cover the group’s ongoing efforts to define and manage its unfolding public identity, including the implications of the members’ decision to define themselves as painters of “kokuga,” their negotiations with members of the press regarding the public release of information on the group and its planned exhibition, and the statements authored and published by the group members themselves, in which they describe their strengths and weaknesses, their influential sources and the larger import of their own contributions to the first Kokuten. 120

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before any news of their plans was released to journalists. Their shock, then, must have been immense when they read an article reporting their plans in the January 13, 1918 edition of the newspaper Osaka Jiji Shinpō under the title “Kyoto Painters Raise Banner of Revolt Against Bunten Judges,” the very kind of unauthorized mass media scrutiny they had wished to avoid. The article’s gossipy tone notwithstanding, it had the potential to do the fledgling group real and serious harm, for not only did it prematurely release detailed information known only to the group members, it was also filled with errors and untruths that misrepresented their motivations. The article reads as follows:

national salon, when in fact their reasons were rooted entirely in the group’s shared perception of waxing conservativism at the Bunten at large. Kagaku records in his diary how on the day the damaging article appeared in print, a reporter from Osaka Jiji Shinpō came by his home wishing to question him further. “I was shocked and greatly surprised to learn that our secret has been leaked,” Kagaku confided, “but when the reporter began making inquiries about our manifesto, I realized the scope of the problem. It appears Seihō has been letting things slip.”6 According to Kagaku, the group decided to cope with the crisis by speaking directly to members of the press to request their restraint. The next day, Kagaku Bakusen and Chikkyō met with Kanzaki Ken’ichi of the Osaka-based Mainichi Shinbun newspaper, an influential critic and reporter with strong connections to the local art world,7 and with two other journalists associated with the Asahi Shinbun. The group’s representatives pointed out that the Osaka Jiji Shinpō article had not only announced their plans prematurely, but it also contained many inaccuracies that now needed correction, and they implored the journalists to refrain from causing further damage by publishing any stories about their movement until after their official press conference, which, considering the pressing need to repair the damage as soon as possible, they hastily scheduled to take place in two days time.8 Much of what we know about the founding of the Kokuga Society and the progression of events leading to the group’s inaugural exhibition are gleaned from Kagaku’s diary. According to family accounts, Kagaku was not known to keep a regular daily journal during any occasion other than the crucial months leading up to the first Kokuten show, which suggests he was aware of the historical importance, at least at the personal level, of the events unfolding around him.9 The diary includes a description of the Kokuga Society’s first press conference held on January 16, 1918 at Kyoto’s Tōyōtei, a Western-style restaurant, where the group officially announced its founding, made their

Bakusen, Chikkyō, Shihō and others have formed a new anti-Bunten group, with Seihō standing behind the black curtain… Plans to raise the banner of revolt against the Bunten have been proposed in the past to no avail, but according to recent reports, these artists have a plan in the works that is near fruition… [Seihō] is at the very center of the group, and has brought together a group of painters who share similar tendencies with the intention of generating more dignity for Kyoto Nihonga and more independence from the Bunten. To learn more details, we will have to wait until the plan is made public. Perhaps this news will cause the faces of certain Tokyoites to turn pale. Yet according to the word of a particularly powerful individual, passed to us in secrecy, the attitudes of Tokyo-based judges of the Bunten, particularly those of Araki Jippō [1872–1944] and Takashima Hokkai, have long been overly callous towards Kyoto painters… But since [Bakusen and company] have already garnered the approval and promise of support from such influential artists [as Seihō], they may prove to be unstoppable.4

Bakusen and company were no doubt dismayed by the reporter’s assertion that regional bias on the part of Tokyo judges, particularly two individuals with whom Seihō was known to frequently clash,5 was the primary reason for their defection from the 121

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publicity.12 Years later, when group advisor Nakai Sōtarō recalled this event vividly, he noted that 1918 was a year of sturm und drang for Japan. Russia had recently witnessed its communist revolution, and in Japan, too, the question of class struggle was on many minds, and the emergence of numerous left-wing political movements was viewed with suspicion by authorities.13 This helps to explain the police’s disruptive appearance at the Kokuga Society’s press conference and their confiscation of the (in their minds) potentially politically subversive manifesto, when the promotion of leftist politics was the furthest thing from the minds of the Kokuga painters. The only politics they cared about were the politics driving the decisions of the Bunten jury. Similarly, it must have been with politics in mind that the Bunten’s administrators distributed a press release of their own only two days after the Kokuga Society’s initial meeting with the press, the swiftness of the response undoubtedly prompted by the news that Takeuchi Seihō, one of the Bunten’s most prominent judges, would play a prominent role on the jury of Japan’s newest nongovernment juried exhibition. The spokesman for the Ministry of Education was Masaki Naohiko, a supervisory officer at the national salon and director of the Tokyo School of Art, whose statement downplayed the potential impact and implications of the Kokuga Society’s arrival on Japan’s national art stage. He expressed doubt that the new group’s Kokuten exhibition would have any significant, lasting impact, or that their membership would expand beyond the few artists responsible for orchestrating this gesture, dismissing them as “extremists existing on the fringe of the Kyoto Nihonga world.” Most Kyoto artists were far more moderate than they, he explained, and there was little chance indeed that Kyoto’s most important painters, such as Yamamoto Shunkyo or Kikuchi Hōbun, would join their movement. Finally, Masaki emphasized the fact that Seihō’s participation was merely a gesture of moral support, and that under no circumstances would he leave the Bunten. “No matter what distractions or disruptions

membership roster public, communicated their intention to hold the inaugural exhibition in autumn of that year, and released copies of their statement of purpose and manifesto, as well as the new group’s regulations (see appendix for English translations of these documents).10 Next, the Kokuga Society founders traveled to Tokyo to hold a second press conference in the nation’s capital, scheduled to take place on January 21 at Seiyōken, another Western-style restaurant, located in Ueno. Another surprise was in store, however, for as reported in the art journal Chūō Bijutsu, just as the press conference was under way, the proceedings were dramatically interrupted by the police, who had somehow obtained a copy of the Kokuga Society manifesto, and determining its contents to be the potentially subversive, staged a raid in order to question and possibly arrest the document’s authors. Members of the press and others present managed to diffuse the situation and convince the authorities of the non-political character of the group and the innocuous intentions of their meeting. Still, the police threatened to charge the artists with distributing politically inflammatory literature unless they handed over all copies of the manifesto to them, and only after Bakusen and company had done so were they content to depart. According to the Chūō Bijutsu reporter present, the incident flustered Bakusen enough that it took him a while to becalm himself before he could deliver his opening remarks.  When he was finally able to speak, he started by assuring all gathered that nothing of this sort had occurred at their press conference in Kyoto, and confessed that he found Tokyo to be altogether too scary for him. The answering burst of laughter from the audience diffused the lingering tension, and the rest of the press conference unfolded as planned, sans distribution of the confiscated manifesto.11 In some ways the police raid of the second Kokuga Society press conference had a positive after-effect, for it guaranteed coverage of the meeting in most major media outlets, including monthly periodicals such as Chūō Bijutsu and Bijutsu Shinpō, providing the Kokuga Society with even greater 122

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may arise from their activities,” he concluded, “the Bunten will continue with no change to its established policies.”14 His measured response, however, belied serious concerns over potential damage to the Bunten’s reputation effected by this very public leave-taking by several of Kyoto’s most promising young artists, as well as the possibility that the Bunten’s Nihonga section might be further impoverished if too many talented artists chose to submit to the Kokuten instead of the national salon. Takeuchi Seihō also published a clarifying statement that confirmed his intention to remain affiliated with the Bunten despite his new role as a Kokuga Society advisor and exhibition judge. This decision, he explained, was not due to a lack of commitment on his part to the national salon, nor would it in any way undermine the Bunten, since the label “anti-Bunten” did not really apply to the Kokuga Society at all, regardless of how the mass media chose to report it. “In my mind, for a group of painters to head off on their own in this way is simply that and nothing more: an action taken by young artists in the name of freedom for the arts. I approve of them branching out into the art world in this way… and I am also compelled to promote and foster their attitude for the benefit of the arts in general, but my approval of their plans should not be viewed in any way as a statement on the Bunten and its judging.”15 A flurry of articles accompanied these statements, as reporters and critics discussed the new Nihonga collective from every possible angle. One of the most comprehensive analyses was a fourpart essay serialized in the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, entitled “New Force Opposes Bunten” and authored by art critic Murakami Bunga (no relation to Kagaku). His essay begins by recalling two early anti-Bunten protest incidents, namely, the founding of the Kokuga Perfection Society (Kokuga Gyokuseikai) in 1907, and the threatened walk-out in 1911 by Bunten judges Takashima Hokkai, Mochizuki Kinpō, Sakuma Tetsuen, and Mashizu Junnan, which we recall resulted in the temporary partitioning of the Nihonga division into two distinct sections. Murakami characterized this latter

incident as a disgraceful spectacle, “a group pout by white-haired geriatrics, all gasping for their last artistic breath,” simply because they felt their outmoded paintings did not received due recognition. On the other side of the spectrum, Murakami continued, was the Kokuga Perfection Society, founded by Okakura Tenshin, Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan and others in the wake of a public dispute among judges of the newly established Bunten exhibition. In 1907, several conservative jurists led by Komuro Sui’un (1874–1945) protested what they viewed as a stacking of the Bunten selection jury with members of the progressive Shinpa faction by seceding from the jury to establish the Fellowship of the True Way (Seiha Dōshikai), a preemptive salon des refuses intended to showcase tradition-based paintings of the sort they expected the Bunten’s progressive faction would summarily reject. The Kokuga Perfection  Society was Okakura and company’s direct response to Sui’un’s gambit, a fact emphasized by their choice of name, which connotes the intention to build upon received painting traditions.16 Unlike Sui’un, however, Okakura, Taikan and Kanzan all kept their seats on the Bunten jury while simultaneously exhibiting works with the Kokuga Perfection Society, a decision that undermined their credibility as commited exhibition reformers. As a result, the Kokuga Perfection Society dissolved only three years later after making no discernible impact on the Bunten. The new Kokuga Society, Murakami argued, stands in contrast to Okakura’s group on account of their idealistic resolve (they broke from the Bunten), and thus had the potential to succeed where the Kokuga Perfection Society failed.17 Kurodo Hōshin, another critic, made a similar observation at the time of the Kokuga Society’s first exhibition in 1918 when he mused, “By calling to themselves as creators of ‘kokuga,’ perhaps [Bakusen and company] are announcing their intention to fulfill the promises broken by [Okakura’s and Taikan’s] Kokuga Perfection Society, and which the Japan Art Institute continues to break today.”18 123

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the kokuga society name, manifesto, and statement of purpose

Art historian Satō Dōshin notes how the emergence of “kokuga” in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan  corresponds with the appearance of other words of Meiji period coinage that feature the prefix koku-, such as “kokushi” (“national history”), “kokugo” (“national language”), and “kokubungaku” (“national literature”), all of which were contained under the larger umbrella of “kokugaku” (“national studies”), a product of early Meiji-era promotion of Westernstyle learning.23 These new terms, however, did not unseat the others in the colloquial sphere; for example, “Nihongo” was still used to distinguish the written and spoken language of Japan from that of other nations, while “kokugo” referred to the analysis of the Japanese language by means of Westernderived tools of scholarship for a native Japanese audience. The point of all these branches of “national studies” was not the promotion of jingoistic agendas (although some kokugaku scholars did in fact promote such views). Rather, they reflect a Meiji-era trend described by Kitazawa Noriaki as jikoku chūshinshugi, the promotion of one’s own national culture, a corollary, perhaps, to Japan’s intensive importation of foreign ways and systems at that time.24 In short, it came to be understood that one could not truly know and appreciate Japanese culture by virtue of solely being Japanese; it required study and the interpretation of experts. By identifying themselves “painters of kokuga,” Bakusen and company did not just proclaim their  commitment to Japan’s historical painting heritage, they identified themselves as national art specialists, skilled and erudite interpreters of Japan’s painting traditions uniquely and expertly prepared to lead the nation to new heights of artistic achievement. At the official announcement of the group’s creation in January 1918, the Kokuga Society released two founding documents, the Kokuga Society Manifesto (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Sengensho), which formally outlined the group’s ideological positions for the benefit of their fellow artists and critics, and Statement of Purpose (Riyūsho), written by the members in colloquial language in order

In his later recollections of the founding of the group, Chikkyō recalled that the name Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai was initially conceived and presented to the group by Murakami Kagaku,19 yet Kagaku never offered any personal insight into his proposal, nor did any other member ever explain why the group chose to construct its name around the concept of “national painting,” or why its members identified themselves explicitly as “kokuga painters.” Nihon Kokugo Dai Jiten, one of Japan’s most comprehensive dictionaries, defines “kokuga” simply as an alternative designation for “Nihonga,”20 but empirical evidence suggests the term’s implications are more complex. First, a survey of modern periodical art literature turns up very few instances of “kokuga,” suggesting the term was used only rarely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, in the unusual instance when it was applied, it was typically a reference to Japan’s preMeiji painting heritage, in other words, the cultural legacy out of which contemporary neotraditional painting emerged and continued to be nurtured – the predecessor of modern Nihonga but not Nihonga itself.21 The earliest instance of twentieth century Japanese artists identifying themselves explicitly as “kokuga painters” came in July 1904, when a group calling itself the Kokuga Association (Kokugakai) held an eponymous exhibition at Tokyo’s Ueno  Park exposition center, featuring new works by the sibling Nihonga painters Otake Chikuha (1878–1936) and Otake Kokkan (1880– 1945).22 In this case, the group may have chose this name to invoke patriotism, since the Kokugakai Picture Exhibit (Kokugakai Gatenkan) featured war paintings that celebrated Japan’s ongoing military efforts against Russia. The Kokugakai seems to have dissolved in the exhibition’s aftermath, but three years later Chikuha participated in the Kokuga Perfection Society, suggestion a possible origin for the new group’s name. 124

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The Statement of Purpose provided a succinct explanation of the group’s reasons for seceding from the Bunten and its hopes for its associated juried exhibition, but of the two documents, the Kokuga Society Manifesto generated the greater public impact. At the time the manifesto was released in 1918, Nihonga painter Yamaguchi Kayō was a nineteen-year-old art student at the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting, and he later remembered the excitement this document generated among his peers at the school by virtue of its forceful language, its poetic imagery, and its unfettered idealism. Kayō recalled he and his friends reading and re-reading the manifesto scrupulously, sometimes to themselves, at other times aloud to each other, with some students going so far as to memorize its text.26 According to testimony offered many years later by Ono Chikkyō, the manifesto had no sole author; instead, members were asked to compose content independently, after which the group gathered to consider their contributions and to combine them into a single, collectively drafted document. Group advisor Nakai also participated in the composition process, and Ono deemed Nakai’s and Kagaku’s offerings to have been the most heartfelt and interesting. “Bakusen,” he recalled, “showed up with a text written by [his brother] Kyōson, and after he read this emotional testimony, we compiled everyone’s ideas together, and in the end produced results that were quite marvelous.”27 To this list of authors we add the editorial contributions of Takeuchi Seihō, for in his diary, Kagaku wrote that  when they shared their finished, formally printed manifesto with their teacher, they were dismayed to learn of his strong objections to sections of the text. After they worked out a revised version that was mutually acceptable, Kagaku describes himself rushing the new copy to the printers to prepare a new printed version in time for the group’s first news conference, scheduled for the following day. This incident was confirmed by Bakusen in a letter to his brother Kyōson, in which he quotes the offending passage, which describes their “shared

to introduce and explain their organization to the general public. Both documents are reproduced in their entirety in this volume’s appendix, but at this juncture, a few salient features and facts surrounding these two documents merit mention. The Statement of Purpose performed the necessary tasks of correcting the erroneous information presented in the premature and unauthorized Jiji Shinpō article by clarifying the group’s position vis-à-vis the Bunten and offering a straightforward explanation of their goals as an exhibition collective. Kagaku records in his diary that he, Bakusen, Chikkyō, and Seihō composed the statement on the night of January 14 with the assistance of Asahi Shinbun reporter Daidō Hirō (dates unknown), and Seihō’s son Takeuchi Itsu. Together they debated and drafted the text, with Kagaku transcribing the finished version.25 The resulting statement is composed in straightforward, conversational Japanese, and if it lacks the dramatic impact of the manifesto’s formal, grandiloquent, and sometimes esoteric language, it provides a clear elucidation of the Kokuga Society’s positions and ambitions. The statement opens by describing a straightforward goal, namely, “the creation of pure art.” It confirms that the Kokuga Society had formed partly out of dissatisfaction with the Bunten, which it argued “has moved away from the attitude towards art that was in place at the time of the exhibition’s founding.” If the group members had remained with the national salon as it falls into mediocrity, “the purity of our artistic production would be sullied, and our individuality would suffer injury. These things we could not endure… That is why here and now we unequivocally sunder all ties with the Bunten.” Rather than be defined solely in relation to the Bunten, however, the members emphasized their desire to contribute to the development of Japanese art, “and when future generations consider our work, we hope that it is with this aim that we remain associated.” As for their planned juried exhibition, they guaranteed that submissions by non-members would be judged strictly, but prudently and fairly. 125

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preconceptions imposed by the status quo. This last statement reveals how in addition to the Bunten, Bakusen and company also had set Yokoyama Taikan’s Japan Art Institute in their sights, for “gourd painters” was an implicit reference to Inten’s own founding statement of 1914, the salient section of which reads, “We refuse to create worthless copies of gourd paintings simply to curry favor… The new Japan is weary of old art, which conservatively and stubbornly sticks to old ways. Everything under the sun undergoes renewal, and in order for it to develop and make progress, art must stop clinging to outdated values.”29 Earlier we learned that Taikan and  company used “gourd paintings” as a metaphor  for the hackneyed and unoriginal art that perennially appeared in the Bunten exhibition. The Japan Art Institute’s own Inten exhibition, however, was regularly taken to task by critics for rewarding novelty over skill, thus by revisiting this same trope, the Kokuga Society founders pointed to the fact that the works selected by Taikan and company were still of a particular, predictable type. In this light, the Inten was no different than the Bunten, insofar as it merely substituted one predilection for another. The manifesto closes by reasserting the group’s commitment to absolute freedom, a promise that “transcend[s] even this manifesto in order to remain faithful to our individual talents,” and then lists the society’s regulations:

attitude towards creation and shared artistic convictions” as the footing on which the Kokuga Society was founded. Seihō complained that this line completely undermined their promise to champion artistic individuality, which Seihō found to be their strongest argument for leaving the Bunten. Based on Seihō’s concerns, the group amended this section with the assertion that “artistic uniqueness is indeed inviolate,” and identified this principle instead as the one upon which their alliance was firmly pledged.28 The manifesto begins with a dramatic declaration: “Art is something born, not produced by mechanism or institution.” By “mechanism or institution” (kikō), the Kokuga Society emphasized its abhorrence of the arts establishment’s stifling influence, but also rebuked artists who focused their practice on producing works they believed would be suitable for selection, instead of addressing their individual creative needs. The authors call for the rejection of any and all authority, including that of critics, or indeed anything that threatens to coerce or stifle creative expression. “Each work of art stands alone and independent, a world unto itself,” they wrote, and “gives life to individualized, free creation.” For this reason, “artists should not be distracted by abstractly worded principles and opinions,” only when artists spurn the advice of experts and critics do their creative impulses become free to soar. “When we see our dissimilar works displayed together,” the section concludes, “each one a banner waving to express the attitudes and convictions that form an artist’s creative wellspring, we see with abundant clarity that artistic uniqueness is inviolate.” The third paragraph—beginning with a succinctly romantic sentiment, “Our creation is an expression of our love of nature”—outlines the group’s artistic principles in concrete terms. They advocate drawing from life, yet they reject superficial observation; cherish subjectivity, yet spurn artists’ “empty striving for novelty,” which only serves to “conceal the poverty of their art”; they “seek out a tradition that allows for the fusion of many qualities,” yet refuse to follow “old-fashioned gourd painters,” whose creativity is hampered by

1) The group will contribute to the development of Japanese art through a wide range of facilities.30 2) The group will organize an annual autumn exhibition of artworks produced by members, to be held in Tokyo and Kyoto. 3) The group will also consider the work of nonmember artists for inclusion in their exhibitions, to be selected by a jury composed of the group members and their official advisors, Nakai Sōtarō and Takeuchi Seihō.

In July they released the Kokuten’s “Submission and Exhibition Rules and Protocols” (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Tenrankai Shuppin Kiyaku; see Appendix), which gave directions for submitting 126

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works, explained the group’s judging policies, and described procedures for purchasing paintings on exhibit. How might the Kokuga Society Manifesto authors have been influenced by the example of modern European manifesto precedents? For example, Bakusen and company may have known F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” excerpts of which, as mentioned earlier, were translated and published by writer Mori Ōgai for the journal Subaru in 1909.31 Marjorie Perloff has analyzed both the textual and super-textual strategies adopted by Marinetti and other participants in the Futurist movement, including their use of disjointed syntax, flamboyant or unconventional punctuation, and mixed typesets, intended to confuse content and nurture frustration by forcing readers to navigate through a fragmented and visually jarring textmap.32 Her description differs from the textual strategies adopted for the Kokuga Society manifesto, which adopts a conservative kanbun-style expository mode that mimics classical Chinese, printed in a typeset that combines kanji and katakana syllabary, an abundantly legible format commonly used for official proclamations and government edicts. In other words, even if Bakusen and company knew Marinetti’s example, they do not seem to have based their efforts on it,33 although it may have persuaded them that authoring a manifesto was de rigueur for any modernist art movement that wished to be taken seriously as such. Style and content aside, however, the core motivations of the Kokuga Society and the Futurists in generating manifestos were not so different, for both groups produced their texts with mythmaking in mind, as a tool for the construction of a specific self-authored public image.34 In the case of the Kokuga Society, its manifesto succeeded in generating an aura of intellectual and critical authority that helped mask the utter lack of experience on the part of its authors in managing and judging juried exhibitions, and instilled public confidence in the Kokuga Society’s intellectual underpinnings. Whether Bakusen and company could deliver on the promises they made in their manifesto was another issue altogether. Yamamoto Shunkyo

noted that several recent art societies, including Taikan’s Japan Art Institute, had proven themselves unequal to the challenge of transforming their rhetoric into reality. “In practice,” Shunkyo argued, “the phrase ‘artistic freedom’ means more than simply turning over one’s brush and painting with the opposite side. Cries over ‘artistic freedom’ and ‘the artist’s right to self expression’ ring hollow if the resulting artworks are not worth a glance.” Such has been the meager harvest of the Inten, Shunkyo complained, but as long as Bakusen and company  remain true to the ideals expressed in their manifesto, he predicted that the Kokuga Society would certainly produce worthy art; “if, however, this is merely a ploy for self- promotion, they will surely fail.”35 In the end, the Kokuga Society Manifesto is perhaps best understood as an ambitious reiteration of various and sundry ideas then current in the fields of Japanese aesthetics and art criticism in the 1910s, including references to German personality theory, Tsuchida Kyōson’s reflections on nature as the source of artistic inspiration,36 Nakai Sōtarō’s Jinseiha-informed beliefs regarding the socially transformative role of the arts, as well as aspects of Nishida Kitarō’s thought, particularly regarding the artistic self and subjectivity.37 The manifesto has all the qualities of a document written by committee, and in many places introduces complex ideas that are subsequently dropped or left undeveloped. But if problems of overall clarity of language detracted from the manifesto, the brilliantly succinct opening phrase “art is something born” provided the Kokuga Society with a catchy and memorable motto, one that even today is heavily quoted in modern Japanese art studies as a distillation of all that the group stood for.

management and organization of the kokuten exhibition The Kokuga Society had included provisions for an annual exhibition in its regulations, and at its initial press conference had announced plans to hold the first Kokuten exhibition the following autumn, but to meet this self-imposed directive, it was necessary 127

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to raise capital to underwrite the hefty expenses such an endeavor required. Both the Bunten and the Inten helped meet their financial needs by requiring artists to pay submission fees, something Bakusen and company were loathe to do, preferring to generate income through the sale of entry tickets, exhibition catalogues, and picture post cards. They understood, however, that these proceeds would not cover all the costs, and from the start the Kokuten organizers knew they needed to find financial backers.38 To learn more about the Kokuga Society’s efforts to raise capital, we turn once again to Kagaku’s diary, which includes scattered records of meetings between group members and potential  sponsors.39 Through this record we learn the identities of the primary financial players in the Kansai art world of the late 1910s, and get a glimpse of the complexities, problems and pitfalls involved in cultivating relations with potential patrons. Fundraising efforts began on the heels of the group’s founding announcement in January 1918, and one of the first individuals they approached was textile merchant Naiki Seibei, mentioned earlier as an important friend and supporter to Kagaku. According to painter Komatsu Hitoshi (1902–1989), later a regular Kokuten participant and benefactor of Naiki’s patronage, Naiki was hesitant to become associated with the Kokuga Society due to his dislike or distrust of Bakusen,40 and although Kagaku and Shihō were able to convince Naiki to donate 1,000 yen for exhibition expenses, he later rescinded the offer.41 Kagaku and Shihō next traveled to Osaka to meet financier Amagasaki Sannosuke (1876–1940) and textile merchant Yoshida Chūsaburō (1876– 1925). Amagasaki offered them a loan of 20,000 yen, to be repaid at the rate of 2,000 yen a year plus interest, an offer Yoshida recommended they reject; his counter-offer was an annual gift of 1,000 yen for the life of the organization, with no obligation to repay.42 Yamamoto Gennosuke (dates unknown), owner of Yamamoto Gasendō, an art supply store in Kyoto, also offered an annual donation, and volunteered to serve as the Kokuga Society’s general business manager.43

The back-and-forth negotiations, ego clashes and stalled progress that Kagaku describes suggests that soliciting funds was a wearisome task, but in fact they were able to raise the necessary capital in just a few weeks, and Nakai Sōtarō later confirmed the relative ease with which they garnered enough funds to underwrite their first exhibition.44 Generally speaking, the 1910s was a dynamic decade in Japan in terms of support for the arts, and Nihonga was no exception. A robust financial climate and equally active arts market was described in a 1912 essay contributed to the British journal The Studio by Harada Jirō (1878– 1963), a critic and art historian, who describes the Nihonga world in the first years of the Taishō era as exploding. Just now the Japanese are showing almost undue enthusiasm for art. There is a spirit of rivalry among different gwa-juku, or studios, especially in the preparation of their exhibitions, which are well attended and patronized. The numerous art sales are crowded with enthusiasts, and the works of nearly every artist, more or less well known, fetch enormous prices. The boom is not only in the old masters, but contemporary artists also are sharing in it. Their studios are packed with stretched silk waiting for the master’s brush. The hyososhi who mount the pictures into hanging pictures are burning their midnight oil. The whole art world here is astir, and a reticent observer shakes his doubtful head, questioning the sanity of it all, and wondering at its possible outcome.45

The First World War years (1914–1918) were especially propitious for Japan’s economy, since its position as sole Pacific nation among the Entente Powers made it an exclusive supplier of processed  steel, fuel and other commodities for its European allies in the eastern war arena. This prosperity was not to last, however, as an influx of Western capital and expanding markets led to steep rises in domestic inflation in the early 1920s, leading to economic recession in the aftermath of the war-time boom. For a short while, however, in the heady financial atmosphere of 128

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ing session in that city, followed by a second round of evaluations in Tokyo, and encouraged artists to submit to whichever location was geographically closest.47 This policy may have been intended to augment submissions, since cheaper shipping costs and no submission fees meant the Kokuten was the less expensive option, especially for artists from the Kansai area. Such strategizing may have been unnecessary,  however, for the enthusiasm and optimism engendered by the Kokuga Society Manifesto endured over the months leading up to the public submission period, abetted by the ample coverage  of the group in the mass media. In the final tally, 103 paintings were accepted during the first round of evaluations in Kyoto, followed by 278 in Tokyo, which meant nearly 400 artists chose to submit their works to the new and utterly untested Kokuten exhibition instead of the Inten or the Bunten. Takehisa Yumeji reflected on the high expectations for Japan’s newest Nihonga collective held by artists and the public alike, teasing his friend Nonagase Banka in an open letter printed in the Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper. Yumeji wondered how an unknown artist who once made do selling his paintings in seedy curio shops had become an art-world star seemingly overnight, with artworks now displayed in the posh sitting rooms of Kyoto’s top patrons. “It seems you and your friends are more than just run-of-the-mill painters after all,” he  joked, “and the newspapers have managed to  sweep even the simplest citizens up in all the excitement.”48

later 1910s, wealthy businessmen and financiers  demonstrated their public-spirited generosity towards artists in various ways, in one instance by showing a willingness to support an untried group of young Kyoto artists embarking on the risky (some would say foolhardy) venture of running a national juried Nihonga exhibition in competition with both the federally-funded, monolithic Bunten and the country’s dominant non-government exhibition, the Inten. The scheduled dates for the inaugural Kokuten, as well as a call for public submissions, appeared in the June 1918 issue of the arts journal Bijutsu Gahō. Bakusen and company had timed their exhibition to run in Tokyo from October 14 to November 20, and subsequently to travel to Kyoto, where it would show from November 27 to December 11, dates that overlapped precisely  with those of the Bunten. Furthermore, for the Kyoto leg they had booked a hall in the same Okazaki municipal exposition complex used annually to house the Bunten. Their plans were dashed, however, when Mitsukoshi department store, selected as the Kokuten’s Tokyo venue, suddenly and inexplicably  canceled the agreement. A suitable substitute  was expediently  found at Shirokiya, another department store located in Tokyo’s Ueno district, but since this gallery was available only between November 1 and November 15, the new schedule pushed back  the exhibition's opening by two weeks, and effectively cut short its Tokyo run by more than half.46 The system Bakusen and company devised for evaluating public submissions, detailed in the July publication of the Kokuten Submission and Exhibition Rules and Protocols (see Appendix 1), involved two distinct sessions, one in Kyoto and one in Tokyo. This marked a departure from the system used by the Bunten and Inten, both of which collected and evaluated artists submissions in Tokyo only, resulting in expensive shipping costs for artists located any distance from the capital. Since the Kokuga Society was based in Kyoto, however, the group chose to hold its preliminary judg-

the inaugural kokuten and its critical reception Bakusen and company concluded the Kokuten’s two-tier judging process on October 26 in Tokyo, and held a press conference the same day in the foyer of the Shirakiya gallery to announce the results; only Murakami Kagaku and Ono Chikkyō were absent, both having been struck by the “Spanish” influenza pandemic that engulfed Japan that year.49 Serving as group spokesman, Nakai Sōtarō 129

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explained to the press that of the 381 works submitted for evaluation, only nine had been selected outright, although an additional six works would be included in the exhibition under the improvised honorable mention category sengai, literally "unselected." Nakai then read the names of the fifteen artists whose works would appear in the exhibition alongside those of the Kokuga Society membership, at which point murmurs arose from the press core, and then a shout, “Tokyo’s been totally crushed!” (Tokyo zenmetsu), for only three Tokyo painters had been named.50 “Are these the results of their manifesto? Is this artistic freedom?” wrote one reporter the following day, and others joined in to lambast the Kokuga Society for its hypocrisy even before the exhibition had officially opened.51 To preempt further critiques of the society’s judging practices, Nakai Sōtarō and Tsuchida Bakusen both published detailed accounts how the evaluations sessions had unfolded. Nakai began his essay by noting that reporters interested only in uncovering grounds for dissatisfaction were bound to find them, but if, as some suggested, the Kokuga Society’s selection process was indeed biased, then it was a bias in favor of talented but disenfranchised painters who were regularly denied opportunities  to exhibit their work. That said, Nakai noted that there had been no fundamental differences of opinion among the judges; unlike the Bunten’s famously divisive selection jury, the group had been largely of one mind concerning the virtues and weaknesses of the various submissions.52 Bakusen’s description of the judging echoed Nakai’s, with the exception that he recognized occasions where the judges had disagreed. This was the reason why they had decided to implement the additional honorable mention category, in order to recognize and reward those paintings that had minority support among the judges. “Even if an artist’s talent has not yet fully developed,” Bakusen promised, “his or her submissions will not be overlooked if they demonstrate an honest and earnest attitude towards nature.” Concerning the works that were rejected, Bakusen explained that they had received an inordinately large number of Nanga works and

“emakimono-like screens of the Bunten variety,” all of which seemed fussily fixated on details and utterly trapped in convention, missing the point of their movement entirely.53 The next day the Kokuga Society held a press and VIP exhibition preview, but the weather was marked by heavy storms. When guests arrived at the galleries, they found the galleries engulfed in darkness, after the building’s electricity was knocked out by the wind and rain. According to one reporter, the paintings on display were barely visible, and colors were impossible to discern, but he admired how spacious the Kokuten galleries seemed, noting the pleasant change from typical salon-style exhibitions where art works were packed together cheek by jowl.54 The weather cleared the following day and the lighting was restored in time for the exhibition’s public opening, but now only Nakai and Bakusen were fit enough to attend, for everyone else had fallen ill with the dangerously potent Spanish flu. Despite these setbacks, and a few initial negative reviews (one critic dismissed the exhibition in toto as “unexpectedly boring),55 most of the mass media reports were extremely favorable. “After seeing so many uninteresting and completely orthodox works at the Bunten,” one critic summarized, “[these paintings] seem like a dose of medicine to cure what ails [the Japanese art world].”56 A few days after the opening, the Kokuga Society announced the winners of two special awards in recognition of outstanding achievement. The first honor, the Kokuten Prize (Kokutenshō), was offered to the artist whose work most strongly reflected the artistic aims and principles of the Kokuga Society; its winner was Irie Hakō, for his submission entitled Subjugating Demons (Gōma, Figure 83). The second award, the Chogyū Prize (Chogyūshō),57 was given to Kanada Warō (1895–1941), a third-year student at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, for his bird-and-flower themed offering, White Peach (Suimitsutō, Figure 85). The art journal Bijutsu Gahō dedicated its entire December 1918 edition to the exhibition, including reproductions of all the paintings on display there, 130

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multiple reviews and commentaries, and statements authored by each of the Kokuga Society members themselves. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these essays is how ready the group members were to publicly recognize the faults and flaws in their own paintings. As we will see, Shihō’s statement basically amounted to an admission of failure; if he had been allowed, he explained, he would have delayed its debut until he had addressed its shortcomings, but that the group had insisted he exhibit it despite Shihō’s own misgivings.58 Chikkyō, Banka, and even Bakusen also voiced similar expressions of regret or disappointment regarding aspects of their paintings, but rather than providing fodder for further criticism, their honest self-evaluations lend an aura of sincerity to their efforts.

It may have been for this reason that Bakusen chose to partially clothe his model in a red juban underrobe, which, according to traditional Japanese aesthetics of the erotic, would have enhanced the allure of his subject far more than presenting her nude. Yet why Bakusen chose to revisit the subject of bathhouse attendants at all is not known, although he may have been encouraged to reconsider it after seeing Matsuoka Eikyū’s painting Murogimi win an award at the 1916 Bunten. As described in Chapter 3, Eikyū’s work (Figure 49) shared many aspects in common with Bakusen’s yuna-themed studies (including similar figures of women partially clothed in red robes and lying in sultry repose). In the finished painting, the yuna of the title is shown taking respite from her work, lying sleepily on the second-story veranda of a bathhouse with bucket and ladle, the tools of her trade, set by her feet. She is framed by the pine branches and blooming wisteria, described in the hauta song on which Bakusen based the painting’s mise en scène, with the ballad itself evoked in the figure of a shamisen player practicing her instrument in the background. The face of the musician, who appears to be a country geisha, is hidden by the veranda’s low roofline, and her placement became one of the most oft-mentioned criticisms of the work, with one reviewer questioning why Bakusen would take pains to include this figure only to decapitate her.61 In addition to Ukiyo-e and Edo-period musical sources for Bathhouse Maiden, art historians have proposed several possible Western inspirational guides, including John Clark, who notes Bakusen’s “quasi-modernist use of technical interpretants” obtained through his study of Gauguin and other European post-Impressionists,62 while Inaga Shigemi points to Manet’s Olympia of 1862 as a potential source work.63 Bakusen himself, however, explains that Francisco de Goya’s La Maja Desnuda of 1800 (Figure 71) served as model for the kind of “voluptuousness and repose” he wish to instill in his work. The results are precisely the kind of corporeal beauty he had initially explored in his sketches in 1916 and subsequently rejected, and

Bakusen’s Bathhouse Maiden With Bathhouse Maiden (Figure 69), Bakusen returned to a project he had abandoned in 1916, namely, the create of a new kind of bijin portrait, that central and abiding thematic in the Ukiyo-e tradition.59 Earlier Bakusen had been attracted to the idea of exploring the Western ideal of nude female beauty in the context of Nihonga, and chose bathhouse attendants as the subject for this line of inquiry, but by his own admission, he was dissatisfied with the studies he produced of nude models, which were unabile to artfully capture the generous figures and radiant flesh so closely linked to Western academic nudes (Figure 70). This self-perceived failing may have something to do with the fact that nude human form had little cultural precedent in Japan as an erotic motif. As Rosina Buckland explains in her study of the Japanese “spring picture” (shunga) genre of erotica, …rather than naked bodies, it is the material, patterns and forms of gorgeous robes that possess erotic appeal. A courtesan depicted naked, were it even imaginable, would have lost much of her appeal for a would-be client… Clothing defined characters, literally by rendering the shape of their bodies, and by providing the viewer with narrative information.60

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70 Tsuchida Bakusen, sketch for Bathhouse Maiden, c. 1918. Color pencil on paper. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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Francisco de Goya, La Maja Desnuda, 1800. Oil on canvas. Prado Museum. Source: Lassaigne, Goya, 1948, p. 19.

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Bakusen conceded in his Bijutsu Gahō essay that the work he finally exhibited did not wholly measure up to his intentions. He argued, however, that Nihonga’s ganryō colors should be held accountable for their role in his failure, for the project had shown him that mineral pigments “are not a suitable tool for capturing the sensuality and languor” he had so doggedly worked to express.64 This selfcritique was echoed by Takeuchi Seihō, who in an interview with the newspaper Asahi Shinbun noted that, while Bathhouse Maiden successfully evokes the luxurious atmosphere of the Heian and Momoyama periods through Bakusen’s rich application of kinpun (gold dust), Bakusen was unsuccessful at depicting a yuna capable of engaging the viewer on an emotional level.65 Although most reviewers disagreed with Bakusen’s self-critique and heaped praise on the painting, others picked up on Bakusen’s heavy reliance on decorative techniques, particularly his use of gold dust. According to one reviewer, the preponderance of kinpun “dulls the life-vibrancy of the work, weakens its compositional cohesion, and creates a cramped and overworked feeling.”66 Another went so far as to suggest Bakusen had recourse to this powder in order to mask mistakes and compensate for flaws in the composition.67 In fact, Bakusen’s liberal application of gold dust was part of a carefully considered compositional strategy that drew on his historical knowledge of kinpun’s multivalent function. Extensive use of gold dust has the effect of flattening the picture plane by partially mask the background, compressing depth and providing  a uniform backdrop against which primary compositional elements stand out all the stronger. Bakusen’s liberal use of gold also evokes the aesthetic of kazari (“ornament”) that dominated the tastes of the pre-modern Heian court, and later, those of the nouveau-riche merchant class of the Momoyama and early Edo periods, who commissioned paintings and lacquerware amply covered in gold in order to dazzle the eyes of onlookers. In this way, Bathhouse Maiden successfully evokes the romantic opulence of these earlier “golden ages” of Japanese culture, and simultaneously

references the sensuality of the modern Western painted nude. Kagaku’s Death of a Saint Second only to Bathhouse Maiden in popularity among critics was Murakami Kagaku’s Death of a Saint (Seija no shi), which was exhibited in an unfinished state. The work was eventually completed after the close of the exhibition and purchased for permanent display in Shinbashi Station in Tokyo’s Minato ward, where it was destroyed in fires caused by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.68 Death of a Saint is known only through a monochrome photograph included in the first Kokuten catalogue (Figure 72), but Ono Chikkyō later described the painting as rendered predominantly in creamy white and yellow ochre, with red accents added for visual emphasis (a color scheme similar to that used in Kagaku’s 1916 Bunten work, Amitabha).69 The painting illustrates the moment of death, parinirvāṇa in Sanskrit (Japanese: nehan), of the historical Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama, alternatively known as Śākyamuni (Japanese: Shaka), an ancient pictorial theme that Kagaku updated by including several unconventional aspects. Kagaku explained his intentions for the painting as follows: I enjoy painting religious themes, yet my own attitude towards painting is quite different from that of the old Buddhist painting masters… Those elder artists painted as an act of religious faith, and the same might be said for me, but my faith is of a different sort…For Death of a Saint, I experimented with drama, which resulted in a more subjective interpretation of this theme. When Śākyamuni decided to leave this world, his disciples and followers experienced great anguish, and were torn apart by grief… [But in the painting], as Śākyamuni prepares to die, his eyes are slightly opened to reveal a spirit as deep and calm as the ocean as he gazes on all living things.70

Striking a proper balance between drama and tranquility proved to be a challenge, however, and Kagaku wrote that he was forced to change his 133

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Murakami Kagaku, Death of a Saint, 1918. Work no longer extant. Source: Dai 1 kai Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Tenrankai Gashū, Seisakusha, Kyoto, 1918.

many of these conventions, but other than a few flying deva maidens, he omits most non-human attendants and greatly increased the number of female lay devotees among the mourners. Kagaku’s method of rendering is also a departure, for he relies on subtly graded gentle washes of ink and light color, rather than the dense pigment-andgold palette usually used by premodern Japanese Buddhist painters. Seihō was one of the first to mention the possible inspiration of late medieval Christian icon imagery for Death of a Saint, remarking how Kagaku’s figures, particularly Śākyamuni, bring Giotto di Bondone’s (1266–1337) work to mind; indeed, Seihō decided the painting was more indebted to Pre-Raphaelite Italian frescos than

plans for the composition several times, until he simply ran out of time, and closed his statement by voicing regret at showing his work in an unfinished state.71 Parinirvāṇa paintings by Japanese artists exist from as early as the Heian period, and are traditionally displayed in temples from March 14 to 16 to mark the anniversary of the Śākyamuni’s death. One such work, dated to the fourteenth century and owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Figure 73) demonstrates the primary features of this composition: the colossal form of the reclining Śākyamuni surrounded by mourning followers and witnesses representing the numerous realms of existence, including human, animal, and celestial. In Death of a Saint, Kagaku follows 134

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medieval Buddhist icons, “focusing as it does less on exterior beauty than it does an internalized   nobility of feeling.”72 In the wake of these observations, reviewers took to nominating one European precedent after another, from Fra Angelico to Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, causing Kagaku to bristle in his statement for Bijutsu Gahō in which he denied any such connections.73 Later, however, he recanted, and acknowledged the painting was in fact partly informed by some Western artists, not in terms of pictorial style but rather by their capacity to evoke an emotional response in their viewers.

Death of the Historical Buddha, 14th century. Color on silk; hanging scroll. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

the pure, unpretentious faith of the Middle Ages… I was also very fond of Fra Angelico’s aesthetically rich paintings, as well the naive fanciful expression found in [William] Blake’s work, and I loved the calm feeling of composure found in the art of Leonardo [da Vinci, 1452–1519]. Death of a Saint was a crystallization of all these different sources. I wanted to insert into this subject a specifically human feeling, and I thought to accomplish this by means of a rhythm and a musicality of line, as well as a symbolic use of color, delving into my own imagination rather than looking at Nature.74

Besides the broad gamut of artistic models for Death of a Saint, the lingering influence of Meier-Graefe’s personality theory can be detected in Kagaku’s statement, particularly in Kagaku’s desire to “insert a specifically human feeling”

The very first time I was truly and deeply moved by a painting, it was when I saw a work by Giotto. I deeply sympathize with his works, not for their compositions or the motifs he employed, but as expressions of

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through the painterly mechanisms of line and color, as well as his interest in probing his own inner vision rather than relying on external referents.

stone, either asleep or listening to the flowing water as it rushes by. The third figure is a young male nude bather, placed on the far left side of the composition on the rocky water’s edge, dangling his legs in the stream. All three figures seem oblivious to the presence of others, seemingly lost, physically and psychologically, in their vibrant, lush, green surroundings. Stream in Early Summer was inspired by a trip taken by the artist in August of that year, when Banka and a party of friends fled Kyoto’s summer heat and humidity on a tour of scenic locations in neighboring Shiga prefecture.75 One of the stops on the tour was Hie Taisha, a Shintō shrine located near the town of Sakamoto, a popular summer retreat. As described by Banka, a shallow river ran by the grounds of the shrine where the group had stopped to rest, and where several maiko who had accompanied the party chose to remove their footwear and wade into the stream. Banka captured the scene in several sketches (Figure 75), and these, combined with other drawings made during the trip, served as the basis for Stream in Early Summer.76 If these sketches reflect Banka’s initial intentions for the painting, then he originally  planned a two-screen composition that included more male figures as well as architectural elements, but with only two months left before

Banka’s Stream in Early Summer Nonagase Banka’s contribution to the first Kokuten, a screen painting entitled Stream in Early Summer (Shoka no nagare, Figure 74), was heavily anticipated by the Tokyo art world, if only due to the fact that Banka had no national reputation to speak of outside the Kansai region. The other four Kokuga Society members were known quantities in the Nihonga world, having at one time or another exhibited paintings at the Bunten, but Banka had never exhibited in the national salon, as a result of which he was characterized by the mass media as an art world outsider and a wild card. Newspapers and art periodicals predicted Banka would offer something characteristically uninhibited for his national debut, and in this regard, Stream in Early Summer did not disappoint. The painting consists of a single six-panel painted screen, and features three figures resting on the rocky banks of a forest stream. On the far right, a woman sits with her legs folded under her as she sets her hair, her blue kimono open to the waist. In the center, a second female dressed in a bright red robe lies on a large

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Nonagase Banka, Stream in Early Summer, 1918. Color on canvas; six-panel folding screen. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

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the exhibition’s opening, he may have been forced to reduce the painting’s scope to meet his pressing deadline. In the essay Banka contributed to the Kokutendedicated issue of Bijutsu Gahō, he confessed that he had never thought of himself exclusively as a Nihonga artist, and suggested his use of mineral pigments and traditional paper and silk substrates to that point, as well as his utilization of traditional mounting formats, was incidental rather than intentional. Nor had he any interest in steering Nihonga in one particular direction or another.77 His non-exclusive approach to Nihonga painting is evident in Stream in Early Summer in several ways, including his selection of cotton canvas rather than the silk or paper grounds typically used for Nihonga works, and his decision to mix and apply his mineral pigments into unusually dense pastes, which he did partly to compensate for the coarse weave of the canvas, and partly to mimic the material appearance of oil paints.78 Stylistically, Banka borrowed directly from oil painting as well, using stippled brushwork to produce flowers and leaves on the lush bushes and trees, and by impressionistically dappling the surfaces of the rocks and skin of the figures with daubs of bright green and yellow color, set aglow by the warm summer sunlight shining through leafy

Nonagase Banka, sketch for Stream in Early Summer, c. 1918. Graphite, color pencil on paper. Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

green trees. Other references to light reflection are seen in reds, yellows and greens playing on the surface of the flowing stream, throwing back the colors of the vegetation overhanging the water (Figure 76). Experiments with the effects of light through color are rare in Nihonga, and more than one critic  raised the possibility of Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) influence, or that of other European Impressionists,79 but Stream in Early Summer is perhaps best understood as the artist’s latest effort to  develop a Nihonga-based pictorial dialect of Fauvism. Critics reached no consensus regarding the success or failure of Stream in Early Summer, for while most reviews recognized Banka’s courage and applauded his willingness to push against the restraints of artistic convention, few were ready to unconditionally endorse his results. Date Nankai, a critic for the newspaper Mainichi Shinbun, voiced his respect for Banka’s desire to handle pigments in an unconventional and uninhibited way, but complained his results lacked cohesion, leaving Date with the impression of colors simply running riot.80 Hamada Masuji, critic for Bijutsu Shinpō, was of a similar opinion, noting that Stream in Early Summer certainly broke new ground for Nihonga, “but ultimately the painting collapses into confusion, errors, and incoherence.”81 Banka did not refute 137

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76 Detail from Stream in Early Summer. Photo by author.

this criticism; in fact, in his Bijutsu Gahō essay, he very frankly agreed that his experiments with overpainting and Yōga-style blending of mineral pigments produced less than satisfactory results, and he concluded his attempt to manipulate mineral pigments as if they were oils had been a mistake. “I learned while working on this painting that the potential of the line is very strong in Nihonga,” he explained, “but the expressive possibilities for color are weaker than I expected. Nevertheless, because I learned so much in the process of painting this work, I believe I can say my experiments were a success.”82 One of Stream in Early Summer’s strongest admirers was oil painter Okada Saburōsuke (1869– 1939), who published an article lauding Banka’s painting in another Kokuten-dedicated issue published by the art periodical Chūō Bijutsu. Okada noted that the term “New Nihonga” (Shin-Nihonga) had been tossed around for over a decade, and yet the question of “whither New Nihonga” was still hotly contested. “The fact remains that traditional brushwork by itself is insufficient to express the thoughts and feelings of those who dwell in the modern age,” Okada argued. “Banka’s painting is one of the very first to acknowledge this fact.”83 Okada did not deny that the painting had flaws; on the contrary, he noted that Banka’s unusually

thick application of pigment was frequently ponderous, and that while his handling of the blue and green leaves bathed in summer light was effectively done, his attempt to show colors reflecting on flowing water was a complete failure.84 What redeemed the painting, however, was Banka’s insistence on exercising and expressing his unique creative vision. “As a Nihonga painting created with mineral pigments, Stream in Early Summer is a proactive experiment in artistic expression, irrespective of success or failure,” he surmised. “It is the work of an artist setting off in search of a new direction, and for this I offer the painting my endorsement.”85 Chikkyō’s Village of Nakiri and Shihō’s Early Plums If Banka’s first Kokuten offering seemed largely unburdened by the weight of tradition, the paintings exhibited by the remaining two Kokuga Society members, Ono Chikkyō and Sakakibara Shihō, affirmed the import of Japan’s premodern painting legacy on contemporary Nihonga. Their contributions to the exhibition were representative of their specialized genres, literati painting in Chikkyō’s case, and bird-and-flower painting in Shihō’s. For this reason, and despite their utilization of drastically different subjects and styles, many viewers 138

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Bunten painting Abalone Divers. Village of Nakiri shares some points in common with Banka’s Stream in Early Summer, insofar as both works are shaseibased interpretations of specific locales, but where Banka fancifully embellished his landscape to create a deeply subjective impression of a known place, Chikkyō’s painting was guided primarily by a desire to remain artistically objective. “My goal is to take what I find in Nature and paint it without

noted a similar attitude in their works, one that reveals their mutual knowledge of and deep respect for Nihonga’s polyvalent East Asian painting legacy. Chikkyō’s Village of Nakiri (Nakirimura, Figure 77) was the largest work of the exhibition, a pair of four-fold screens featuring the landscape surrounding Nakiri, the seaside-fishing town in Mie prefecture where Bakusen sketched the ama for his 1913

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Ono Chikkyō, Nakiri Village, 1918. Color on silk; pair of four-panel folding screen. Kasaoka Municipal Chikkyō Museum of Art.

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altering it,” Chikkyō wrote for Bijutsu Gahō, “and in this sense, it might be possible to label my painting a ‘true view’ [jikkei] of Nakiri village.” Chikkyō’s description of Nakiri as “a village resting on redorange rocks” over “a vivid, dark blue sea,” set under “white clouds piled on top of each other” with “bright sunlight shining brightly over all”86 serves accurately to recount his painted tableaux of the selfsame site. To afford the painting a richer panoply of shades within its limited tonal range of ocher, ultramarine and yellow-green hues, Chikkyo captures the location at different times of the day, rendering the right side in the crisp, clear light of morning, and enveloping the left in the hazy, golden glow of the sun’s setting light. We have previously discussed Cézanne’s influence on Chikkyō in the 1910s, and the French painter’s example remained an important referent for Village of Nakiri.87 Cézanne’s Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’estaque (1886), which was reproduced in the May 1917 issue of Shirakaba, may have served as one of several possible models for Chikkyō’s rendering of geometric forms and planar use of color in Village of Nakiri, but just like Southern Country (1911), and his award winning Bunten submission Two Island Works (1916), Village of Nakiri must also be placed in relation to Chikkyō’s admiration and respect for literati painting. Chikkyō’s placement of meandering paths through the masses of rock, his use of traditional “axe-cut strokes” (fuhekishun) to provide cliffs and boulders with fissured surfaces, and his rendering of trees and other vegetation in rhythmically repeating patterns of ink lines and dots – all these elements expressed his knowledge of and affinity for the Nanga tradition. Chikkyō later recalled that Yōga artist Kosugi Misei praised Village of Nakiri at the time of its debut for its Nanga-like aspects (as he had for Chikkyō's earlier works), and noted that of all the compliments he received for his Kokuten debut, Kosugi’s made him feel most pleased and grateful.88 Shihō’s Kokuten contribution, entitled Early Plums (Ao’ume, Figure 78), features blossoming flowers and birds rendered on a two-paneled screen. It is a work that pays homage to and yet

simultaneously departs from the academic Chinese tradition of bird-and-flower painting. The right panel features hydrangeas blossoms under a maple tree and includes a Eurasian jay in the tree branches. The left panel features azalea and rose of Sharon flowers blooming under a plum tree, the branches of which are laden with young green fruit and frolicking sparrows. Shihō later recalled the circumstances around the creation of the work, noting that his aim had been simply to render a typical corner of an ordinary temple garden, planned and executed without the distraction of abstract theories or elaborate metaphors. “Of course the influence of oil painting was there,” he wrote, “but this was too formally integrated with the Chinese-inspired aspects, and largely lost to viewers… It is clear I wished the work to be seen as ‘modern’ [kindaiteki], while still revealing an archaic Chinese-style compositional structure.”89 Of all the artists’ statements written by the Kokuga painters for Bijutsu Gahō, Shihō’s was the most self-critical. The painting struck him as overly intellectual and aloof, distant where his wish had been to express something immediate. Rather than creating an exciting new version of the ancient mode, one that expressed modern artistic values through a Chinese-inflected execution, Shihō confessed, “Early Plums turned out to be just another run-of-the-mill bird-and-flower painting.”90 In the end, he surmised he had been too slavish in his desire to capture the flavor of Chinese painting, and lost sight of his own subjective position as an artist, “which is something like committing creative suicide for the sake of an aesthetic.”91 Despite Shihō’s own strongly voiced dissatisfaction with Early Plums, critical reactions to the work were almost unanimously positive. Bijutsu Gahō writer Fujikake Shizuya addressed the painting at length, noting that few artists of late had attempted anything so interesting and progressive in the realm of bird-and-flower compositions, which made Early Plums a particularly refreshing change, as well as a difficult challenge for a critic. Although Shihō was trained in the Shijō school tradition with which Kyoto is so closely associated, 140

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Sakakibara Shihō, Early Plums, 1918. Color on silk; pair of framed panels. Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture.

Fujikake describes Shihō’s approach to shaseibased painting as distinct from that of his Kyoto peers, many of whom, it seemed, were interested in consummate brushwork above all else. This, he deduced, was a congenital flaw among Kyoto painters that reduced technical proficiency to mere contrivance.92 Shihō, however, managed to avoid this pitfall, Fujikake explained, as did Chikkyō in Village of Nakiri, but where Shihō understands the importance of restraint, Chikkyō does not. “As a result,” he explains, “the viewer is somewhat overwhelmed with the complexity and verbosity of [Chikkyō’s] work,” and he cautioned Chikkyō against trying too hard to capture reality exactly as he experiences it, particularly when using mineral pigments, which do not stand up well to lavish

application. “Instead, a balance needs to be found between objectivity, which requires artists to remain true to their subjects, and subjectivity, which requires them to remain true their selected medium.”93 Other Significant Works at the First Kokuten Irie Hakō, the first Kokuten Prize winner for Subjugating Demons (Figure 79), was a friend to the Kokuga Society, and was particularly well known to Kagaku and Shihō from their days together at the Kyoto School of Fine Arts and Crafts, and afterwards at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting, where Hakō was among the graduating members of the school’s first class. 141

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79 Irie Hakō, Subjugating Demons, 1918. Color on silk; framed. Saihōji Temple, Kyoto.

We recall how Hakō was initially solicited to join the group, and although he declined, he promised to submit a painting to their inaugural exhibition.94 Considering the parameters of the Kokuten prize, Subjugating Demons closely reflects the approach to Nihonga exhibited by the Kokuga Society membership as a highly individualized interpretation of a traditional subject. Like Kagaku’s Death of a Saint, Subjugating Demons depicts an episode from the life of the historical Buddha, the moment when the demon Mara sent a horde of spirits disguised as temptresses, soldiers and terrifying  monsters to distract him from his goal of enlightenment. Critics noted that Hakō’s work also shows stylistic similarities to Death of a Saint, and that both demonstrate an impressive knowledge of both Asia’s and Europe’s religious art traditions. Not all reviewers, however, felt such stylistic quotation was effective if the results were

overly derivative, or if the selection of prototypes was poorly considered. For example, critic Fujikake Shizuya wrote: Subjugating Demons is certainly the best work from among the public submissions, with an interesting and fine composition. The manner in which it is painted, however, will no doubt invite obvious and frequent comparisons to such precedents as the Ajanta cave murals… Also, the demons appear more comical than fearful or fierce, similar to those seen in Edo-era woodblock prints and kusazōshi illustrated books, or [the famed sixteenth century handscroll] Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (Hyakki yakō).95

Since its debut, art historians have also compared  Subjugating Demons to paintings of gaki (the “hungry ghosts” of the Buddhist tradition), Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, and the 142

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illustrations of William Blake.96 We should also consider the affinities found between Hakō’s demon faces and a series of Leonardo da Vinci caricature sketches reproduced in the journal Shirakaba in June 1917, which may have been one of Hakō’s sources (Figure 80).97 If the choice of Hakō for the Kokuten prize was widely condoned by critics, the selection of Kanada Warō as winner of the Chogyū Prize came as a surprise. Warō was one of the most junior artists selected for the exhibition, and in 1918 was virtually unknown outside the small sphere of his student peers. The prize-winning painting, White Peach (Figure 81) was Warō’s diploma painting for the School of Fine Arts and Crafts, where he had been sent down for remedial training after failing to pass the admittance exam to the Specialized School for

Painting.98 According to art historian Shimada Yasuhiro, White Peach began as a series of shasei  sketches made in a peach orchard in the town of Kanada’s birth in Fukuoka prefecture. To these sketches he integrated elements derived from Chinese bird-and-flower paintings published  in the late Ming dynasty multi-volume Collection of Poems and Paintings (Shihuafang), as well as aspects of French post-Impressionism, which he had studied under the tutelage of an unnamed oil painter friend.99 The results are seen in the prize-winning two-panel folding screen, which features a white peach tree in summer, its limbs heavy with ripening fruit. A listless cat sits on a lower branch, apparently dozing but in actuality only feigning sleep, its eyes slightly open to spy on two birds, which peer down from the upper reaches of the tree, observing the cat and keeping cautious distance. Several critics questioned the decision to award Warō the Chogyū Prize for this painting, which at least one critic described as clearly derivative of Hishida Shunsō’s famous Black Cat (Kuroki neko) of 1910.100 Others suggested the choice may have been based on Warō’s expressed affinity for the work of Sakakibara Shihō, and indeed, Warō himself later identified Shihō as his single most admired living artist.101 Critic and oil painter Saitō Yori (1885–1959) grumbled at this apparent preferential  treatment, complaining, “I can see no reason why this work won, if not for the fact that it is so much in the flavor of Shihō,”102 while Mainichi Shinbun reviewer Date Nankai gave backhanded compliments to both artists, noting that Shihō’s technical ability was the higher of the two, but that Warō’s creative talent seemed to be the richer.103 In fact, Warō was not the only finalist for the Chogyū Prize, and choosing a winner had been a struggle for the Kokuten judges. Contrary to speculation, it was Chikkyō, not Shihō, who nominated the painter of White Peach; Bakusen in turn suggested Okamoto Shinsō’s (1894–1933) Lip Rouge (Kuchibeni) for the award, while Kagaku put forward Kainoshō Tadaoto’s (1894–1978) Comb Aslant (Yokogushi). The judges allowed Takeuchi

80 Caricatures (early 16th century) by Leonardo da Vinci, as reproduced in Shirakaba, vol. 8, no. 6 (June 1917). University of Hawaii at Mānoa Library collection. Photo by author.

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Kanada Warō, White Peach, 1918. Color on silk; two-panel folding screen. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Seihō to cast the final deciding vote, and it was he who named Warō the Chogyū Prize winner.104 The other two artists put forward for the award, Shinsō and Tadaoto, had both studied under Nakai Sōtarō and Seihō at the Specialized School for Painting; Tadaoto graduated in 1915, and Shinsō in 1918, with Lip Rouge serving as the latter’s diploma painting. Both artists were known to the Kyoto Nihonga world for participating in the popular yet short-lived exhibition collective the Secret Chestnut Society (Mitsuritsukai), active from 1915 to 1916, where their unique

portrayals of female subjects earned them accolades in the local press as “the new heroes of bijinga.”105 Although their paintings won no awards, Lip Rouge and Comb Aslant generated nearly as much attention among critics and viewers of the Kokuten as the works exhibited by society members themselves. Tadaoto’s Comb Aslant (Figure 82) has undergone a startling transformation over the century since its first exhibition in 1918. Today the painting depicts a courtesan in a Kabuki-themed robe posed on a copper-colored furoshiki cloth, standing 144

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82

Post card image of Comb Aslant as it originally appeared in the 1918 Kokuten exhibition. Image courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

over-robe, under-robe and kimono sash, as well as on the square furoshiki spread on the floor. The woman’s expression has also been altered; once aloof and vaguely sinister in character, today it is warm, clear-eyed and gently smiling. The most surprising alteration, however, involves a portrait of a Kabuki actor in the role of Scarface Otomi (Kirare Otomi, from the Kabuki play Comb Aslant: A Maiden Ill-Famed for Her Coquetry (Musume gonomi ukina no yokogushi).106 This portrait adorned the flowered backdrop screen in 1918,

KainoshōTadaoto, Comb Aslant, 1918. Color on silk; framed. Hiroshima Prefectural Museum of Art, Hiroshima.

before a screen painted with oversized chrysanthemum blossoms, but a color postcard of the work, produced for souvenir sale at the time of the first Kokuten exhibition (Figure 83), shows variations in the patterns and coloration of the subject’s 145

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Tadaoto’s graduation painting captured the interest of Murakami Kagaku, and three years later, Kagaku took the opportunity of a chance meeting with Tadaoto on Kyoto’s Shijō Bridge to entreat the younger artist to submit Comb Aslant to the Kokuten, promising to give the submission his personal endorsement.109 Rather than present one of the earlier versions of the painting, Tadaoto decided to create a reinterpretation of the theme, which, when it appeared in the 1918 Kokuten exhibition, became one of the most discussed works in the show. In one review, Ueda Jūzō reflected the disturbing quality of the painting produced by the subject’s eyes, yellow-tinged and rimmed with black and red, and suggested this was evidence of Tadaoto’s deep understanding of maquillage, and the pains he took to carefully record the realistic effects of traditional Edoperiod makeup.110 Okamoto Shinsō’s Lip Rouge (Figure 84) also addressed the themes of courtesans, costume and cosmetics. Both Tadaoto’s and Shinsō’s paintings were part of a larger trend in Kyoto during the 1910s that moved away from the idealized images of female beauties closely associated with Japan’s Edo-era floating world culture, and towards a more closely observed and sometimes exaggerated realism. In Kyoto, the pleasure quarter was Shimabara, which functioned as the city's licensed brothel zone from 1640 until 1958; today it survives as a heritage site. But even though it remained active as an entertainment district well into the twentieth century, by the 1910s Shimabara was already in the process of transforming from a vibrant pleasure quarter into a tourist attraction and place of historical interest.111 The businesses that remained, however, could still provide valuable practical information regarding the customs, dress, hairstyles, and material culture of Japan’s nineteenth-century pleasure quarters. For this reason, Shinsō made frequent visits to Shimabara to observe such preserved traditions as the oiran dōchū, a ceremony in which the top courtesans make a slow, stately promenade through the pleasure district, captured in a photograph believed to have been taken by Shinsō himself (Figure 85).112

but was later obliterated by the application of thick, gold-decorated paper inscribed with the colophon, “Comb Aslant, exhibited at the first Kokuga Society exhibition” (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai dai ikkai shuppinsaku Yokogushi). Tadaoto himself executed these drastic changes on two different occasions, the first coming soon after Comb Aslant was purchased at its debut  at the Kokuten exhibition, when the buyer commissioned Tadaoto to rework certain sections.  It was at this time that the portrait of Scarface Otomi was covered over and replaced by the colophon. Afterwards, Comb Aslant was lost for several decades, only to resurface in 1963, coincidentally just at the time the Kyoto Municipal  Museum of Art was planning the first Kokuga Society retrospective exhibition. After decades of improper storage and neglect, however, the painting required extensive restoration, and once again Tadaoto, now seventy-three years old, was commissioned to rework the painting, this time to restore damaged regions.107 As a result of these alterations and repairs, Comb Aslant was transformed from the unusual and eerie painting that garnered so much attention in 1918 into the brighter, wholesome work that exists today. Tadaoto later recalled that the impetus for the work had been a performance the year before by the actor Sawamura Gennosuke IV (1859–1936) at Kyoto’s Minami-za theater in the role of Scarface Otomi, which had captured his imagination and inspired the composition. He created his first version of the painting (there are at least three variations on this theme) as his diploma work for the Specialized School for Painting, with his sister-inlaw standing as his model. At the time, he was approaching the end of his final term at the school, and had been warned that he would not graduate unless his painting was satisfactorily completed. “I worked at home,” he later recalled, “and had no time to do a proper draft, so I drew the outlines offthe-cuff, directly onto the prepared painting surface with charcoal. By laboring in this way, I was able to finish the painting in time for the graduation exhibition.”108 146

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84 Okamoto Shinsō, Lip Rouge, 1918. Color on silk; framed. University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts.

In this way, Lip Rouge was an attempt to recapture the lost opulence and decadence of Kyoto’s pleasure district. Shinsō’s painting portrays a courtesan applying rouge to her lips before a candle stand, her body stooped forward at an unnatural angle to catch the dim light in a small hand mirror. Like Tadaoto, Shinsō mingled erotic and grotesque elements in the woman’s features, depicting slightly open, heavy-lidded eyes, and thick, sensuous lips pulled back to reveal white teeth and gray-pink gums. Her severely foreshortened torso is drastically deformed and abbreviated, giving her bare arms, which jut insect-like through the sleeve vents of her kimono, an odd disembodied appearance. Her legs, hidden by her exquisitely decorated layered robes, also seem stretched and distorted, recalling the proportions of the long-legged and high-waisted beauties rendered by Edo-era Ukiyo-e artists such as Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815). Lip Rouge simultaneously affirms and negates pre-Meiji aesthetic conventions associated with the bijinga genre, insofar

as Shinsō offers a subjective interpretation of the idealized but unnatural female proportions celebrated in Ukiyo-e, combined with objective documentation of historical garments and period styles of hair dressing and cosmetics. Shinsō’s and Tadaoto’s shared sobriquet as “the new heroes of Bijinga painting” was not based on their intention to slavishly affirm Edo-period floating world aesthetics, but rather on their willingness to reflect on, critique and update them, thus affording them contemporary relevance. In a manner of speaking, Comb Aslant and Lip Rouge could both be described as anti-bijin portraits, alternatives to the Edo-era ideal that reduce the female subject to idealized forms as lovely, delicate, and decorative, treating women as arranged cut flowers. Instead, they surprise and jar the viewer by imbuing their subjects with characteristics largely alien to the bijinga thematic, and in the process uncover new expressive potential for modern female portraiture. Several other works at the first Kokuten exhibition are also worthy of note. Sakakibara Shikō, 147

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drafted in realistic style strongly reminiscent of a Western-style charcoal esquisse, or even a monochrome photograph. As much as any experimental work in the exhibition, Shikō’s Landscape challenged customary notions and presented new possibilities for Nihonga. In the end, however, Shikō’s contribution to the first Kokuten left most viewers scratching their heads, and it received little attention in reviews. Kuroda Hōshin’s discussion of Landscape are representative of the few comments it elicited from critics, insofar as he mostly restricts himself to a simplistic description: “The entire surface is coated with either black or white… reminding one of a Western-style charcoal drawing. The rich blackness of the ink sometimes makes it difficult to ascertain what one is looking at, but the more one studies the work, the more intelligible its elements become… But what is the purpose of the arch at the top of the composition? Perhaps the work would be better without it…” Reviews by Kuroda, an art critic and alumnus of Tokyo University’s Philosophy Department, were seldom devoid of complex theoretical commentary, but Shikō’s work seems to have left him stymied. In the end, Kuroda, like most critics, was ultimately unable to evaluate the effectiveness of Shikō’s experimentation, or its repercussions in the evolving field of Nihonga. 114 Finally, Growing Late at the Street Car Stop (Kureyuku teiryūjo, Figure 87) was a work accepted in the Honorable Mention category, submitted by Kajiwara Hisako (1896–1988), the only female artist to participate in any of the Kokuten exhibitions. Hisako’s painting shows an exhausted young woman seated on a wooden bench at a tram station, a subject she based, as the artist later explained, on a scene she witnessed at the Chūshojima tram station, located on the Keihan line between Kyoto and Osaka.115 Hisako’s choice of theme demonstrates an ongoing interest in the humanist  Jinseiha trend championed by Nakai Sōtarō during the heyday of the Nameless Society in the early 1910s, and explored by Bakusen in his Tax Day of 1912. Hisako’s painting addresses the exhaustion and alienation experienced by temporary maid and waitress staff

Photograph of oiran promenade (oiran dōchū) taken inShimabara district of Kyoto circa 1918. Image courtesy of Hoshino Garō, Kyoto.

brother to Shihō, exhibited the eponymously entitled Landscape (Fūkei, Figure 86), a bucolic view of Kyoto’s Higashiyama hills as seen through the second-story studio windows of the Specialized Painting School.113 Lost today and known only through photographs in the Kokuten catalogue and on souvenir postcards, the mild-looking Landscape is a much more radical departure from conventional expectations of what constitutes Nihonga than first glance suggests. The work was Shikō’s attempt to directly address Nihonga’s “pigment problem,” similar in spirit to Banka’s Stream in Early Summer. But, whereas Banka offered an explosion of expressionistic color, Shikō’s piece featured an unusual combination of black sumi ink and white chalk on silk, a monochrome scene 148

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86 Sakakibara Shikō, Landscape, 1918. Work not extant. Photo courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

who move from one inn or restaurant to the next during busy holiday, festival or tourists seasons. According to Michiyo Morioka’s insightful description the work, “The architectural background is inorganic, public and urban… Cherry blossoms, often juxtaposed in a traditional bijinga painting to vie with the beautiful women subjects, are here shown only as a design in a poster… Placed in this unfeeling public space, her sense of loneliness and anonymity becomes even more acute.”116 This poignant and powerful painting was Hisako’s sole contribution to the Kokuga Society’s exhibition, for in the following year, she returned to the national salon, where her works were regularly accepted through the 1920s, establishing one of the most successful careers enjoyed by a female painter in twentieth century Kyoto.

the broad range of styles represented by the small number of works it featured, and in this sense the Kokuga Society achieved one of its stated goals in its manifesto, namely, to achieve a diverse visual record of creative self-expression. If there was one discernable public goal for the group, it was to establish a precedent for an exhibition of Nihonga that mingled understandings of traditional Japanese and Western painting, and generated a new set of aspirations for Japan’s newest generation of artists.117 For some, however, this East-West amalgamative approach in fact constituted a specific “Kokuten style,” and those who disapproved of the results dismissed the group’s efforts as a shallow mimicry and debasement of both Japan’s and Europe’s lofty painting heritages, resulting in the distortion of the most admirable and distinctive qualities of Nihonga and Yōga alike. Cartoonist Okamoto Ippei (1886–1948) used this criticism as the basis for a lampoon entitled The Position of the Kokuten (Kokuten no tachiba, Figure 88), which appeared in the December 1918 issue of the periodical Chūō Bijutsu. The caricature shows a

the impact of the first kokuten: an overview What struck many viewers when they considered their experience of the first Kokuten as a whole was 149

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flavor! The Kokuten – a blending of local Kyoto saké and imported European liquor. Care for a drink?” The customer makes a strange face: “An usual flavor, to be sure, but a bit hard to swallow.”118

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As the text demonstrates, Okamoto’s cartoon is not only aimed at the Kokuten, but addresses the perceived weaknesses of all three of the nation’s most important juried Nihonga exhibitions. Okamoto alludes to the banality of the Bunten by filling this cup with amazake, a drink made from saké lees, sweet with little or no alcoholic content and thus suitable even for children. Yokoyama Taikan’s Inten, on the other hand, is compared to denkiburan, a kind of fortified liquor (the name is a contraction of denki burandei, “electric brandy”) popular at that time with students and laborers as a cheap drink that quickly intoxicates. Lastly, Okamoto mocks the penchant of Bakusen and company for blending Eastern and Western artistic influences, represented by fine Kyoto sake and expensive Western alcohol, each very pleasant when enjoyed separately but unpalatable when mixed in the same cup. The few unfavorable write-ups of the Kokuga Society’s first exhibition, however, were overwhelmed by an otherwise enthusiastically positive reception, encouraging the general public to come in droves. Attendance figures for the 1918 Kokuten are unavailable today for its Tokyo run, but in Kyoto, a total of 28,339 visitors were counted over the exhibition’s fifteen day span, with ¥4,202.45 generated through the sale of entry tickets; that same year in Kyoto, the Bunten saw 68,407 visitors, and collected ¥9,314 door fees over the same fifteen days.119 In other words, the Kokuten, with only twenty-one works to the Bunten’s three hundred fifty-one, managed to attract an average of approximately 2000 visitors a day, and generated almost fifty percent the ticket sales of the much larger and more prestigious government-sponsored salon. Further evidence of the Kokuten’s positive reception is found in its record of painting sales, with nearly half the works on display reported purchased before the close of the Kokuten’s Tokyo run. By the exhibition’s close, sales of paintings at the Kokuten totaled ¥10,200,120 a

Kajiwara Hisako, Growing Late at the Street Car Stop, 1918. Color on silk; framed. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

white-mustachioed gentleman holding three cups, two labeled “Bunten” and “Inten” in his right hand, and one marked “Kokuten” in his left. His affable host pours drinks for him, and describes the flavors of the newfangled cocktails. Regarding the contents of the Kokuten cup, Okamoto’s text reads: “It doesn’t taste like the amazake of the Bunten, nor does it smack of the Inten’s denkiburan. It’s a brand new

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88 Okamoto Ippei, The Position of the Kokuten, 1918. Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 4, no. 12 (December 1918).

large portion of which stemmed from the purchase of Bakusen’s Bathhouse Maiden for the astounding sum of ¥4,500, a price ¥500 higher than that paid for the most expensive Bunten painting that same year.121 Even works by emerging artists went for impressive fees, such as those by Kainoshō Tadaoto and Kajiwara Hisako, both of which sold for ¥300, an amount which compares very favorably with a bank clerk’s respectable ¥40-a-month starting salary in 1918.122 The last issue to consider with regard to the inaugural Kokuten was one of the first raised, when Nakai Sōtarō read the list of works selected for exhibition from among the public submissions. That announcement had sparked outrage among members of the press corps, who raised their voices when they learned Tokyo artists had been virtually shut out. After this initial displeasure, however, the issue of geographic bias was entirely dropped from reviews and discussions of the Kokuten in the mass media. The close affinity demonstrated by Bakusen and company towards the Specialized Painting School was never raised, which seems curious, considering the fact that more than half the submissions selected for the 1918 Kokuten were painted by

recent graduates or currently enrolled students of the society members’ alma mater. In other words, the fact that the Kokuten was functioning as a launching platform for students of the school did not appear to be an issue worthy of comment or concern. Indeed, it is possible that no one realistically expected the Kokuga Society to be purely objective in their judging. After all, the stated primary goal of the organization was to promote of the art of its membership, and in the words of Bakusen himself, “only artists who create work and display attitudes complementary with our own” could expect to see their paintings accepted by the Kokuten judges.123 Perhaps it was considered natural that works by artists with the same institutional training would harmonize best with paintings exhibited the Kokuga Society members. In any event, what may have helped the Kokuten avoid accusations of unfair judging was the quality of the works exhibited, for if the paintings chosen by Bakusen and his peers had not been so uniformly admired by critics and the exhibition-going public alike, then the issue of geographic bias would have undoubtedly received more critical attention. 151

6 Artistic Flowering: The Second and Third Kokuten Exhibitions

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n the previous chapter, we saw how the fledgling Kokuga Society expanded its import from a group of disaffected minor painters into an exhibition collective of national significance, one that demonstrated its active engagement with complex aesthetic questions and its commitment to expanding the expressive potential of Nihonga. We also saw how it succeeded in generating an aura of authority for its members primarily through the publication of a manifesto, and for its associated Kokuten exhibition through the implementation of strict judging standards. In this chapter, we will examine the second and third Kokuten exhibitions of 1919 and 1920, and trace the crystallization of a number of developing inclinations and see them mature into fully realized dispositions, which some critics identified as the burgeoning of a definable “Kokuten style” (Kokutenha). As the Kokuten exhibition as a whole entered a period of artistic flowering, for some of the Kokuga Society’s founding members these two years were a period of unrealized ambitions and frustrated initiatives. This was especially true of Tsuchida Bakusen, who blamed his inability to complete not one but both of his Kokuten paintings in 1919 and 1920 on his society and exhibition management duties. While the new responsibilities were no doubt substantial, his struggle to meet the measure of his own past accomplishments suggests that,

artistically speaking, Bakusen stood at a crossroads. At stake was his fundamental approach to his painted subject. Representing this transitional moment in Bakusen’s career is his Kokuten contribution of 1919, which, like his painting at the Bunten salon in 1916, was based on sketches of maiko models hired from a local Kyoto teahouse (Figure 89). Earlier in his career, Bakusen had been eager to identify himself as a specialist in the bijinga genre, a painter of women, and he demonstrated his talent in capturing the varied qualities, physical and temperamental, of a wide range of female subjects, from abalone divers of Nakiri and the women of the Seto Island chain, to Ohara women peddlers and Kyoto maiko. Speaking about his own painting of 1919, however, he notes that this second exploration of the Three Maiko theme (Figure 91) marked new approach. Gone, he explains, is the sweet, romantic feeling that exudes from his earlier version, having replaced it with an interest in pure form. “This,” he explained, “is how I generate beauty, such as that which existed in Bathhouse Maiden, and [this year] in Three Maiko. Whenever I paint from nature, I do so with modesty and humility, in an attitude resembling piety… This year I approached [my maiko] with an interest in their outer forms alone, addressing them no different from the way I would address apples [in a still life].” Any aspirations he had for his Kokuten paintings in 1919 and 1920, however, were undermined by his inability to complete them in time for their respective openings.1

Okamoto Shinsō, Study of Three Maiko Playing Ken, 1920, detail of fig. 112.

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89 Photograph of Bakusen in his studio with two maiko models and their chaperone, circa 1919. Image courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

the death of the bunten and birth of the teiten

With Bakusen’s failure to recreate his success of the Kokuten debut, over the next two years critics turned their attention to the dynamic unfolding among the works exhibited by other members, particularly Ono Chikkyō and Nonagase Banka, as well as the paintings selected for exhibition from among the hundreds of submissions, many of which demonstrated these artists’ keen interest in quoting from Western painting movements. This trend was reviled by many reviewers, including Ishii Hakutei, who minced no words in his criticism. “Whether considered in terms of form or spirit, these works that smack so strongly of oils (Yōga kusai) are completely dead to the East Asian pictorial tradition,” Ishii wrote, “making it impossible to evaluate them as Nihonga. When I look out on all these attempts to mimic Yōga painting, I can only express my dissatisfaction.”2 The question of Western quotation was not easily settled, however, for it was closely tied up with other, larger issues, such as whether ganryō pigments had the practical capacity to successfully function as a vehicle for modern artistic expression, and if so, what form that expression should take. In short, Nihonga’s “pigment problem” was as yet alive and well, and became the subject of renewed artistic exploration in the second and third Kokuten exhibitions.

In 1919, Japan’s Ministry of Education made the surprise decision to shut down the Bunten in order to oversee its complete organizational restructuring and public rehabilitation. Why the government ministers chose this particular moment to implement sweeping reforms to the national salon is unclear, for by many markers the Bunten had just enjoyed one of the most successful exhibitions in its twelve-year history. In 1918, the Bunten sold a staggering ¥202,180 yen worth of entry tickets to 258,371 visitors, 2,000 more than the year before. As for painting sales, eighty-nine paintings were sold, compared to seventy-eight in 1917, including sixty-two Nihonga works.3 As usual, there had been the usual range of voices, both conservative and progressive, eager to sound off about the quality of the art selected for inclusion by the Bunten judges, yet droves of artists continued submitting, the critics kept reviewing, and the Bunten remained as popular as ever with the exhibition-going public. What, then, was the incentive for the government to reform its sponsored juried exhibition? One impetus was certainly the unexpected success of the inaugural Kokuten exhibition. Despite the Ministry’s official statement the previous year, 154

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which treated the founding of the Kokuga Society lightly, no doubt officials at the Ministry of Education observed the new group and its exhibition closely, and must have been disconcerted when this small-scale affair garnered so much critical and popular attention. The fact that yet another group of young and talented artists had very publicly withdrawn from the national exhibition to form their own exhibition collective, echoing the example of Second Section Society and the Japan Art Institute before them, suggested that the Bunten had not successfully united the Japanese art world, its proclaimed aim at the time of its founding in 1907; on the contrary, it had become its chief source of disaffection and rupture. The creation of the Kokuga Society and its affiliated exhibition, at least according to its self-staked public position, had been necessary in order to safeguard for the nation that most sacrosanct of modernist artistic principles, freedom of creative expression, from the Bunten’s ethically compromised panel of judges. By 1918, the image of the Bunten as a reactionary and heavily politicized institution was so entrenched that, if the Ministry of Education wished to restore the faith of gifted progressive painters like Bakusen and company, the members of the Japan Art Institute, or other artists unwilling to participate in the culture of mediocrity associated with the Bunten, their exhibition needed rebranding as well as restructuring. If the popularity of the first Kokuten exhibition provided one incentive to reform the national salon, the death of Terasaki Kōgyō (1866–1919) in February 1919 presented the Ministry of Education with another. Kōgyō, a respected and influential Nihonga painter based in Tokyo, had been closely involved in the Bunten from the time of its initial proposal and planning in 1906, and had served on the selection jury of every Bunten exhibition in its twelve-year history. Kōgyō was also an early follower of Okakura Tenshin, but when Yokoyama Taikan was ejected from the Bunten jury in 1914, Kōgyō was not among those who resigned in solidarity and protest, which led to a falling out between the two former colleagues. With Kōgyō’s

death in 1919, Education Ministry officials hoped to entice Taikan back into the government fold, and bring an end to the political partisanship that divided the great Tokyo Nihonga world. In September 1919, the Ministry of Education announced the formation of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin). Created by royal edict and underwritten by the Imperial Household, its primary function was to oversee Japan’s new national juried exhibition, the Teiten (short for Teikoku Bijutsuin Tenrankai). In addition to ceremonial language and statements of the Academy’s lofty intentions, the announcement laid out the structure and regulations of the new exhibition.4 Members of the Imperial Art Academy would serve as an executive body, featuring a director and no more than fifteen members nominated by the Ministry of Education, chosen on the merits of their contributions to Japanese art and culture. This body, however, would help the Ministry choose an exhibition director for the Teiten, who would serve for three years, and members of the selection jury, who would be appointed annually. This ingenious scheme accomplished two necessary ends. First, it made the politically entrenched senior artists on the Bunten jury amenable to stepping down in exchange for the greater prestige and monetary stipend that came with the title of Imperial Appointee (Chokuninkan). Second, it allowed for the regular repopulation of the new national salon’s selection jury with younger artists, which in theory would allow the Teiten to remain in touch with current trends, as well as forestall the entrenchment of the new population of judges.5 Another significant policy difference between the Teiten and the Bunten was the creation of the status of Endorsee (Suisensha). An artist so named by the Imperial Art Academy was given the right to exhibit at the Teiten without undergoing the selection process. We recall that both Ono Chikkyō and Sakakibara Shihō were given similar status at the Inten, when Taikan named them both Friends of the Institute in 1915. In 1920 the Kokuga Society would follow suite and announce the creation of a similar designation, Friend of the Society (Kaiyū), 155

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Fellowship of the True Way, the exhibition collective founded by arch-conservative Takashima Hokkai in 1907 in reaction to the perception of Shinpa bias on the first Bunten jury (although Matsubayashi Keigetsu, another Nanga painter, also demonstrated conservative artistic values in his work). Of the four Kyoto judges named, two of them, Kansetsu and Suishō, were former students of Takeuchi Seihō, a fact that demonstrates his continued strong influence as an Imperial Art Academy member. Other names of interest on the Teiten selection panel are Kaburagi Kiyokata, Yūki Somei, and Matsuoka Eikyū, three of the five members of a collective known as the Gold Bell Society (Kinreisha), active from 1916 to 1922. This group was the brainchild of Taguchi Kikutei (1875–1943), publisher of the art journal Chūō Bijutsu, who hired Kiyokata, Somei, and Eikyū as instructors for the one of the country’s first correspondence art schools, the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Bijutsu Gakuin, not to be confused with the Japan Art Institute). These three teachers plus two others, Hirafuku Hyakusui (1878–1972) and Yoshikawa Reika (1875–1929), exhibited their works as the Gold Bell Society to promote Taguchi’s school and its educational mission. Like many artists of the time, Kiyokata and the others were sometimes critical of the national salon, yet the Gold Bell Society could hardly be described as anti-establishment, for its members continued to submit and win prizes at the Bunten and Teiten, and carefully scheduled Golden Bell Society exhibitions to avoid overlapping with the national salon.7

which extended the same right-to-exhibit. The function of these titles was not only to recognize artistic excellence, but also to extend institutional affiliation, whether the recipient desired it or not. Tsuchida Bakusen, for example, was one of the first artists named an Endorsee by the Imperial Art Academy, but he chose not to take advantage of this honorary status until 1929, after the dissolution of the Kokuga Society. The initial roster of Imperial Art Academy members shows an interesting cross-section of Japan’s art and cultural elite. J. Thomas Rimer has remarked that the first Academy director, writer and art critic Mori Ōgai, had made significant contributions to critical discourse on oil painting over the years, but by 1919 he was old, infirm, and nearing the end of his career, and few expected any significant new ideas to come from him.6 The Nanga painter Tomioka Tessai and Tokyo-based Nihonga painter Matsumoto Fūko (1840–1923), respectively 82 and 79 years of age, also appear to have been appointed in recognition of life achievements, underscoring the largely honorary nature of these Imperial appointments. Other members included oil painters Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), Okada Saburōsuke, Wada Eisaku (1874–1959), and Nakamura Fusetsu (1866–1943), Nihonga painters Takeuchi Seihō, Kobori Tomoto, Kawai Gyokudō, Yamamoto Shunkyō, Imao Keinen, and sculptors Shinkai Taketarō (1868–1927) and Takamura Kōun. Yokoyama Taikan and Shimomura Kanzan were also offered appointments but turned them down, killing any hopes for reconciliation between the Inten leaders and the organizers of the new government salon. The selection jury for the new Teiten exhibition was announced in October. Nine judges were named to the Nihonga section, with Hashimoto Kansetsu, Kikuchi Keigetsu, Nishimura Suishō, and Kawamura Manshū representing Kyoto, and Kaburagi Kiyokata, Yūki Somei (1875–1957), Matsuoka Eikyū, Komuro Sui’un and Matsubayashi Keigetsu appointed from Tokyo. The only self-defined Kyūha artist on the panel was Sui’un, a Nanga painter and one-time member of the

overview of the second and third kokuten exhibitions (1919, 1920) The Kokuga Society must have welcomed the reorganization of the national salon as evidence of their movement’s forceful impact, and perhaps even saw it as an ideological victory, but at the same time, they likely viewed the Bunten’s transformation into the Teiten with no small concern. 156

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Would the new, progressively oriented national exhibition render its own activities redundant? Such concerns were not unfounded, for in 1919 Bakusen and company watched as Kajiwara Hisako and Kainoshō Tadaoto, two of the most-discussed participants in the first Kokuten, returned to the government’s fold. Furthermore, several talented recent graduates of the Kyoto Specialized Painting School chose to submit to the new Teiten instead of the Kokuga Society’s exhibition, despite the favor shown by Bakusen and company to affiliates of the school. Fukuda Heihachirō (1892–1974), who made his juried exhibition debut at the 1919 Teiten, is an example, and although his Teiten debut work, a painting entitled Snow (Yuki) is lost today, his contribution to the second Teiten of 1920, Pomegranate (Ansekiryū, Figure 90), is extant.8 A study of this painting reveals close parallels with Sakakibara Shihō’s Early Plums of 1918, both works featuring references to Song and Yuan dynasty academic Chinese bird and flower painting, combined with closely observed Western-style realism. If the Teiten judges were willing to recognize precisely the sort of Eastern-Western aesthetic amalgamations exemplified at the Kokuten, then perhaps the Kokuga Society’s reform-minded movement had already accomplished its objectives. The second Kokuten opened at Shirakiya Department store on November 1, 1919, and after a run of fifteen days moved to Kyoto, where it was held at the First Industrial Exhibition Hall in Okazaki from November 27 to December 11. The third Kokuten ran in Tokyo from November 2 to 15, 1920 and in Kyoto from November 27 to December 13 at the same venues as the previous years. Any concerns that Bakusen and company may have harbored regarding the prospective success of these exhibitions were put to rest in 1919, when the Kokuten selection jury accepted 412 public submissions (178 from Kyoto, 234 from Tokyo), 134 more than the previous year. In 1920, the number rose yet again to 449, a 61 percent increase from 1918.9 But whereas an incremental rise in submissions would normally result in a corresponding expansion in the number of public works selected, at the second and

90 Fukuda Heihachirō, Pomegranite, 1920. Color on silk; hanging scroll. Oita Prefectural Museum of Art.

third Kokuten exhibitions this number actually decreased. In 1919, five submissions were accepted outright and five included in the Honorable Mention category; in 1920, three works made the first cut, and ten chosen for honorable mention, constituting an acceptance rate of approximately three percent. In addition to the increased stringency with which submissions were judged, there was a reduction in monetary awards given by the selection jury. The Chogyū Prize continued to be dispersed at 157

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however, the three maiko appear close only in terms of their physical proximity; one maiko holds a chairi tea container and a bamboo tea scoop, the second a tea bowl, and the third a fan, giving them the appearance of preparing for a tea ceremony, yet each of the women seem unmindful to the presence of the others. Like the 1916 version, Bakusen’s Three Maiko of 1919 is lost today and known only through photographic reproduction,11 but even this does not give us a clear idea of how the work appeared to viewers in the Kokuten’s galleries, since it was exhibited in an unfinished state, and only completed after the exhibition’s close. Bakusen offered his excuses in a letter to Nomura Itsushi, blaming his administrative responsibilities, which had ballooned that year, and the increase in submissions, which required more time to properly evaluate.12 Surprisingly, however, few critics commented on its lack of completion, although several reviewers deemed the Three Maiko of 1919 inferior to the earlier version prepared for the Bunten. Oil painter Takamura Masao, writing for Chūō Bijutsu, very bluntly called the work a failure. “My expectations were completely disappointed,” he explained. “Three Maiko of a few years ago had a much more modern feel to it, and showed superior use of line, coloration, and

all future Kokuten exhibitions, but no further Kokuten Prizes were distributed after Irie Hakō received it in 1918, a fact has caused Tanaka Hisao to conjecture if the Kokuten Prize was invented solely to thank Irie Hakō for his contribution to the first Kokuten, and to entice him to accept full membership in the Kokuga Society, which he did in 1919.10

bakusen: three maiko (1919) and spring (1920) As discussed in this chapter’s introduction, Bakusen’s contribution to the second Kokuten in 1919 was the figure painting Three Maiko (Sannin no maiko, Figure 91), revisiting a theme he explored for the 1916 Bunten. This of course made comparative evaluations of the two versions inevitable, but when we put these works side-by-side for comparison, their differences stand out more than their similarities. The maiko in the 1916 version (Figure 50) are shown interacting in a game of cards, their bodies turned inwards to create a private interior space. Even if their gazes do not meet, their congenial expressions and the graceful mutual inclination of their heads leave the viewer with an impression of conviviality and intimacy. In the 1919 version,

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Tsuchida Bakusen, Three Maiko, 1919. Work not extant. Image courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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rhythm.” Takamura also disliked how spacious and empty the composition seemed, spread out on the large screen surface, but this, he conceded, may have been due to the incomplete state in which the artist chose to exhibit it.13 Bakusen published his response to negative reviews of Three Maiko in the December 1919 issue of Bijutsu Gahō, dismissing them as focused entirely on superficial issues and utterly inadequate as critiques. He then expounded on his approach to Nihonga painting as he made a case for the merits of Three Maiko, noting that his own laudable character attributes and the purity of his intentions towards his subject shine through in the work (revealing in the process the continuing influence of personality theory).

thus the beauty found in the work does not come from the flower, it emerges from within the artist himself.14

In 1920, desiring to impress his critics in a way that Three Maiko had not, Bakusen contributed Spring (Haru, Figure 92) to the third Kokuten. The painting was a complex and sizable composition featuring two framed paintings flanking a two-panel screen. Writing again for Bijutsu Gahō, Bakusen explained that he had originally intended to paint a bird-and-flower composition for the third Kokuten, once again revisiting a theme he previous exhibited at the Bunten, but was forced to change his plans after being struck with rheumatism. During the lengthy period of recuperation, he passed the time watching his young daughter Reiko, born two years earlier, as she played in the garden attached to his home in Kyoto, and decided instead on the theme of a mother and child immersed in nature. “I tried to explore the entire painting surface, including every corner,” he wrote. “I wanted every single flower to be so beautiful that the viewer would wish to reach out and pluck it.”15

I inevitably take what I find in nature, whatever it may be, and fuse it to with what develops in my imagination. This is how I generate beauty, such as that which appeared in Bathhouse Maiden, and now in Three Maiko. Whenever I paint from nature, I do so with modesty and humility, in an attitude resembling piety… When drawing flowers, one draws objectively,

92 Tsuchida Bakusen, Spring, 1920. Color on silk; framed triptych. Kodansha Noma Memorial Museum, Tokyo.

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Spring is an uncommonly large painting, dwarfing Bakusen in a photograph of the artist sitting in his studio before the unfinished painting (Figure 93), its massive scale and unusual threepiece format calling to mind a Western-style altarpiece triptych. The painting features oversized renderings of Bakusen’s own wife and child under the arbored branches of a young blossoming pear in a field of flowering dandelion and daikon radish plants. Flanking the center tableau are independently composed bird-and-flower arrangements featuring a magnolia tree on the left side and a camellia on the right, holdovers, perhaps, from Bakusen’s original plans to execute a bird-andflower painting. Ishida Kōtarō, a reviewer for Chūō Bijutsu, positively compared these flanking panels with Bakusen’s Spring Birds in Clear Weather from

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1917, suggesting they show demonstrable improvements both in terms of Bakusen’s technical skill and sense of composition, which allowed him to obtain a proper balance between decorativeness and fidelity to nature, a measured conciliation of the subjective and objective artistic principles that was lacking in the highly ornamental Spring Birds in Clear Weather.16 The ambitious size of Spring undoubtedly contributed to Bakusen’s inability to finish the work in time for the exhibition. Reviewers had for the most part been willing to overlook this failing in 1919, but this was the second time in as many years that Bakusen allowed his Kokuten painting to appear in the galleries in an unfinished state, and critics blasted him for it. Yomiuri Shinbun reviewer Nakada Yōnosuke strongly rebuked the defacto

Photograph of Tsuchida Bakusen in his studio seated before Spring, circa 1920. Image courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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collective's decision to take a temporary hiatus from exhibition painting, the only such interruption in the span of his career.

Kokuga Society leader for his lack of professionalism. Showing half-completed paintings appears to have become a habit into which Bakusen had fallen, he wryly noted, and complained that disappointing results like this were exactly what separated independent collective events like the Kokuten from the government-organized exhibitions. “I had hoped to be able to say more about Bakusen and his work,” he concluded his comments, “but out of respect for the artist I will refrain from doing so.”17 For his Tokyo Asahi Shinbun review, Haruyama Takematsu concluded that Spring was in fact a very brave work for Bakusen to attempt, since in order to succeed, it relied entirely on his ability to capture and convey the tenderness of the mother and child relationship, and on generating a sympathetic emotional response in the viewer. But here is precisely where the work falls flat, he explained, for rather than being charged with warmth, the features and expressions of the mother and infant seem wooden, and their poses awkward and stiff. For this reason, Haruyama, too, concluded Spring to be a failure, and pointed to Bakusen’s recent pattern of returning each year to previously explored motifs as evidence that the head of the Kokuga Society was running out of new ideas.18 Haruyama’s conclusions, if exaggerated, had a degree of truth in them, for after the close of the 1920 Kokuten, Bakusen was instrumental in the

chikkyō: gokayama in summer (1919) and island at sea (1920) Much like Bakusen, in 1919 and 1920 Ono Chikkyō had trouble recreating the success of his first Kokuten contribution, the strong and confident Nakiri Village. Decades later, Chikkyō diagnosed the problems he faced at this stage of his career as stemming from his desire to push against the limits of Nihonga’s mineral pigments. “There was a gap between what I wanted to accomplish and what I was able to do with regard to realism,” he wrote, “which afflicted me terribly. The more interested I became in realism, the more I had to face the limitations of my medium… It was as if a dark road stretched ahead of me.”19 The two paintings he created for the second and third Kokuten exhibitions, Gokayama in Summer of 1919 (Natsu no Gokayama, Figure 94) and Island at Sea of 1920 (Kaitō, Figure 95) serve as milestones along this dark road. Shortly before the second Kokuten’s opening in November 1919, Chikkyō published a statement in Seisaku, the society’s media organ, in which he explained the background for Gokayama in Summer and described the new and unusual strategy he

94 Ono Chikkyō, Summer in Gokayama, 1919. Color on silk; four-panel folding screen. Kasaoka Municipal Chikkyō Museum of Art.

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95 Ono Chikkyō, Islands, 1920. Color on silk; pair of two-panel folding screens. Kasaoka Municipal Chikkyō Museum of Art.

pursued for its execution. One evening earlier that year, as he gazed out his studio window at sunset, he was taken by the view of the Mount Hie, a high peak located to the northeast of Kyoto, illuminated in the last light of the day. “Suddenly I decided that I wanted to paint mountains,” he recorded, “and Gokayama immediately suggested itself.”20 Gokayama, a village located in modern Toyama prefecture and a registered UNESCO World Heritage Site, was already famed in the 1910s for the beauty of its mountainous settings and for its distinctive rural farmhouse architecture with steeply peaked roofs known as gasshō-tsukuri (“prayinghands construction,” named for the resemblance of the rooflines to hands clasped in prayer). Chikkyō had visited Gokayama in 1916 to generate shasei studies for a failed Bunten submission that year, and he resolved to take up these three-year-old sketches and try again.21 If Nakiri Village was as study in objectivity, in Gokayama in Summer Chikkyō gave subjectivity freer rein. He dispensed with the usual step of generating a carefully considered shita-e compositional mock-up, and blocked out the composition directly on a silk ground using impressionistic lines rendered with charcoal.22 He then executed the painting

entirely with pigment, relying on color blending and eschewing the use of outlines to define forms, a strategy not dissimilar from the “misty” or “hazy” (mōrōtai) style of painting developed around 1900 by Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō. Just as those earlier attempts to create a purely pigmentbased Nihonga were criticized for their lack of clarity, so was Chikkyō taken to task by reviewers for the murky, monotonous appearance of Gokayama in Summer. Even if critics disapproved of his efforts, at the very least Chikkyō successfully foregrounded the debate over the potential of Nihonga pigments to successfully function in a mimetic capacity similar to oil paints, although Moriguchi Tari noted that Chikkyō, Banka, and others at the Kokuga Society were not the only ones attempting to tackle Nihonga’s pigment problem head on. Others exhibiting Nihonga works at both the Inten and Teiten were also expressing a new appetite for mimetic realism, “but realism explored for its own sake is uninteresting,” he complained, and besides, similar experiments had been attempted and abandoned decades ago. “If this is what these painters are looking for,” Moriguchi explained, “they need only go back to the early Meiji period, where they will find the artists at work on the same problem.”23 162

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Chikkyō was as dissatisfied with Gokayama in Summer as the critics, noting in his statement in Seisaku that in the absence of ink outlines and texture strokes, the painting did indeed have a blurred, hazy feel, and he expressed his frustration at his inability to achieve the effects he desired. “Compared to oil painting,” he wrote, “the only kind of realism possible with Nihonga materials is a perfunctory kind, so much so that it begs the question of whether realism by its strictest definition is achievable [with mineral pigments] at all.”24 But he was not willing to see his efforts dismissed entirely, for he argued there were other painterly issues at work in Summer in Gokayama, especially the latent power of subjective expression. Before one can effectively capture nature, he reflected, one must first come to understand it, and with understanding comes expressive power. Even if an artist cannot capture color or forms with traditional mineral pigments exactly as they appear in nature, one should still be able to find a color or produce a line that captures nature’s “eternal aspects.” “When it comes time to make their paintings, artists should keep this in mind, and refuse to acknowledge the limitations of Japanese pigments… In short, artists must have a firm grasp of reality before they plunge forward, and it is critical that they embrace their own way of viewing nature.”25 The following year Chikkyō fine-tuned his attempts to approximate the objective realism possible with oil painting while still playing to mineral pigments’ strengths. His contribution to the third Kokuten in 1920 was Island at Sea, and in an essay for the graphic art journal Bijutsu Shashin Gahō, Chikkyō explained that the view featured in the painting was taken from a promontory overlooking several small islands in the Seto Inland Sea, a site located near Chikkyō’s own hometown of Kasaoka. When he first arrived at the site, “the clouds had just broken and a fleeting light brimmed over, illuminating the entire sea in a lead gray light, and in the shadow of the island, the sea was a patchwork of dark and light tones made by the water’s changing depth.” These two things, the colors of the light and the water, made the greatest impression on

him, and by adding white sails dotting the water and the reds and greens of the wind-blown pines, he was able to enrich the entire scene with visual drama. “I was determined to capture the view as realistically as my skills would allow, to try and see if I could not make at least a little progress towards achieving a degree of realistic rendering hitherto unachieved in Nihonga.”26 In pursuit of this goal, Island at Sea makes effective use of aerial perspective, hiding objects in the deep distance in a shimmering haze, providing atmosphere as well as generating a sense of deep distance. Once again Chikkyō relied heavily on blended pigments to define compositional elements and provide volume, but this time he did not entirely eschew traditional East Asian painting techniques. For example, Chikkyo rendered outlines to accentuate the forms of the trees, but used pigment instead of sumi ink, and added texture strokes to the tree bark, stones, and the island’s rocky shoreline, again with color instead of the traditional   black ink, which provided greater clarity and definition. Most critics acknowledged and applauded Chikkyō’s efforts to improve the technical failings that marred Gokayama in Summer of the year before, yet there were denigrators who vehemently opposed the very premise of Chikkyō’s YōgaNihonga amalgamated style. Bakusen wrote an essay in defense of Chikkyō’s aesthetic experiments, reminding his readers (and echoing Moriguchi Tari) that Kano Hōgai and other artists of the late nineteenth century had experimented with Western-style realism and produced many fine works. But critics were missing larger and more consequential issues, he observed, when they quibbled over such concerns: If one faces nature with a pious attitude, an experience that can bring one to the verge of tears, and then somehow actually manages to capture its beauty in a painting, what does it matter if the result looks Western or not? It is obvious that the Kokuga Society members have studied Western paintings, and they have clearly influenced us, but all that matters is that our work

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shihō: red pines (1919) and forest in nara (1920)

demonstrates our interior struggle. I am not worried about being attacked by critics for this, not even they charge us with causing the death of Nihonga.27

While Bakusen and Chikkyō struggled with their second and third Kokuten paintings, Shihō experienced a new clarity of purpose. For the second Kokuga Society exhibition, he exhibited Red Pines (Akamatsu, Figure 96), a pair of folding screens nearly twenty-five feet in length. The painting features a row of Japanese red pines and a single hawk perched on one of the branches, set against a clear sky turning orange in the light of a setting sun, a composition as open and uncluttered as Early Plums was close and ornate. Recalling Red Pines several years later, Shihō described himself at that time as an artist awakening to the eternal, unchanging aspects of nature. “My attitude [towards natural subjects] was humbler and more deferential,” he remembered, “but at the same time, my thoughts ran deeper, and my spirit was more at ease… I began to cultivate a sense of emotional interiority, moving deeper and deeper inward, into the spiritual.” In Red Pines, he recalled, as in Chikkyō’s works, it was pigments that gave him the most trouble, and his only regret was that he had been unable to more ably capture the color tones as he experienced them

Chikkyō closed his own essay in journal Bijutsu Shashin Gahō with no attempt to rebut his critics, but neither did he concede defeat, although he did explain three basic truths he had learned about Nihonga: first, that Japanese mineral pigments cannot be handled in the same way as oils; second, that the brushed line is the most effective way to define forms; and third, that color must be used in a way that does not compromise the efficacy of the line. He also promised to continue exploring effective new ways of expressing his vision of nature, which required delicate balance of subjectivity and objectivity: When I look at nature and I am moved, I am still not able to adequately express what I see. I want to absorb nature more deeply, and to allow nature to dictate which colors I should use. If I could do so, then I would be able to realize nature brilliantly in my work, and generate a decorative quality based upon greater simplicity. Only then would I finally be able to create a painting of nature generated firmly from the standpoint of Nihonga.28

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in nature.29 An examination of Shihō’s color studies for Red Pines (Figure 97) provides a glimpse into his original intentions regarding pigments, for these drawings, executed in color pencil, show swirling, feathery tendrils of translucent red, yellow, green and blue, generating a dream-like, ethereal feel not present in the crystalline final work.

Critic Moriguchi Tari was pleased with Red Pines, and noted the influence of Momoyama-era mural and screen paintings, even suggesting a possible inspirational source in the pines and hawks from the sliding screen panels (fusuma) painted by Kano Tanyū around 1625 for Nijō Castle’s Ninomaru Palace. The excellence of Shihō’s painting,

97 Sakakibara Shihō, color study for Red Pines, 1919. Color pencil on paper. Private collection.

96 Sakakibara Shihō, Red Pines, 1919. Color on silk; pair of six-panel folding screens. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

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however, also stems from his careful study of living pines, Moriguchi explained, evidence of which he found in the lines of the trunks, the bends of the branches, and the groupings of needles, all of which closely adhere to models provided in nature. He applauded Shihō’s success in adapting the formal qualities of these antique precedents in an entirely new manner of expression.30 Murakami Bunga also raved about the painting, and concluded “no artists working in the Yamato-e style today can touch him.”31 For his third Kokuten painting, Shihō offered another interpretation of a nature theme entitled Forest in Nara (Nara no mori, Figure 98). Shihō afterwards recalls how pleased he was with his success in capturing and rendering the vision that had inspired the painting, which came to him while was listening to music from his collection of classical Western recordings.32

encounter something similar to what I had experienced in Casals’s music.33

Shihō followed his inclinations and traveled to Nara, and ended up spending two months creating the shasei sketches that formed the building blocks of his composition. The final tableau depicts a family of deer resting in the shade of a tall cedar tree beside azalea bushes, and a gnarled and ancient wisteria vine, its tendrils heavy with hanging seed pods, wrapped around the tree’s trunk. All these elements are drenched in the golden light of a late afternoon, which Shihō incorporated to give the scene a classical (kotenteki) sense or feel, similar to that which he experienced in Casals’s recording.34 Rendered in a manner that combines Yamato-e “classicism” with Yōga-style realism, Forest in Nara evokes a romantic ethereality, appearing in equal parts realistic and fantastic to recreate the experience of a waking dream. Like Red Pines, Forest in Nara was generously rewarded with positive reviews. Murakami Bunga mentioned some reservations concerning the composition (he disliked some of the deer, he wrote, particularly the fawn) but applauded Shihō’s technical prowess. In particular, he praised Shihō’s mastery of urahaku, a process by which gold leaf is

Forest in Nara developed from an impression I received while listening to the cellist Pau Casals playing [Granados’s] Spanish Dance. The piece is very fanciful; in addition to a classical feel, there also seems to be something decidedly Asian about it. I was deeply moved by its beauty, and in the midst of listening I felt a sudden desire to visit Nara. I was sure that in Nara I would

98 Sakakibara Shikō, Forest in Nara, 1920. Color, gold on silk; pair of two-panel folding screens. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

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affixed to a painting from behind, and Murakami admired how the glitter of gold seen through the loose weave of the silk ground helped recreate the warm golden glow of sunset.35 Ishida Kōtarō noted that although Forest in Nara speaks to a more conventional Japanese taste and temperament than any other work on display at the 1920 Kokuten, this is not a bad thing. While Forest in Nara makes reference to Western-style realism, Ishida noted how “it does not have any of that disagreeable odor of Western oils” exuded by so many of the works featured in the exhibition. “Both Shihō’s point of departure and his final destination,” Ishida concludes, “are pure Nihonga.”36

kagaku: hidaka river (1919), nude (1920) Murakami Kagaku’s contribution to the second Kokuten was Hidaka River (Hidakagawa, Figure 99),37 the subject of which is originally derived from a Buddhist setsuwa or moral story dating to at least the eleventh century.38 This tale, which describes the tragic consequences of a woman’s unrequited love for a priest, was adapted on many occasions for the Noh, Kabuki, and Jōruri puppet theaters, as well as by painters and print designers, forming a continuous thread linking examples from Japanese theatrical, literary and art history under the rubric of Dōjōji-mono (“Dōjōji-related things”). The main gist of the various interpretations unfolds as follows. Anchin, a priest of Dōjōji temple, is traveling on pilgrimage to Kumano shrine, and takes shelter at the home of a minor official. The daughter of the household, Kiyohime, falls in love with him, and attempts to bed him. Anchin rejects her advances, but mollifies her by offering to comply with her desires upon his return from pilgrimage. Rather than keep his promise, however, Anchin returns on the road to Dōjōji without stopping, and learning of this betrayal, Kiyohime flies into a rage and takes off in hot pursuit. She chases him as far as the banks of the swollen Hidaka River, but Anchin manages to cross ahead of her, leaving instructions for the boatmen to refuse

99 Murakami Kagaku, Hidaka River, 1919. Color on silk; hanging scroll. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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her passage. Overwhelmed by her frustration, jealousy and fury, Kiyohime transforms into a monstrous snake and continues pursuit, a scene illustrated in an Edo-period handscroll copied from a sixteenth century original that tells the story, Miraculous Origins of Dōjōji Temple (Dōjōji engi; Figure 100). Anchin arrives at Dōjōji and attempts to hide under the temple’s large bronze bell, but Kiyohime discovers him there, and wrapping her serpentine body around the bell, she bursts into flames, consuming them both in the heat of her passion and anger.39 Kagaku produced several painted variations on the Dōjōji theme prior to 1919, including Dōjōji Puppet Performance (Ayatsuri ningyō Dōjōji, Figure 101) from 1916, the inspirational source of which was a dramatization of the KiyohimeAnchin story for Ningyō jōruri, otherwise known as Bunraku, a popular puppet play tradition established in seventeenth century.40 Kagaku includes the puppeteers, vested in black robes and hoods, in the 1916 version but not in the one from 1919, for which the setting moves from the Bunraku

stage to the desolate banks of the Hidaka river. In both works, Kagaku captures Kiyohime in the moment directly prior to her metamorphosis into a snake, but rather than capitalizing on the lurid aspects of this transformation, Kagaku retains a flat, muted expression on Kiyohime’s pale white face, suggesting that, even in the 1919 version, we are still looking at a puppet. In spite of her wooden features, however, our knowledge of the story allows us to discern the anxious tension of the moment and feel her silent desperation, as Kiyohime stands transfixed by her own frustrated desire. Hidaka River was not the work Kagaku originally intended to exhibit at the second Kokuten, and appears to have been a last minute substitution. The November issue of the society’s journal Seisaku, which appeared in print around the time of the second exhibition’s opening, featured a different painting as Kagaku’s Kokuten offering for that year. The photograph shows an Ukiyo-e influenced painting of a mother, child, and servant resting under a mosquito net (Figure 102), a subject with

100 Detail of Miraculous Origins of Dōjōji Temple, Edo period. Ink, light color on paper; handscroll. Osaka Prefecture University Harmony Museum.

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at a major exhibition that one has already seen is enough to kill any interest in it.”41 In some ways Hidaka River was an odd and even risky choice for the exhibition, and not only because he had previously exhibited it elsewhere (if we trust Murakami Bunga’s account). As a hanging scroll of only modest size, Hidaka River stood the chance of being overwhelmed by the other multi-panel screens and large-scale framed paintings shown alongside it in the galleries. Kagaku’s gambit paid off, however, for Hidaka River received frequent and positive mention in the press. Novelist Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), for example, wrote a review that voiced strong admiration for Kagaku’s painting, particularly the sense of dramatic tension he successfully instilled in capturing Kiyohime’s distracted love for Anchin, “almost as if she has been struck blind.” Akutagawa also made mention of the otherworldly quality of the landscape Kagaku generated as background, “the mud-toned mountains and milky-colored water flowing in the river” contributing to the uniquely eerie atmosphere of this painting.42 The painting, he concluded, was far better than Matsuoka Eikyū’s version of the Dōjōji theme, featured at the 1917 Bunten, or indeed any other recent version.43 For the 1920 Kokuten, Kagaku revisited the interest in South Asian murals he explored in his 1916 Bunten offering, Amitabha. The painting, entitled Nude (Rafu, Figure 103) depicts a woman seated on a wall of fitted stones overgrown with vines. The setting suggests an ancient temple ground, yet the woman, dressed as she is in a loose skirt, diaphanous scarves and elaborate jewelry, seems an unnatural addition to such abandoned surroundings. For the background, Kagaku continued working with thick and pasty pigments used in Hidaka River, applying them in dense layers to form the shapes of the hills and tree, and largely limited his palette to golden-yellow, olive and ocher tones. The only variation to this color scheme is the narrow band of gray-blue in the upper left corner, offering a narrow glimpse of sky. The identity of the central figure in Nude has intrigued critics and historians of modern Japanese

101 Murakami Kagaku, Puppet Performance of Dōjōji, 1916. Ink, color on paper; hanging scroll. Private collection.

ample precedent in Edo-era woodblock print designs. The painting as shown in the magazine is finished only as far as the mockup stage, and it is not known whether Kagaku was unable to complete it in time or if he was simply dissatisfied with the results, but for whatever reasons, Kagaku ultimately withheld the painting, and showed Hidaka River in its place. Critic Murakami Bunga claimed to have viewed the Dōjōji-themed work at an exhibition organized sometime earlier by Heian Shobō, a dealer of art as well as a publisher of art books. “Perhaps the version on display there was a prototype, and this one is the ‘true’ version” he speculated. “Nevertheless, to encounter a painting 169

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102 Murakami Kagaku, preparatory mock-up for unfinished painting, 1919. Work not extant. Source: Seisaku, vol. 2, no. 10 (November 1919).

instead of a human being, she may be a nature spirit, or perhaps a bodhisattva.45 Kagaku characterized his intentions for Nude in a written essay, “Eternal Woman” (Kuon no josei), describing them as an attempt to give pictorial form to this utterly illusive concept:

art since the painting’s debut at the third Kokuten, and several theories for her identity and origin have been suggested, such as Kagaku having based the painting on sketches of his own wife, or on figures represented in the Ajanta cave murals, or even on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. According to Ono Chikkyō, however, Nude was something akin to the allegorical paintings of the Western Renaissance, insofar as it was not intended as a portrait of any specific woman. Rather it was a representation of a concept, “an image we might find in an antique Indian or Italian painting, combined with something Kagaku might have encountered in his dreams.”44 Tanaka Hisao suggests that this dream-like impression Chikkyō describes was achieved partly through Kagaku’s disjunctive use of scale, observing that the trees in the background appear unnaturally small in relation to the seated woman, making her seem immense by comparison. Tanaka also notes the presence of a spring at her feet and a spray of lotus flowers at her side, which suggests to him that,

Humans have a longing for irrepressible beauty, the symbol of which is ‘eternal woman.’ But if by this we refer to a female furnished with every idealized virtue, then it is something no ordinary woman, or for that matter any ordinary man, can possibly attain. It requires something that transcends gender, existing as something that is called a ‘third sex’ [chūsei].46

Kagaku continues by suggesting the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara as an example of a being in possession of all the virtues of the Eternal Woman, defined according to the Buddhist concept of Prajñāpāramitā (Japanese: Hannya), “the Perfection of Wisdom, an immunity to all manner of evil desires, eternally pure, eternally beautiful, and forever 170

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103 Murakami Kagaku, Nude, 1920. Color on silk; framed. Yamatane Museum of Art.

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shining bright.”47 As an artist’s statement, “Eternal Woman” is difficult to parse, filled as it is with inherent contradictions and odd analogies, but from it, however, we may conclude that Kagaku was grappling for some way to overcome the tendency in East Asian Buddhism and other religious traditions to locate carnality in the female sex and spirituality in the male, as illustrated in the setsuwa tale of Kiyohime and Anchin. Kagaku’s “third sex” should not be considered solely in terms of physical hermaphroditism, for it connotes much more than that. As Grace Tiffany explains:

form achieved through the amalgamation of the devotional paintings of India, Italy, and Japan.”51 Kagaku’s esoteric explanations of the painting, however, made him the subject of the caricaturist Okamoto Ippei, who lampooned his spiritualitylaced exposition of Nude in the December 1920 issue of Chūō Bijutsu’s. Ippei’s cartoon (Figure 104) depicts Kagaku’s “Eternal Woman” being examined by a medical doctor, and relates their dialogue as follows:

The androgyne’s originary status in numerous mythologies suggests its transcultural value as the symbol of the sum of human capabilities… Cultures that were initially widely separated accord central mythic importance to an androgynous figure who combines all human attributes into one state of hermaphroditic being. Like Christ, in whom Saint Paul tells us “there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28), this genderless god is both human and divine.48

Another way to consider Kagaku’s intentions for Nude is to take up the title itself. Since the Meiji era, rafu (literally “unclothed woman”) functioned as the Japanese equivalent of the “nude” as artistic subject, which, as Linda Neal explains, was central to Western painting and sculpture since the Renaissance, and “symbolized the transformation of the base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture and the spirit.”49 Kagaku’s Nude can be seen as illustrating the idealized virtues celebrated in the Western nude subject, as well as the virtues of the spirit, which for Kagaku was represented by the infinite wisdom and compassion personified in the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Viewed in this light, Kagaku’s Nude can be viewed as a new kind of semisecular icon, one that merges Buddhist hermeneutics with Western pictorial allegory.50 Asahi Shinbun critic Haruyama Takematsu warmly approved of Kagaku’s efforts in this direction, and lauded Nude as a new and immensely successful exploration of the religious painting genre, “a mystic expression of divinity in human

104 Okamoto Ippei, “Murakami Kagaku’s Nude: a Conversation with a Doctor in an Examination Room.” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 5, no. 12 (December 1920).

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modernist expression in his art, the most dauntless in the face of his critics who panned his efforts, and the most candid about his own artistic idiosyncrasies. In 1920, he wrote an essay for Bijutsu Gahō in which he freely admitted that his aims as a Nihonga painter were purely selfish, namely, to express himself as an artist. The preservation of Japan’s traditional painting legacy, or the breaking of new artistic ground to further Nihonga as a field were of little concern to him. In fact, he suggested (as he had in the past) that his decision to use mineral pigments simply came down to the fact that, for now, doing so pleased him. He expressed his antipathy of inflexible presumptions, categories, and labels for art and artists, repeating some of the same complaints voiced in Takamura Kōtarō in his seminal essay “A Green Sun” nearly a decade earlier.

Doctor: You certainly are sick! Nude: No, I am not, I am very healthy. Doctor: For you to say so is actually a symptom of your illness. You have been looking at a certain “something” for too long. What is it? Nude: Nothing. Just a few Western devotional paintings, a few drawings by European masters, some Asian religious icons… Doctor: Viewing such things with eyesight like yours? No wonder your rendering and color are so weak. Japanese painters who try to escape convention end up staring directly into the sun, and therein experience a joy that cannot be understood by intellect alone. But when you stare at that bright light known as Nature for too long, everything becomes strange and mysterious. It can lead to a nervous breakdown. Nude: The path on which I travel is one from which I cannot deviate. Doctor: What is that supposed to mean? Sounds like a line from a script. Now then, without delay, please

[When painting] I try to think as broadly as possible

mix some shohō jissō with some shabasoku jakkō jōdo,

about coloration… If there is another, better way [than

add a little reality, and drink it down.

mineral pigments] to capture the colors one has in mind,

Nude: You should examine my companions…

perhaps with strips of colored paper, or by gluing on

Doctor: No need, the same medicine will work for them

scraps of yūzen dyed fabrics, then that is how the work

as well.52

should be executed. If the results can still be considered Nihonga, then clearly Nihonga cannot be defined by

The “prescription” Okamoto describes features a haphazard mixture of esoteric Buddhist concepts  that sound like gibberish to the unschooled.53 Okamoto is poking fun at a tendency shared by Kagaku and his “companions” in the Kokuga Society of relying on ostentatious language and quasi-religious references to explain their works, perhaps intended to remind them of their own manifesto, which speaks against the tyranny of abstract principles that inevitably distract and sidetrack painters away from matters of true artistic import.

pigments and techniques alone… If an artist executing a painting is Nihonjin [Japanese], then it seems to me that the result must be Nihonga. My views on painting technique were developed with pure self-indulgence in mind.54

Banka’s original plan for the second Kokuten was to show two works, one on the theme of workers taking a break from their toil, and another featuring women and children relaxing among blossoming flowers. Due to time constraints, however, he was only able to complete the first work, entitled Time of Rest (Yasumi doki, Figure 105), in time for the exhibition.55 Painted on a pair of two-panel screens, Time of Rest depicts a long view of a green river valley observed from an overlooking bluff populated with several field workers and two children. On the far left, a woman holds a cloth bundle filled with persimmons and grapes, while next to her at some

banka: time of rest (1919)and fishermen returning at sunset (1920) Of all the Kokuga Society members, Nonagase Banka was the most unabashed in his pursuit of 173

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105 Nonagase Banka, Time of Rest, 1919. Color on canvas; pair of two-panel folding screens. Present location of work unknown. Photo courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

distance behind, Banka placed a man playing a bamboo flute while leaning against a tree. The children sit front and center in the composition, an older girl absorbed in eating a persimmon, and a toddler reaching for its mother who stands adjacent to the pair in the neighboring panel. On the right, a young woman with a bouquet of daffodils emerges from below the bluff, approaching a second man who sits with his face buried in his folded arms, either resting or absorbed in grief. Except for the mother and child, the figures seem self-absorbed, and their relationship to each other ambiguous. As a result, a feeling of melancholia persists over the lush greenery and brightly colored flowers that decorate the landscape. As seen in Chikkyō’s Gokayama in Summer on display at the same Kokuten exhibition, and previously in Banka’s own Stream in Early Summer of the 1918, in Time of Rest the artist made no recourse to ink outlines, favoring to define forms through color alone. In this Banka achieved a more satisfying result than he had in the previous year, particularly in his use of blended pigments to capture the effects of light and shadow in the folds of garments, and to provide a more believable sense of volume to

the figures’ bodies and limbs. Achieving perfect illusionism was not his goal, however, for Banka also utilized very expressive, feathery brush effects (the swept grass and textured sky could have been modeled after Renoir) that generate a soft, muted backcloth against which the bright and more sharply defined blossoms of marigold, daffodil, and camellia stand in relief. Banka identified a stretch of the Edogawa riverbank in Tokyo as one of the sites of his preparatory sketches, and the scenery around Hirosawano-ike, a pond located in the northwest Saga region of Kyoto as another, but offered little else to explain the theme and figures. The title implies they are laborers; perhaps they are fruit pickers, due to the abundant presence of persimmons and grapes. This however, raises the question of seasons, which are often identified in Japanese paintings by the inclusion of particular flowers or fruits. In this regard Time at Rest is ambiguous, for camellias and daffodils bloom in spring, grapes are harvested in summer, and persimmons and marigolds are both associated with autumn. But rather than try to identify elements of the painting as specific markers or indicators of seasons, it is better to consider 174

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Time of Rest as a kind of allegory of seasonal harvest work of all kinds. Perhaps Banka had in mind the model of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), known for his flat, bucolic landscapes populated by classicized figures. In 1863, for example, Puvis created a pair of paintings entitled Work (Travail) and Repose (Repos), the second of which (Figure 106) features a group of laborers and children resting by a body of water amidst lush vegetation. The compositions are similar enough that it is tempting to put Puvis’s work forward as an important inspirational source for Time of Rest, although Banka himself gave nothing away with regard to stylistic or thematic references, Western or Eastern. Instead, Banka spoke at length about his overall goals for the painting, especially his desire to

achieve an expressly human flavor (ningenmi), which indeed, he asserts, is the aim of all his paintings: Imagine a stylized [Noh] drama, with lords, ladies and retainers, all moving in a prescribed manner. The story is told with such formality that we, the audience, are somehow removed from the scene, leaving us to gaze onto a world in which we ourselves do not belong. Such a drama is missing a human flavor, and the results are often not very agreeable… [In contrast], the other day I went to see Kakiemon the Master Artist (Meiko Kakiemon), a [Kabuki] drama that has real power to draw its audience in… We are all distracted by a wide range of things, and there is not much around today that has the power to truly captivate. Paintings featuring histori-

106 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Repose, c. 1863. Oil on canvas. Widener Collection. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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Kokuten. “Generally speaking,” he wrote, “my development as a painter is still underway, and I sometime have problems related to technique. But [when I start a new painting] I never set out to get better. I simply paint, unthinkingly, and only once I have finished do I know if I have succeeded or failed.”59 That said, however, Banka recognized that “some more traditionally-mind people” might find his offering that year, a four-panel folding screen entitled Fishermen Returning at Sunset (Yūhi ni kaeru gyofu, Figure 107), a little strange. The work depicts a party of fishermen porting their oars and fishing nets across a shallow tidal flat. Here again Banka eschewed ink outlines and defined his figures entirely with red tones ranging from light salmon pink to dark brick, creating the impression of a scene illuminated by the light of a setting sun. According to Wadaka Nobuo, the genesis for the painting was an encounter Banka experienced during a two-month long summer trip he took to Niigata prefecture in search of “Niigata beauties” (Niigata bijin) to model for his Kokuten painting, but found fishermen instead. During a stop at the coastal hot spring town of Senami, he took to sketching local fishermen at work on the nearby beach, and took several photographs as well, and decided he had found the theme for his Kokuten painting. He returned to Kyoto in mid-September, but by that time little more than a month remained before the Kokuten’s opening date, and Banka struggled to finish his painting in time. Even after recruiting the help of his newly wedded spouse, in the end he was forced to take the unfinished work with him to Tokyo, where he continued working on the painting until the very last minute, finishing it just in time for the exhibition’s press preview.60 Unfortunately, we do not know what visitors to the 1920 Kokuten saw when they viewed Banka’s contribution to the Kokuten that year, for Fishermen Returning Home at Sunset has undergone substantial chemical metamorphosis in the years since its debut. Ever the innovator, Banka utilized a process and formula of his own invention designed

cal themes are particularly lacking in this respect. I believe it is best to paint honestly, so that when a viewer examines my work, it evokes emotions without the use of tricks or gimmicks. I believe the best thing for all of us is to carry on creating works that explore our most human qualities.56

In his critique of the painting, Ishii Hakutei noted certain correspondence to works by Puvis and also the French group Les Nabis, but ultimately he decided that Banka’s results came up short. Ishii admitted there is nothing wrong with pastoralism per se, but Banka’s decision to integrate Japanese figures into a bucolic setting so clearly Western in flavor resulted in an awkward mismatch. Furthermore, Ishii remained opposed to Banka’s efforts to replicate the effects of oil painting with mineral pigments. He noted with disapproval that, like Stream in Early Summer from the first Kokuten, Time of Rest was painted on canvas ground instead of customary silk or paper, a decision that made comparisons with oil painting all the more inevitable. Indeed, Ishii pointed out that Banka could have used oil paints on an unsized canvas, which would have produced the desired flat, non-glossy appearance he desired, and also allowed him to achieve smoother and better blending, instead of insisting on using mineral pigments. “He should have taken the logical next step,” Ishii concluded, “and used oil paints, which were better suited to his purposes.”57 Even Banka’s friend Takehisa Yumeji took him to task for neglecting the natural strengths of Nihonga’s mineral pigments. “Your painting reminds me of Bakusen’s Island Women from the early days of the Bunten,” he wrote, “when Nihonga painters were first experimenting with effects inspired by Western oil painting. It also brings my own early interest in art nouveau to mind, but even then I was aware that this was a dead-end path that Nihonga was travellling down.”58 Undismayed by this public criticism, Banka immersed himself even deeper into his experiments with Yōga-style pigment manipulation for the 1920

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107 Nonagase Banka, Fishermen Returning at Sunset, 1920. Color on hemp; four-panel folding screen. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

of Yomiuri Shinbun, who wrote, “Sunsets have been painted countless times, but never in a manner as completely new and groundbreaking as this,” and suggested the work’s true merit proceeds from what Banka excluded, namely, all that is clichéd and conventional about contemporary painting.63 But as Banka himself predicted, many viewers could not understand the work, and as a result it generated some of the harshest critiques of the exhibition. “Banka’s Fishermen Returning at Sunset slaps pigment roughshod over the sensibilities of the modern viewer,” wrote Asahi Shinbun Haruyama Takematsu (recalling John Ruskin’s censure of Whistler in 1877 for “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face).64 “The results are so audacious,” Haruyama decided, “I think he must have exhibited it as a practical joke.”65 Print artist Yamamoto Kanae noted that the painting had given him a slight shock upon first view, but once that had passed, he found there was nothing left, and concluded that “the painting has all the lasting impact of wallpaper.66 But as he had done in the past, Banka simply ignored the criticism of those unable to appreciate what he was

to replicate the application process and resulting appearance of a fresco mural. Using seashell white (gofun) in place of lime plaster, and working in small sections at a time on the painting’s hemp ground, he spread the wet gofun in a thick layer, and while it was still damp, he applied mineral colors suspended in a mercury-based compound.61 The mixture of traditional nikawa glue binder in the gofun and the mercury used with the colors proved to be chemically unstable, and today the work is marred with gray-blue streaks (especially visible on the surface of the tidal strand) and ghostly outlines around the figures that were not present at the time of the painting’s debut.62 We can get an idea of what Banka actually intended for Fishermen by studying his compositional mock-up, which shows light blues and yellow-greens as well as reds and oranges (Figure 108). But if these tones were visible in the painting in 1920, they are invisible today, altered by the unstable chemistry of Banka’s experimental glue-and-mercury compound pigments. Fishermen Returning at Sunset had a number of supporters among critics, such as Nakada Yōnosuke

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108 Nonagase Banka, compositional mock-up for Fishermen Returning at Sunset, 1920. Ink, colors on paper; pair of two-panel folding screens. Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

Gokayama in Summer) from several influential critics, Chikkyō’s Kokuten paintings made a profound impression on many young Nihonga painters, so much so that the label “Chikkyō School” (Chikkyō-ha) was coined as a way to describe landscape paintings by artists pursuing Western-style realism with Nihonga’s mineral pigments.68 After landscapes, the second-most common thematic executed in an acutely mimetic manner was figure painting, with strongest focus on female subjects. The so-called “Chikkyō School” was best represented at the second and third Kokuten exhibitions by Suita Sōboku (1900–1984) and Itō Sōhaku (1896–1945), both of whom were known to members of the Kokuga Society prior to the establishment of group. Suita Sōboku started his art studies as an oil painting student at the Kansai Art Institute, but in 1914 he decided to switch to Nihonga, at which point he joined Chikujōkai to study under Seihō. In 1917, Sōboku began taking private painting instruction with Bakusen, and although he did not participate in the first Kokuten in 1918 (he made his national debut at the final Bunten exhibition

trying to accomplish. Following the close of the third Kokuten exhibition, Banka wrote a letter to Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923), a critic and professor of English literature at Kyoto Imperial University, to thank Kuriyagawa for his positive response to his painting. “It goes without saying that your evaluation of Fishermen Returning at Sunset, which acknowledged its scintillating colors and fine composition, moved me deeply. As for negative appraisals to the painting, they are something I shrug off with a laugh.”67

other significant works at the second and third kokuten The lion’s share of critical attention, both positive   and negative, at the second and third Kokuten   shows was directed at paintings executed in mimetic styles. Of these, the majority were landscapes that followed the Yōga-inspired model provided by Ono Chikkyō. Although Chikkyō himself expressed reservations of his own regarding his experiments with realism, and despite the strongly negative reactions to these works (especially to

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that year instead), he participated in every subsequent Kokuga Society-sponsored exhibition from 1919 until the group’s dissolution in 1928.69 Summer View of Izu (Izu kaikei, Figure 109), Sōboku’s first Kokuten contribution, was selected for photographic reproduction in the special Kokuten issue of Chūō Bijutsu in December 1919, and the painting was fêted by the Kokuga members and the press

alike. At the same time, Ishii Hakutei’s review of the 1919 Kokuten, published in the very same issue of Chūō Bijutsu, identified Sōboku’s approach just the kind of pseudo-realism that Nihonga painters should avoid at all cost.70 Itō Sōhaku became a member of Seihō’s juku in the same year as Sōboku, and he, too, later received tutelage from Bakusen. Indeed, Sōhaku

109 Suita Sōboku, Summer View of Izu, 1919. Color on silk; two-panel folding screen. Image courtesy Kashima-Arts Company, Ltd., Tokyo.

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and Sōboku were close friends, frequently working and traveling on shasei excursions together, mirroring Bakusen’s and Chikkyō’s early friendship.71 Sōhaku was the only non-member to have a painting selected for each of the first three Kokuten exhibitions, and in honor of this achievement, he was named the group’s first Friend of the Society in 1920, which allowed him to exhibit at all future Kokuten shows without undergoing the ritual of submission and selection. Speaking to the press, Bakusen warmly praised Sōhaku’s contribution to the 1920 Kokuten, Landscape (Fūkei, figure 110), which survives today only in the form of a souvenir picture postcard, noting that the young artist had been studying under him for several years, and showed substantial progress at each subsequent exhibit.72 Yamamoto Kanae (1882–1946), pioneer of the Creative Print (Sōsaku Hanga)

movement, agreed that Sōhaku’s work was better than the contributions of others who chose to imitate the look of oils, but admitted that it was beyond him why an artist of such obvious intelligence would stubbornly insist on using mineral pigments and purposefully ignore oil painting’s potential to accomplish exactly what he was striving to achieve.73 Okamura Utarō (1899–1971) produced an interesting mimetic portrait at the 1920 Kokuten. At the time of the exhibition, Utarō was in his first year at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting, and was one of the show’s youngest participants. His Study of a Fisherman (Gyofu no shūsaku, Figure 111), also preserved today only in the form of a Kokuten souvenir postcard, was one of only three submissions fully selected (ten more works, we recall, were included in the honorable

110 Postcard of 1920 Kokuten exhibition featuring Itō Sōhaku, Landscape (1920). Image courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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Another figural work dating to the third Kokuten is Okamoto Shinsō’s Study for Three Maiko Playing Ken (Ken o uteru sannin no maiko no shūsaku, Figure 112). We recall how Shinsō was lauded at the first Kokuten for Lip Rouge (Figure 88), his distorted, inventive variation on the bijinga thematic, and in many ways his second Kokuten offering, exhibited as an “unselected” work in 1920, continued to explore this anti-bijin aesthetic. There are a number of odd aspects to Shinsō’s painting, however. For one, its size and proportions are unusual for a Nihonga exhibition piece, and despite the appearance of the artist’s signature and seal in the upper left corner, the composition appears to have been substantially cropped. Yamamoto Kanae questioned why only a single maiko is featured, since the title suggests there should be three, but he was willing to overlook this since the sole figure was so well done. In particular, Yamamoto admired the decorative qualities of the painting that serve to enhance the maiko’s beguiling beauty, “her lacquer-black hair, her silver-flowered ornamental hairpins, the elegant, smooth lines of her yūzen-patterned costume, and the maiko’s features, bewitching with thick lipstick and white face powder,” all illuminated in the glow of an unseen candle that envelopes her in an eerie shadow-halo.75 The peculiar history of this painting is laid out in the pages of Shinsō’s diary, which survives to provide a detailed account of the artist’s struggle to complete it. The diary records October 26 as Shinsō’s date of departure to Tokyo, scheduled in order to deliver his painting in time for the Kokuten’s opening. Shinsō writes, however, that on that day the painting was not even close to being finished. In desperation, he describes himself taking a pair of shears to the silk and cutting out the painting’s center section, which was most complete. Arriving in Tokyo with this fragment, Shinsō went straight to an inn, where he continued working on the painting for four more days. He finally turned in the completed but severely curtailed work at Shirokiya’s exhibition halls on October 30, two days before the opening, at which time the word “study” was appended to the work. Shinsō wrote

111 Postcard of 1920 Kokuten exhibition featuring Okamura Utarō’s Study of a Fisherman (1920). Image courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

mention category), and yet proved to be one of the most controversial paintings in the exhibition, alongside Banka’s Fishermen Returning Home at Sunset. The usual cast of critics derided the work's mimetic aspect, but Tsuchida Bakusen expressed his marvel at how close Utarō’s portrait approached the kind of realism usually achievable only with oils; he particularly admired the expression Utarō captured in the face, “the features of a real fisherman brought to life, the exterior qualities deeply expressing the subject’s inner qualities.” Artists who can paint like this, Bakusen admitted, frightened him with their talent, and he concluded that only one of the most skilled painters of the day could achieve this level of success in the extremely difficult area of Nihonga portraiture.74 181

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112 Okamoto Shinsō, Study of Three Maiko Playing Ken, 1920. Color on silk; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

engaged in a hand-gesture game known as Ken (“Fists”), several variations of which exist in Japan, including the popular “Rock, Paper, Scissor” (Janken).78 Being a drinking game, the loser of a round was expected to drink of cup of sake, which Shinsō supplies on the black lacquer tray placed before the three maiko. Shinsō’s diary reveals other information about Study for Three Maiko Playing Ken by making note of diverse references the artist consulted in planning the composition, including Collection of One Hundred Robes (Tagasode hyakushu), a reference book of kimono patterns from the Momoyama through the Edo eras published in 1919. Shinsō also describes photographs and sketches he made of Kyoto maiko, and of his examination of figure paintings by several important painters of the Italian Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–1469). Shinsō’s diary does not name specific titles by these artists,

that he did not even bother to attend the exhibition, but returned to Kyoto on the following day in a disconsolate state.76 Many Japanese exhibition paintings created in the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa eras have been lost, often in the destruction of the mid-century Pacific War. At other times, paintings may have survived but suffered damage or deterioration in the intervening years, as we saw with Kainoshō Tadaoto’s Comb Aslant of 1918. In Study for Three Maiko Playing Ken, we have a strange scenario where the artist marred his own work, yet we still have a clear idea of what Shinsō’s painting would have looked like had he been able to complete it as originally conceived. This is because the abandoned section from which Shinsō extracted the center fragment was rediscovered in 1987, allowing the separated sections to be reunited (Figure 113).77 When rejoined, the original composition includes the three maiko seated in a triangular arrangement and 182

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113 Okamoto Shinsō, Study of Three Maiko Playing Ken reunited with outer section removed at time of 1918 debut. Outer section: color on silk; framed. Hoshino Garō, Kyoto.

but one of his surviving sketchbooks includes collages of images clipped from books or magazines reproducing figures from both these artists’ paintings, with the archangel Gabriel from Leonardo’s Annunciation of the late 1470s (Figure 114) featured prominently. The seated maiko in the expanded version of Shinsō’s composition suggests he made careful study of Italian Renaissance painted figures in order to understand their poses and the gathering of their garments, and then transferred what he learned into his Nihonga compositions. As important a source of information as Shinsō’s diary proves to be, it also raises a number of interesting questions, especially regarding the Kokuten submission policy. According to the Kokuga Society’s regulations, non-members were

required to submit works for evaluation by the Kokuten judges, but according to the diary, Shinsō was not even close to completing Three Maiko Playing Ken less than a week before the third Kokuten’s scheduled opening. This begs the question: what, if anything, had he submitted for evaluation? Evidence in the diary suggests the members of the selection jury never saw the painting, and based their decision to include it solely on the basis of photographs of the work in progress. In an entry dated September 26, about a month before Shinsō took shears to the work, he records a visit to his studio by Nakai Sōtarō, who made an initial examination of the work. A week later, a photographer dropped by to document the work, and Shinsō notes that he “passed the night in suspense and anxiety,”79 183

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114 Leonardo da Vinci, detail from The Annunciation, circa 1472–75. Fresco. Uffizi gallery. Source: Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci, 1943, n.p.

aftermath of the three kokuga society exhibitions

waiting, we may assume, to learn if Nakai, Bakusen, and the other Kokuten judges had deigned to accept Three Maiko Playing Ken based on the photos taken that day. What, then, was the reaction of the judges when the work Shinsō finally exhibited was substantially different from the version they had accepted on the basis of photographs? Shinsō’s decision to return immediately to Kyoto and forgo the exhibition opening suggests Bakusen and company’s response was not sympathetic, and may also explain Shinsō’s absence from all subsequent Kokuten exhibitions. The following year Shinsō took to submitting to the Teiten, where in 1923 he exhibited another version of Three Maiko Playing Ken, this time complete.80 Shinsō continued to exhibit at the government salon until 1928, a success streak that ended (coincidentally or otherwise) the same year that Bakusen joined the Teiten selection jury. Shinsō died four years later, succumbing to a brain aneurysm at the young age of 39, and his debacle at the third Kokuten notwithstanding, his death cut short the career of one of Kyoto’s most original and promising Nihonga painters.

Earlier we gauged the success of the inaugural Kokuten of 1918 based on such information as ticket sales, and tracked the waxing prestige of the exhibition in the larger Nihonga world by marking the sharp increase in public submissions over the next two years, from 287 in 1918 to 449 in 1920. Another way of measuring the group’s success is by examining the relative positions of the Kokuga Society members in the art world as reported in broadsheets, including one type that ranked Nihonga artists according to estimated prices of their works. One such publication is “Assessment Summary of Japanese Calligraphers and Painters” (Nihon shoga hyōka ichiran), released by the Tokyo publisher Ishizuka Inomi on an annual basis for several years in the 1910s and early 1920s. Several of the Kokuga Society members were included in the issues released in 1917 and 1920, and by examining their respective estimated art work prices for those years, and contrasting these with prices listed for their contemporaries (see Table 1),

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artistic flowering: the second and third kokuten exhibitions Table 1 Estimated Prices of Nihonga Paintings for 1917 and 1920 Artist Name

Estimated Price in 1917

Estimated Price in 1920

Tsuchida Bakusen Sakakibara Shihō Ono Chikkyō Nonagase Banka Murakami Kagaku Yokoyama Taikan Kaburagi Kiyokata

¥40 Not listed Not listed Not listed ¥30 ¥70 Not listed

¥300 ¥180 ¥150 ¥70 ¥80 ¥300 ¥200

setting prices for the Nihonga painting market at this time. This does not mean, however, that Bakusen and his peers could afford to ignore critics entirely, especially with regard to two issues perennially raised in discussions of the first three Kokuten exhibitions. The first was the perception of an identifiable “Kokuten style” that for some critics, mostly detractors, was a sign of an over-zealous and irrational interest in mimicking the qualities of oil painting. Several group members countered this criticism on a number of occasions, as we have seen, including Nonagase Banka, who in 1919 offered the following sardonic rebuttal:

we are able to obtain a picture of Bakusen and company’s rise in fortune between the founding of the Kokuten exhibition and three years into its management. The prices published by Ishizuka in these rankings are for standard-sized hanging scroll paintings of the sort suitable for display in a private home, and not for the large scale screens and framed works created for exhibitions, prices of which were substantially higher (we recall that Bakusen’s Bathhouse Maiden sold in 1918 for ¥4,500, more than one hundred times the price suggested in 1917 for one of his more modest paintings). These figures show how the perceived value of works by Kokuga Society artists increased dramatically during the first three years of their activity. For the sake of comparative understanding, if we return to the benchmark of ¥70 as the average starting monthly salary for a white collar worker in Japan of the late 1910s,81 it becomes clear that even a modest painting produced by any of the Kokuga Society members would have been beyond the reach of most Japanese. The 650% rise in price for Bakusen’s works, from ¥40 to ¥300, was the most substantial, and brought him to the same rank as Yokoyama Taikan, founder of the Inten, and higher than Kaburagi Kiyokata, who sat on the selection juries of the Bunten and Teiten. This is interesting in light of the reviews Bakusen received for his 1919 and 1920 Kokuten contributions, which were nearly uniformly negative, a fact that suggests critics played a very minor role, if any, in

I am a person of this current age, something I am compelled to recognize as a fact… I eat Western-style food, I ride in trains, I look up and see airplanes flying in the sky… [Today] a person would be greeted with howls of laughter if they walked down the street in samurai garb with their hair in a chonmage topknot. It is equally absurd for someone to announce the only proper inspiration for Nihonga is antique Japanese painting.82

Bakusen also offered a categorical rejection of this criticism at the time of the 1920 Kokuten. “I have read many reviews that complain the landscapes in our exhibitions are too close to oil painting,” he wrote in an essay for the Mainichi Shinbun, “but such formal evaluations deal solely with exterior appearances, and say nothing about the inner feelings of the artist or the internal life of the work.” Like Banka, he turned to analogy to make his argument, reflecting that when writing an essay, one has the freedom to choose between using the formal Chinese (kanbun) or the native Japanese (wabun) styles of composition, or even to mix these styles. “Is not the inner life of the sentence,” Bakusen insisted, “the meaning it communicates, of fundamentally greater importance than its grammatical structure?” In the same way, he suggested, was not the inner life of a painting of far deeper significance than the style in which it is executed?83

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Bakusen reinforced this point in another essay written at the time of the third Kokuten, this time pointing to the example of seminal Meijiera Nihonga painter Kano Hōgai, who at the time was the subject of a retrospective exhibition in Tokyo. “Nobody evaluates Hōgai’s work from the point of view of Yōga,” Bakusen argued. “No one questions why he painted in that particular way, or suggests he would have been better served if he had just used oils. Hōgai was not trying to imitate Yōga: like us, he was trying to find a way to inject new life into Nihonga.” He also dismissed the critics who argued it was impossible to effectively capture the effects of light or the beauty of the human nude with mineral pigments. “In response,” he said defiantly, “I would simply tell them to go and take a look at our work. We are soldiers charging into the fray, giving no heed to the risks, taking on impossible tasks and making them possible.”84 The second point of contention regarded the Kokuga Society’s tendency to favor submissions from Kansai-area artists. An examination of the selections made by Bakusen and company for inclusion in the first three Kokuten exhibitions shows approximately seventy-five per cent were created by artists based in the greater Kyoto region, nearly all of whom were associated with the Kyoto Specialized Painting School or with Chikujōkai, Seihō’s juku. Furthermore, Bakusen made no secret of his mentorship of several of the regular returnees, such as Suita Sōboku and Itō Sōhaku, who Bakusen praised publicly and proudly as their teacher, and in fact voiced a spirited defense of the Kokuten judges' policy of selecting artists well known to them. In an article published in the Yomiuru Shinbun after the choices for the 1920 Kokuten were announced, Bakusen explained how year after year he and his fellow judges anticipated a treasure trove of wonderful works from Tokyo artists, but that every year their expectations were inevitably disappointed. As judges, Bakusen explained, they simply could not sympathize with what Tokyo artists were producing, while the young artists of Kyoto seemed to have an inherent understanding of what they were

looking for. Besides, Bakusen went on to explain, their younger Kyoto peers were relying on them, and as alumni of the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting, they felt a special obligation to support the work of its students and recent graduates. “For this reason,” he concluded, “we will continue making selections that may not seem logical to critics, in order to afford growth opportunities to these young painters and to pave the way for the next generation of Kokuga Society members.”85 In other words, the Kokuten existed to promote the art of its organizers first, that of their fellow Kansai artists and Specialize Painting School graduates second, and that of painters from Tokyo and other regions of Japan coming in at a distant third. One of the factors that afforded Bakusen and company the freedom to manage the Kokuten in this self-serving fashion was the reliable and generous backing they received from sympathetic patrons, which provided them with the financial independence necessary to make decisions that would otherwise have been economically untenable. In addition to their tendency to favor local Kyoto artists for selection, they adhered to their policy of selecting an extremely small number of works from among the public submissions; for example, the Kokuten of 1919 featured seventeen public submissions, compared to ninety-nine included in the first Teiten exhibition that year. This selectivity nurtured the reputation of the Kokuten as an elite event, which made selection all the more desirable. But the Kokuga Society’s enviable economic situation would not remain intact for long. With the resolution of the First World War in November 1918, the wartime economy that had given Japan a substantial financial boost also came to an end, and by 1919 some of the Kokuga Society’s financial backers had already begun withdrawing their support.86 Yet it was not until 1920 that the group began experiencing money problems in earnest. “Our group’s financial situation at the time of the third Kokuten was severely affected,” Chikkyō recalled, “and after the close of the exhibition that year, we gathered at Ikenoryō, [a restaurant] in Kyoto’s Maruyama Park, to 186

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discuss what to do about our financial losses.” The restaurant was located near a pond with a small fountain in the center, which they could hear inside the restaurant as they talked over their money problems. “It sounded like falling rain,” wrote Ono, “a suitable accompaniment for our gloomy sentiments.”87 The group was able to postpone the impact of a changed economic environment

for a little while by taking a hiatus, during which time it was decided the members would make an art pilgrimage to Europe to study the collections of the great Western art museums and to visit the places that gave birth to the modern painting movements that, along with Japan’s own painting heritage, so richly informed their own artistic practices.

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7 Hiatus, Expansion, and Collapse: The Kokuten’s Middle and Final Stages

I

f bathhouse maiden is considered a signature piece of Tsuchida Bakusen’s early Kokuten period, Maiko in a Garden (Bugi rinsen, Figure 123) is emblematic of the exhibition’s latter phase. When it appeared at the Kokuten in 1924, Maiko in a Garden was the first complete, large-scale Nihonga painting Bakusen had contributed to a national exhibition in four years,1 and he must have been keenly aware of the scrutiny it would undergo in the public eye. The work proved to be a critical success; today it is considered by some to be his magnum opus. Along with Three Maiko of 1920, Maiko in a Garden is an important transitional painting, for it represents a change from the artistic priorities Bakusen held in the 1910s, when his romantic identification with modern Western painters encouraged him to push against conventional views regarding the self-expressive potential of mineral pigments, and marks a move towards an intellectual formalism based upon his evolving esteem for Nihonga’s decorative potential. Kosugi Misei wrote a review for the Yomiuri Shinbun that applauded the complexity of Bakusen’s Maiko in a Garden, in which he detected a range

of historical sources, including academic Chinese portraiture in the features of his maiko model, Ukiyo-e in his skilled rendering of embroidered silk brocade of his model’s kimono and obi sash, and modernist abstraction in the patternized garden backdrop.2 Ishii Hakutei, so strongly critical of Kokuten works in the past, praised Maiko in a Garden as one of the most exciting works exhibited in any exhibition that year. In particular he admired Bakusen’s handling of the stone- and tree-covered island behind the seated figure, which he decided must have been “Cubist-inspired,” and remarked on the ease with which Bakusen integrated his understanding of Edo-period Ukiyo-e with modern Western painting referents to achieve such elegant coloration, decorative patterns, and exquisite line work.3 Bakusen himself offered little in the way of an explanation of his inspirational sources, Japanese or European, but from Chikkyō we know that Bakusen intended Maiko in a Garden to showcase all he had learned during their two-year stay in Europe, including the inspiration of late medieval Italian fresco murals, such as those by Giotto and Cimabue (c. 1240–1302) which they viewed on a trip to Assisi.4 Italian fresco painting was but one in a complex array of visual referents in Maiko in a Garden, alongside Cézanne’s proto-Cubist formalism and Japan’s own Yamato-e heritage, which led

Tsuchida Bakusen, Maiko in a Garden, 1924, detail of fig. 123

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art pilgrimage to europe

Chikkyō to characterize Maiko in a Garden on another occasion as “a blend of Cézanne-ism and Tosa painting.”5 In 1929, art journalist Kanzaki Ken’ichi generated an overview of the Kokuga Society as part of a comprehensive history of Kyoto Nihonga, in which he identified three distinct phases in the life of the collective and its associated exhibitions. His first period covers 1918 to 1920 and the first three Kokuten, a time, Kanzaki explains, when the Kokuga Society members were flush with the excitement and the possibility of fomenting real change in contemporary Nihonga, and when the group members’ interpersonal relations were characterized by mutual good will. The second period, which Kanzaki dates from 1921 to 1924, is marked by the art pilgrimage to Europe made by Bakusen, Chikkyō and other associates, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and its traumatic aftermath, and the fourth Kokuten, which finally resumed after a four-year hiatus. The Japanese art world, meanwhile, had completely and irrevocably changed in the interim, and in order for the group and its sponsored exhibition to survive, the Kokuga Society had to undergo comprehensive policy changes. Kanzaki marks this period as the group’s final stage from 1925 to 1928, which includes the final three Kokuten, and describes it as a time of collective inertia and diminishing relevance in the greater Nihonga world during which the Kokuga Society largely surrendered its role as an advocate for progressive, experimental Nihonga.6 This chapter follows the trajectory plotted by Kanzaki for the Kokuga Society, starting with Bakusen and company’s trip to Europe from 1921 to 1923, their efforts to cope with the impact of the cataclysmic Great Kantō Earthquake of 1924, and the subsequent expansion of the organization from 1926 to 1928 in order to incorporate oil painting, sculpture, prints and ceramics. It also describes the reactions of the contemporary art world to these changes, and covers the dissolution of the Kokuga Society in the wake of its eighth Kokuten exhibition.

In early January of 1921, the Kokuga Society members announced their plans to travel to Europe, in order to experience the art that they had known and admired through photo-reproduction but never studied in person. Their initial plan was to depart after the close of the fourth Kokuten, scheduled for that autumn,7 but for reasons unexplained (yet almost certainly linked to financial difficulties), Bakusen and company canceled the exhibition and headed to Europe in October. For many of the younger participants in the Kokuten, this hiatus was a serious setback. Some moved to the Teiten or other venues that year, and finding success there, never returned to the Kokuten. Others bided their time until the exhibition series resumed, while some, like Yamawaki Hōgen (1877–?), an idiosyncratic but talented young figure painter who exhibited at the first and third Kokuten, vanished entirely from the Japanese art world. But before Bakusen and company are blamed too harshly for taking their leave and destabilizing the careers of their associates in this way, we recall Chikkyō’s description of the Kokuga Society’s gloomy financial state in the wake of the 1920 Kokuten,8 which suggests the interruption of the annual exhibition may have been an economic necessity, and not simply to afford its organizers a chance to travel. In fact this trip to Europe, which Bakusen and company described as an “art pilgrimage,” was nearly canceled due to the difficulties of raising enough money to pay for travel and a year’s living expenses in Europe. In March, Nonagase Banka estimated in an article for the Yomiuri Shinbun that the cost of the trip might require as much as ¥10,000,9 an astronomical amount, since a house with land attached in one of Tokyo’s most expensive areas could be had for approximately ¥2,000 in 1921.10 To help meet expenses, Banka conceived the idea of a patronage society, selling memberships for ¥80, in return for which donors would receive a small painting. Banka’s scheme proved so successful that he not only raised enough money for his

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trip, he also generated enough additional capital to build a new home in Kyoto for his wife, mother, and newborn son.11 As for Bakusen, we learn from his letters that his travel and living expenses were met partly through the sale of Spring, his contribution to the third Kokuten, for despite the poor critical reception the work received, it was purchased for ¥5,000,12 which alone was enough to cover half his travel expenses. Over the summer, the number of pilgrims making the journey to Europe was reduced by two, when both Sakakibara Shihō and Murakami Kagaku pulled out of the trip. In August, Kagaku experienced a worsening of an asthmatic condition that had affected him since childhood, forcing him to cancel for medical reasons. Around the same time, Shihō lost his wife Shigeko to tuberculosis, obliging him to withdraw. Joining the group, however, was oil painter Kuroda Jūtarō, friend of Tsuchida Bakusen and Ono Chikkyō since their days together in Le Masque. Kuroda had journeyed to Europe before and was conversant in French, and he served in the invaluable capacity of translator and guide. Kuroda’s expenses were offset by the Osaka newspaper Jiji Shinpō, which commissioned him to send illustrated accounts of their journey and activities in Europe for a semi-regular column in the newspaper’s pages, to which Bakusen, Chikkyō and Banka also contributed sketches (Figure 115).13 It was also decided that a second group would depart some months later to join Bakusen and the others in Paris the following spring. The second travel party was composed of Nakai Sōtarō, his wife Nakai Aiko, Kokuten participants Irie Hakō and Suita Sōboku, and Nihonga painter Kikuchi Keigetsu (whose Falling Flowers of 1904 was discussed in Chapter One in relation to the Shinkoten exhibition). Bakusen, Chikkyō, Banka and Kuroda set sail in October on a six-week journey by mail boat, and headed from Kobe to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Colombo, Suez and Cairo. The six-week journey finally came to an end in Marseille, where an overnight train brought

115 Nonagase Banka, sketch, Beggar Woman in Rome, 1922. Source: Kuroda Jūtarō, Ōshū geijutsu junrei kikō, Jūjikan, 1923.

them to Paris, their ultimate destination, in midNovember.14 Bakusen wrote frequent letters and postcards from Europe, describing the locations he visited, the exhibitions he viewed, and the sketches and paintings he created.15 His correspondence is a valuable source of information about Bakusen’s art collection, for one of the goals of his trip was to return to Japan with a significant selection of paintings, drawings and prints by important Western artists, which he accomplished, spending a small fortune in the process. He made his first purchase, a small painting by Renoir, only eight days after arriving in Paris. “It shows the best coloration that Renoir ever accomplished in a painting,” he wrote to his wife, “and it includes a very nice

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antique-looking frame.” He listed its price at 12,000F, which at that time was equal to approximately ¥1,850.16 Yet Bakusen was prepared to part with even larger sums for desirable works of art, as was evident from in his correspondence: I saw many Renoir works in dealers’ shops, but these days Renoir is incredibly expensive. Cézanne is even more shocking in terms of cost; just a small work done in pencil and a little color costs more than 10,000F, a ridiculous amount of money. I also saw a Van Gogh today, but it was just a little pen drawing, and for that they wanted 80,000F… Today I saw a very nice [Camille] Pissarro at the same store where I bought the Renoir… rendered with true passion, one of Pissarro’s best. It was very cheap; I could probably have it for around 25,000F.17

Bakusen wrote home again in three months’ time, and included a list of the works he had accumulated to that point, which consisted of paintings and drawings by Courbet, Cézanne, and an early Van Gogh, as well as works by Renoir, Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), and Odilon Redon (1840–1916).18 By the end of his trip, he had accumulated several more, including a small sculpture by Renoir, as well as several Edo-era Japanese prints, including one by Sharaku. Other Japanese were also in Paris at this time to purchase artworks, including industrialist Matsukata Kōjirō (1865–1950), whose mission was to create a world-class collection of modern French paintings; the results of his efforts later formed the foundation of the National Museum of Western Art (Kokuritsu Seiyō Bijutsukan), established in 1951. Bakusen had nowhere near the financial resources of such wealthy tycoons as Matsukata, but he managed to build a small but important collection of modern Western drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures to carry back to Japan. His collection included minor but high quality works by important artists, such as a painting by Redon entitled Siddhartha, owned today by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (Figure 116), on which he spent over 180,000F (¥27,800).19

116 Odilon Redon, Bouddha dans sa jeunesse, 1909. Oil on canvas. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Bakusen’s letters disclose other interesting financial information, such as his living costs, in which he describes himself trying to keep down to around 6000F (¥925) per month.20 For the sake of  comparison, oil painter Maeda Kanji (1896– 1930), who also lived in Paris around the same time,  recorded his monthly budget as follows: food, 300F; French lessons, 120F; rent, 36F; models’ fees, 90F; cinema, 40F; miscellaneous expenses, 30F.21 This comes to a total of 616F (a little over ¥95 yen) per month, just one-tenth of Bakusen’s monthly expenditures. While Maeda’s life in Paris was not unlike that of many other struggling painters, Bakusen’s Parisian experience was that of a wealthy and successful artist living on a magnanimous budget. The group spent two months in Paris visiting the city’s many galleries and art dealers, exploring its numerous art museums, and capturing the city’s 192

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Bathhouse Maiden of 1918. They then went to Toledo, where they visited the house of El Greco, before returning to Paris. Bakusen and Chikkyō then took a brief trip to London, wishing to experience the art of William Blake and Joseph Mallord William Turner at the National and the Tate Galleries, where their paintings had been deeply admired by Takeuchi Seihō on his own trip to Europe twenty years earlier. Bakusen admitted in a letter to his wife, however, that neither Blake nor Turner appealed to him as much as the French painters he had so long admired.24 In early April, soon after their return from London, Chikkyō left France and returned to Japan, at which time Bakusen moved from Paris to Vétheuil, a village located about 50 kilometers to the northwest. Vétheuil was a site associated with several pioneers of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; Claude Monet, for example, produced some 150 paintings there between 1878 and 1881. Bakusen stayed in the village for approximately five months, generating shasei studies of the  rural French landscape, and perfecting his mastery of tempera and gouache pigments, the use of which he had studied in Paris.25 The paintings he created with these materials prominently featured houses, barns, and other local architecture, and focused on effects of light and shadow, the

urban views in sketches and watercolor paintings. In late January, Bakusen, Chikkyō, and Kuroda set off on a tour of Italy; Banka had fallen ill and was forced to stay behind.22 The trio spent nearly a month visiting Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Pompeii and Assisi (Figure 117). The trip to Italy also gave them the opportunity to study fresco painting for the first time, and Chikkyō later recalled how important this experience was to him and Bakusen. As he examined the frescos, he later recalled: I constantly thought about Nihonga’s [pigment] problem, which was an issue of great personal significance. It was [in Italy] that I finally became truly cognizant of the fact that, compared to oil painting, Nihonga was flat, and that my fundamental path lay in the pursuit of a solidity that acknowledges the flatness of the painted surface… As we stood together studying the fresco murals, at one point Bakusen turned and quietly murmured to me, “This shows great potential for Nihonga, don’t you think?”23

In March, Banka had recovered from his illness, and all four travelers set off to Spain. In Madrid they studied paintings in the Prado Museum, where Bakusen had the chance to view Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, which had been so inspirational for

117 Postcard of Assisi inscribed by Tsuchida Bakusen on January 28, 1922.National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Photo by author.

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expression of volume, and other aspects associated with Western painting, yet also capitalize on the flatness shared by both the Nihonga and tempera mediums (Figure 118). After his period in Vétheuil, Bakusen left France again in October, traveling to Belgium, Holland, and Germany, returning to Paris in November. During the last phase of his time abroad he shared lodgings with Irie Hakō, who had arrived in France earlier that May with Nakai Sōtarō and his wife Aiko, Suita Sōboku, Kikuchi Keigetsu, and a fifth traveler, a painting mounter and gallery owner named Fukuhara Yoichirō (dates unknown).26 With only four months remaining before his scheduled return to Japan, Bakusen resolved to embark on a large-scale project that would encapsulate all that he had learned and experienced during his time in Europe. He chose dancers for the subject of his grand composition, and for inspiration, he frequented the famous Folies Bergère music

hall, and hired French models dressed in dance costumes. To execute the work, he rented the studio of Charles  Francois Prosper Guérin (1874– 1939), who   was a painter and student of Gustave Moreau, and who may also have been Bakusen’s tempera teacher.27 Bakusen’s interest in cabaret women was probably intended to expand his reputation as a painter of bijinga themes, with the Parisian dancers serving as a Western counterpoint to Kyoto’s maiko. In the end, however, he abandoned the cabaret composition in frustration after making insufficient headway, but he retained the studio and continued to sketch local models, both in the atelier and in a local public park. His next idea was to capture the ideal Parisian woman, and to execute the work in tempera on canvas, but he became unsatisfied with the results of this project as well, and described his own efforts as “too melancholy, even gloomy.”28 He was unable to finish Women of Paris (Figure 119)

118 Tsuchida Bakusen, Landscape of Vétheuil, 1922. Tempera on cardboard. Gallery Sō, Kyoto.

119 Tsuchida Bakusen, Women of Paris, 1919. Tempera on canvas. Present location of work unknown. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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the great kantō earthquake and the japan art exhibition (1923)

before his return to Japan, but his efforts were not wasted, for they gave him the chance to explore the flatness he had admired in Italian fresco painting, moving him further in the direction that ultimately produced Maiko in a Garden in 1924. Bakusen left France in late March of 1923 and arrived back in Japan on the first of May, returning with many sketches, a number of tempera paintings both complete and incomplete, and one of the most extensive collections of modern French paintings and drawings in the greater Kansai region. While Bakusen and company were abroad, Kagaku and Shihō had not remained idle. Kagaku contributed a Buddhist-themed painting to a special two-month long exhibition of Japanese art organized, ironically, by the Salon Nationale de Beaux Artes in Paris in April and June of 1922.29 In March of the following year, just prior to Bakusen’s return, Kagaku held a solo exhibition at the Osaka Takashimaya Department Store that featured twenty works, twelve of which featured Buddhist themes.30 1923 was also the year that Kagaku moved from Kyoto, where the humid climate aggravated his asthma, to Ashiya, a suburb of Kobe at the foot of the Rokkō Mountains, where the cooler and drier air gave him some respite from his increasingly debilitating condition. Shihō, meanwhile, remarried in February 1922, and in April of the same year held a solo exhibition at Kyoto’s Mitsukoshi Department Store. As for the junior associates and regular participants in the Kokuten, the situation was more difficult. Some, as we have observed, turned to the Teiten exhibitions of 1921 and 1922, while one group, led by Itō Sōhaku, Moritani Nanjinshi (1889–1981), Inagaki Chūsei (1897–1922), Okamoto Shinsō, plus four others, formed the Society of Nine (Kyūmeikai), which held a single small exhibition in 1922 sponsored by the Kyoto publishing and printing company Fukumura Sho’undo.31 Others, including Shihō’s brother Sakakibara Shikō, appear not to have participated  in any formal exhibitions until the Kokuten reconvened.

After a two-year interval, the Kokuga Society announced in August 1923 that it would accept submissions in early November for the fourth Kokuten, scheduled to open later that month. These plans, however, were shattered by the Great Kantō Earthquake, which occurred at 11:58 AM on September 1, 1923. Measured at a magnitude of 9 on the Japanese scale (7.9 Richter) at its epicenter, it remains the largest natural disaster in Japan’s recorded history.32 91,000 people were killed, 13,000 went missing, and 52,000 were injured. Over 45% of Tokyo and 90% of Yokohama were estimated to have been razed, much of it by out-ofcontrol fires that raged across the cityscape in the earthquake’s aftermath. The economic cost of the disaster was calculated at more than ¥6.5 billion, more than four times Japan’s national budget that year.33 In the days following the disaster, the populace became susceptible to mass hysteria, and rumors that Korean residents were taking advantage of the chaos to poison water supplies and start fires resulted in the massacre of as many as 6,000 Korean residents at the hands of vigilante groups, the military and the police.34 The anarchy also led to a series of murders of prominent socialists, with the Kameido Incident (Kameido jiken) and Amakasu Incident (Amakasu jiken) among the most frequently mentioned.35 The earthquake and fire were catastrophes for the visual arts as well. Many works were destroyed, including one of the earliest important collections of European art assembled Japan. In 1923, a group of industrialists returned from Europe with a large number of paintings by Courbet, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Edouard Manet, and others, as well as drawings and etchings by Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–1594), Anthony van Dyck (1599– 1641), Edgar Degas, and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), all of which were burned. The earthquake also resulted in the folding of the important 195

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arts journal Shirakaba, as well as the suspension of most art exhibitions in the greater Tokyo area. Takeda Michitarō notes that the site hosting the Teiten exhibition in Ueno was converted into a shelter for 3,000 refugees, who camped in the galleries, surrounded by artworks.36 As they waited to learn more about the catastrophe, the Kokuga Society tentatively carried out the first phase of its two-part selection process in Kyoto, but when the extent of damage and casualties became clear, the organizers returned the works that had been selected and canceled the fourth Kokuten entirely. The Japan Art Institute’s Inten was also canceled that year, although select paintings by Yokoyama Taikan and other members of the Japan Art Institute were exhibited in a commercial Osaka gallery from October 30 to November 25. The Nika Society canceled the Nikaten’s Tokyo run but went ahead with its scheduled Kyoto, Osaka and Fukuoka tours. In Kyoto, to make up for the absence of the Teiten that year, the Osaka branch of Mainichi Shinbun newspaper organized the largest exhibition of the year: the Japan Art Exhibition (Nihon Bijutsuten), a one-time juried show that opened in December in the Kyoto Second Exposition Hall, made vacant by the cancelation of the government-sponsored Teiten. Seihō, Bakusen and Shihō were among the local artists invited to judge submissions, nearly all of which were contributed by painters of the greater Kansai region. All five of the founding Kokuga Society members showed paintings there, with Bakusen’s contributions consisting of Nihonga work entitled Summer Maiko (Natsu no maiko), unknown today, and his unfinished tempera work, Women of Paris.

total of sixty works, including fifty paintings, twelve of which were contributed by the group members, thirteen by Society Friends, and twenty-five selected from amongst the public submissions (the Honorable Mention category was phased out at the fourth show, from which time all works selected were ranked equally). The exhibition also included ten sketches and studies, constituting a new exhibition category that had been announced the previous January; these were shown in a small room adjacent to the main Nihonga galleries.37 In addition, Bakusen and company adorned the gallery’s lounge area with a selection of works by such European artists as Henri Rousseau, Pierre-August Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Odilon Redon, probably chosen from among the works collected by Bakusen during his time in Paris.38 Another significant change in the Kokuga Society was the expansion of the number of Society Friends, announced when Bakusen and company published the expanded list shortly prior to the fourth Kokuten's opening. In addition to Itō Sōhaku, who earned this special status in 1920, Society Friends now included Sakakibara Shikō, Okamura Utarō, Kainoshō Tadaoto, and Suita Sōboku, as well as Kayukawa Shinji (1896–1955), a frequent contributor whose works often show a fascination with the Ukiyo-e sub-genre of Nagasaki-e, as seen in Remembrances of Old Nagasaki (Nagasaki kaiko, figure 120) from the fifth Kokuten, and Sugita Yūjirō (1900–1984), who debuted at the third Kokuten at the young age of 20. These six newly named Friends had either been selected or given honorable mention at more than one of the preceding exhibitions, with the exception of Kainoshō Tadaoto, who had not shown a painting  at the Kokuten since his highly acclaimed Comb Worn Aslant of 1918. We know, however, that Tadaoto had a loyal friend and advocate in Murakami Kagaku,39 and if members of the Kokuga Society were divided over the merits of Tadaoto’s art, they must have decided it was preferable to have him be a part of their own endeavors, rather than see his unusual brand of bijinga painting exhibited at a rival venue.

the kokuga society’s expansion and evolving policies When the fourth Kokuga Society exhibition finally opened in late November 1924, it proved to be a very different affair from the intimate shows of the past. The newly expanded Kokuten featured a 196

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120 Kayugawa Shinji, Remembrances of Old Nagasaki, 1926. Color on paper; hanging scroll. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

The following year the Kokuten expanded even further by sponsoring a spring exhibition held in Kyoto in May of 1925 (Figure 121), in addition to its regularly scheduled autumn show. The spring event was a more casual affair, consisting almost entirely of small-scale paintings, drawings and studies, yet there was a large number of these, one hundred  in total, including seventy-three selected from among the public submissions. The seven Society Friends made the strongest showing by contributing nineteen works,40 outdoing even the founding members, for only Bakusen made a significant contribution by showing two sketches, one featuring a maiko and another a still life with fish, and four tempera paintings featuring the landscape of Vétheuil. In contrast, Chikkyō showed one sketch and Banka one small painting, while Kagaku and Shihō contributed no works at all.41 The Spring Kokuten was warmly received by critics, who were delighted by its informality and the more prominent role played by the younger Friends of the Society,42 but the unenthusiastic showing on the part of the society’s senior membership, apart from Bakusen, suggests they did not support the scheme, and may explain why the first Spring Kokuten also proved to be the last.

121 Photograph of entrance to the 1925 Spring Kokuten Exhibition.Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

The principal autumn Kokuten of 1925, the society’s fifth, was initially scheduled to open in November, but in midsummer the Kokuga Society announced it was to be postponed until the following March, in order to accommodate further substantial changes in the organization’s structure and exhibition policies. First, the society had decided to nearly double the number of full members with the 197

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promotions of Sakakibara Shikō, Okamura Utarō, Sugita Yūjirō, Suita Sōboku, Itō Hakudai, Kainoshō Tadaoto and Kayukawa Shinji to full membership. In addition, twenty-five new Society Friends were named, including several painters who had participated in the Kokuten for the first time only the previous year. The third and most radical  development was the incorporation of an Oil Painting Section (Yōgabu), to be managed and judged by Umehara Ryūzaburō and Kawashima Ri’ichirō, with the addition of official advisors Tanaka Kisaku, Tokyo-based poet and art critic Kawaji Ryūkō (1888–1959), and Nojima Yasuzō (1889–1964), a photographer and owner of the important Tokyo gallery Kabutoya Garō.43 The Kokuten expanded again in 1927 to include a sculpture section managed by Kaneko Kuheiji (1895–1968), and grew again in 1928 to accommodate fine crafts, primarily ceramics.44 Once members of the press had digested the startling news that the Nihonga-centered Kokuga Society would incorporate Yōga, they widely acknowledged Umehara and Kawashima to be the natural choices to head the new Oil Painting Section. As discussed in Chapter One, Umehara trained alongside Tanaka Kisaku at the Kansai Art Institute in Kyoto, and accompanied Tanaka to Paris in 1908, where he continued his studies at the Académie Julian and later under Pierre-August Renoir. Upon his return to Japan in 1913, he held exhibitions underwritten by the journal Shirakaba, and regularly participated in the Second Section Society’s Nikaten. Kawashima Ri’ichirō also spent many years studying abroad, first graduating in 1910 from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and then moving to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian, the Académie Colarossi, and under painter Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921), showing at the Salon d’automne (Autumn Salon) before returning to Japan in 1919. Together Umehara and Kawashima brought extensive international experience and prestige to the Kokuga Society’s new Oil Painting Section. A photograph dating to 1925, probably taken at the July press conference in which these extensive

changes were announced, shows the new line up of the Kokuga Society leaders and judges (Figure 122). Identified from left to right, the photo features Kawaji Ryūkō, Tanaka Kisaku, Kawashima Ri’ichirō, Sakakibara Shihō, Ono Chikkyō, Nonagase Banka, Umehara Ryūzaburō and Tsuchida Bakusen. Missing are Nojima Yasuzō, Murakami Kagaku and Takeuchi Seihō. Kagaku’s absence is explained only partly by his worsening health, for as we will learn, by 1925 he had begun to distance himself from the Kokuga Society and its activities. As for Seihō, his participation in the group as advisor and judge appears to have ended after the third Kokuten, for although no official announcement was ever made, his name no longer appears in association with the society after 1920. The Kokuga Society’s new structure and policies, especially the addition of oil painting, were adopted in order to raise desperately needed revenue. Takeda Michitarō has written about the surge in popularity that Yōga exhibitions enjoyed in the 1920s,45 and Bakusen and company may have believed that addition of a Yōga section would draw more visitors and increase door proceeds. Over the next two years, more steps were taken to increase revenue flow, such as implementing a handling fee for non-members exhibiting paintings (one yen for Nihonga, fifty sen for Yōga) starting with the sixth Kokuten in 1926. Even if the amounts were nominal, charging artists to exhibit their works had no precedent at any Japan exhibition,46 and the poor reception of the new policy in the press prompted Kawashima Ri’ichirō to justify the fees by explaining they were intended to support a generous new Kokuten scholarship award of ¥1000.47 Another fund-raising strategy implemented in 1925 at the suggestion of Bakusen proved to be contentious among the members of the society itself. Bakusen’s scheme required each full member to produce an annual quota of pan-e or “breadpaintings,” a term coined for artworks made solely for generating capital. According to Komatsu Hitoshi, who became Bakusen’s student after participating in the 1924 Kokuten, his teacher was one of the most energetic producers of pan-e, creating .

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122 Photograph of the expanded Kokuga Society membership, 1925. From left to right: Kawaji Ryūkō, Tanaka Kisaku, Kawashima Ri'ichirō, Sakakibara Shihō, Ono Chikkyō, Nonagase Banka, Umehara Ryūzaburō and Tsuchida Bakusen. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

of public submissions to the Kokuten between 1918 and 1928 and the number of works included in each exhibition, with oil paintings and other nonNihonga works exhibited at the Kokuten from 1926 also indicated. The table demonstrates the decrease in emphasis in Nihonga versus the increasingly important roles played by other media, particularly oil painting, at the society’s last four exhibitions. These numbers show substantial annual increases in Nihonga submissions until reaching a high point in 1924, when the Kokuten judges evaluated approximately double the number of paintings they received for the first exhibition. Everything changed in 1926, a year that saw the expansion of the Kokuten membership to thirteen, the implementation of handling fees for works

as many as seventy such works a year not just for sale but also as gifts to newspaper and magazine offices.48 The generation of such “bread paintings,” however, was a serious point of discord among the society’s senior membership, for Chikkyō was the only other founding member willing to join Bakusen’s efforts to raise money this way. Shihō in particular took strong exception to Bakusen’s insistence on this unofficial policy, Tanaka Hisao writes, and as a result their relationship suffered a severe strain from which it never fully recovered.49 In the long run, however, not only were these new policies unable to restore the Kokuten to financial stability, they appear to have been detrimental to the group’s popular standing in the larger Japanese art world, as illustrated in Table 2, which shows the correlation between the number 199

painting circles Table 2: Numbers of Nihonga Paintings versus Works in Other Media at the Kokuten from 1918 to 1928.50 Kokuten Exhibitions

Nihonga Paintings Submitted

Nihonga Paintings Exhibited

Kokuten #1, 1918

278

21

Kokuten #2, 1919

412

17

Kokuten #3, 1920

449

19

Kokuten #4, 1924

573

50

10 sketches

Spring Kokuten, 1925

unknown

73

4 prints, 19 drawings, 4 tempura paintings

Kokuten #5, 1926

430

45

178 oil paintings, 1 drawing, 5 prints

Kokuten #6, 1927

355

55

175 oil paintings, 6 prints, 28 sculptures

Kokuten #7, 1928

245

39

197 oil paintings, 14 prints, 16 sculptures, 25 fine craft

selected, the inauguration of an Oil Painting Section, and a tripling in number of art works on display in the exhibition’s galleries. But 1926 also witnessed the first drop in Nihonga submissions in the Kokuten’s history, and this number would continue to fall until the eighth and last exhibition of 1928, when Nihonga submissions fell below the number received in 1918. This rise and fall suggests a direct correlation existed between the prestige of the Kokuten in the eyes of Nihonga painters and the exhibition’s reputation for exclusivity. In 1928, Bakusen made the satisfied observation that, thanks to the growth of the Kokuten and the addition of non-Nihonga categories of art, the exhibition could finally function as an all-inclusive alternative to the Teiten.51 Others, however, may have looked at the same changes and concluded the differences between the Kokuten and Teiten had finally been dissolved, and that the Kokuga Society’s Nihonga Section had all but lost its relevance as an arena of

Non-Nihonga Works Exhibited

progressive art experimentation. In the next section, we will examine works contributed by the founding members of the Kokuga Society to the fourth through seventh Kokuten, which demonstrate the impact of Bakusen’s, Chikkyō’s and Banka’s experiences in Europe, and the directions taken up by Shihō and Kagaku, who remained in Japan during the Kokuten’s three-year hiatus.

bakusen’s maiko in a garden (1924) and women of ōhara (1927) At the fourth Kokuten of 1924, Bakusen showed four works consisting of two small still life studies, a large-scale mock-up of a work entitled Women of Ōhara, and a finished painting, Maiko in a Garden (Figure 123), which received the lion’s share of critical attention. The painting’s setting is based on sketches Bakusen made in the Tenjuan garden at 200

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portrait and an abstract landscape, merged in a single composition, an impression that has its origins partly in Bakusen’s two-stage composing process wherein each of these elements was conceived and planned independently and then combined in the final work. This process is in evidence in the largescale line and color shita-e mock-up created for this painting (Figure 124), which on close study reveals Bakusen had substantial difficulty realizing his central maiko figure. Her kimono is crisscrossed with black and red ink lines, suggesting Bakusen tried and rejected many variations of line placement. As for her features, at one point it seems he abandoned his initial attempts as entirely unsatisfactory, and pasting a clean piece of paper over the area of her face, he reworked her features until he achieved the blend of objective description and subjective interpretation he desired. In contrast, the garden section shows much less evidence of correction and reworking, suggesting Bakusen had a clearer vision from the start about how this section should appear in the final work. In this chapter’s introduction, we encountered Chikkyō's description of Maiko in a Garden as “a blend of Cézannism and Tosa painting.” Bakusen’s rendering of the maiko in the finished work utilizes attenuated outlines combined with dense coloration, a method associated with Yamato-e, a style originally assigned to courtly painting of the Heian period and revived in the fifteenth century by the Tosa school. In turn, the Yamato-e of Tosa painters informed such popular genres of Momoyama and Edo period painting as Ukiyo-e, early examples of which feature similar tensile calligraphic outlines and rich coloration, as well as the same calculated formality, aestheticized elongation of the body, and a core emphasis on sumptuously patterned garments (Figure 125), all of which are seen in Bakusen’s painting. But Bakusen’s ambition for Maiko in a Garden, and indeed for all his exhibition pieces to that date, was not solely to celebrate Japan’s historical painting legacy but to give it contemporary relevance, in this case by injecting what might be described as a muted mimesis through subtle color gradations to

123 Tsuchida Bakusen, Maiko in a Garden, 1924. Color on silk; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Nanzenji, one of Kyoto’s most significant Zen temples.52 Bakusen’s model was a thirteen-year-old maiko named Miei, who sat for the artist in his studio over June, July and August of that year.53 Stylistically speaking, Maiko in a Garden seems to consist of two distinct works, a semi-naturalistic 201

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125 Anonymous. Woman Playing Shamisen, 1661–1672. Color on silk; hanging scroll. Honolulu Museum of Art. 124 Tsuchida Bakusen, compositional mock-up for Maiko in a Garden, 1924. Ink, color on paper; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

and landscape constructed entirely of flat, resplendent pattern. Bakusen also took an amalgamated approach for the garden background as well, this time referencing both pre-modern Italian fresco painting and Cézanne’s proto-Cubist style. We recall that Maiko in a Garden was the first full-scale Nihonga painting Bakusen exhibited at the Kokuten since his return

generate faint shadowing in the maiko’s face, neck, hands, and garment folds, just enough to create the suggestion of three-dimensional modeling. In this way, Bakusen references reality and yet still manages to generate the impression of a figure 202

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from Europe two years earlier, and the painting incorporates some of what he learned there, including the results of his extensive  studies of fresco murals in Italy. This is clearly manifests in Bakusen’s treatment of rocks and boulders, especially the maiko’s stony makeshift seat, rendered in the faceted fashion found in such late medieval Italian frescoes as Giotto’s Saint Francis cycle from the Saint Francis Basilica in Assisi (Figure 126), which, judging from his letters, made a particularly deep impression on him during his Italian tour.

In addition to Italian frescoes, Chikkyō’s mentions Cézannism in relation Maiko in a Garden,  a system of visualizing nature in terms of geometrical cylinders, spheres and cones promoted by its namesake. Cézannism was certainly not new to Japan in 1924, and we know Bakusen was an admirer of Cézanne as early as 1910 (Kuroda Jūtarō listed him among several French artists he and Bakusen discussed in their days together in Chat Noir and Le Masque). Bakusen’s Paris experience rekindled his admiration for the French painter,

126 Attributed to Giotto di Bondone, Legend of St Francis: Miracle of the Spring, late 13th to early 14th c. Fresco. Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. Source: Rey, Giotto: Frescoes in the Upper Church, Assisi, plate 12.

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unable to finish the second work, he decided to exhibit its compositional mock-up instead. The theme of the incomplete painting was Oharame, an update of his 1915 Bunten painting featuring women peddlers from the village of Ōhara. Two years later this scenario repeated itself when Bakusen failed to complete his main contribution to the fifth Kokuten, as a result of which his contribution to that show was limited to two small works, one a still life of salmon and sardines, the other of poppies, as well as two large-scale figure studies, one made for the unfinished Oharame composition and the other created two years earlier for Maiko in a Garden.55 Bakusen finally debuted the long-delayed Women of Ōhara (Oharame, figure 127) at the sixth Kokuten in 1927, and although it shares the subject of its 1915 precedent, the second exploration of this topic offered an entirely fresh view. The women in both paintings wear the same indigo-dyed robes

and a Cézanne drawing was among the items he brought back to Japan and exhibited at the fourth Kokuten. 1922 was also the year that Julius MeierGraefe published Cézanne and His Circle (Cézanne und sein Kreis), which Bakusen purchased and carried home with him from Europe. Art historian Inaga Shigemi has remarked on Bakusen’s reliance on Cézannesque geometric visualization in Maiko in a Garden, pointing to his cone-shaped cypresses, elliptical needle-covered pine branches, and spherical stones, boulders and grassy mounds by the water’s edge. Inaga also points out that Kuroda Jūtarō, Bakusen’s friend and fellow traveler in Europe, published a book entitled A Study of Composition (Kōzu no kenkyū) in 1925, which incorporates a discussion of Cézanne’s geometrical representational system, all evidence of a wider interest in Cézannism in Japan in the mid 1920s.54 Bakusen had initially intended to exhibit two large-scale paintings at the 1924 Kokuten, but

127 Tsuchida Bakusen, Women of Ohara, 1927. Color on silk; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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trees in the upper right corner of both Manet’s and Bakusen’s compositions.57 Doris Croissant, too, suggests Manet’s iconic painting as ripe for comparison, particularly due to corresponding poses in the left-most figures depicted in both works.58 There is, of course, every reason to believe that Bakusen viewed Luncheon on the Grass at the Louvre during his stay in Paris.59 That said, it was rare for him to directly quote pictorial elements from source paintings of either Western or Japanese origin in his own compositions; indeed he had not attempted such literal image quotation since the 1905 Shinkoten, when he reproduced the pose of Kano Hōgai’s famous Kannon as Compassionate Mother in his own Manchurian Summer Heat. In any case, ample precedence of pyramidal figure groupings can be found in Bakusen’s own oeuvre, in such works as Three Maiko of 1916. If Manet’s influence is to be found in Bakusen’s painting, then it is probably in the French artist’s detached formalism, something Émile Zola (1840–1902) also admired. “Artists such as Manet,” Zola noted, “who is an analytical painter, do not have this preoccupation with subject matter which, more than anything else, worries the public. For example the nude woman in

and sleeve guards, kasuri-decorated aprons, and white cotton headscarves and garters, the distinctive costume of Oharame. In 1915, however, Bakusen showed the peddler women at work, porting brushwood along a mountain trail for sale in the city, while in 1927 he depicted the women at rest on a grass mound amidst a grove of evergreens. He also included a farmhouse, a mill, and other buildings in the background, which take on a solid, geometric appearance not unlike that found in his tempera landscapes of Vétheuil. Since the painting’s debut, critics and art historians have suggested a number of pictorial references for Women of Ōhara. Shimada Yasuhiro has written that the carpet-like treatment of the grass, sprouted with dandelion blossoms, recalls the flower-festooned ground planes featured in late medieval and early Renaissance Italian fresco compositions by artists such as Fra Angelico (1395– 1455).56 Inaga Shigemi has noticed a parallel arrangement of the figures in Bakusen’s painting and that of the picnickers in Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (Dejeuner sur l’herb, 1862–63; Figure 128), and notes further visual correspondence in the placement of paired inward-leaning

128 Edouard Manet, Dejeuner surl'herb, 1862–63. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay. Source: Raynal, From Baudelaire to Bonnard: The Birth of a New Vision, p. 7.

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painting of camellias),63 and forwent contributing to the Spring Kokuten of 1925 entirely. In 1926, Kagaku’s exhibited Pine Mountains in Mist (Shōsan un’en, Figure 129) at the Kokuga Society’s fifth exhibition, which proved to be his last contribution to the Kokuten, although his name remained linked with the Kokuga Society until its dissolution two years later. Pine Mountains in Mist features the Rokko mountain range, which runs from west Kobe to the city of Takarazuka. The mountains are not far from Kagaku’s childhood home, and he later described how he approached this familiar subject:

Luncheon on the Grass is undoubtedly only there to give the artist an opportunity to paint naked skin.”60 We recall that in 1919 Bakusen described a similar ambition for his painting Three Maiko, namely, “to approach [my subject] with an interest in outer form alone,” and to treat his maiko models no differently than if they were an arrangement of apples.61 With Woman of Ōhara, Bakusen achieves a Manet-like emotional distance by his calculated reliance on thin, tensile outlines and by his application of largely unvariegated coloration, but perhaps most importantly, by stripping his subjects and scenery of sentiment. The result is a clear, almost crystalline vision of the Ōhara landscape and its Oharame inhabitants that plays directly to the decorative strengths of Nihonga’s mineral pigments.

I have been looking at these mountains since my youth, and have occasionally put brush to paper to paint them, but the first time I decided to paint them in earnest was for Pine Mountains in Mist, at the end of my Kokuten

other significant kokuten paintings, 1924–1927

period. For that work, I tried to emulate Li Gonglin [1049–1106] and other [Chinese landscape painters]… In order to paint it, I rented a small house on the out-

Murakami Kagaku scaled back his participation in the Kokuga Society after 1920, ostensibly due to his deteriorating asthmatic condition, the stated reason for his withdrawal from the group’s European tour and for his relocation from humid Kyoto to Ashiya.62 For the fourth Kokuten in 1924, Kagaku contributed four small paintings (two Buddhistthemed works, a still life with vegetables and a

skirts [of Ashiya] and did shasei sketches while perched on the roof, in order to take in a view of all the mountains at once.64

In rendering the mountains of Rokko, Kagaku returned to the Nanga-style ink brushwork he had learned in his youth, inspired, perhaps, by his choice of a subject he had known since he was a boy

129 Murakami Kagaku, Pine Mountains in Mist, 1926. Ink, light color on paper; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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growing up in Kobe. Kawaji Ryūkō, advising judge for the Kokuten’s Oil Painting section, was deeply impressed with the painting, and noted that in addition to its Nanga elements, Kagaku also incorporated techniques of his own invention. In particular, Kawaji was both interested in and perplexed by the way Kagaku managed to generate the suggestion of thickly wooded mountains while actually depicting a much smaller number of trees, which he rendered in light, delicate strokes and scattered thinly across the landscape. “These fine brush lines also help to increase the weight of the mountains and to add animation to the mist,” he wrote, “showing the depths of Kagaku’s talents… It is a strange and marvellous work.”65 Although Kagaku’s participation in the Kokuga Society lessened in the mid-1920s, he remained professionally active in other ways. In 1924 he put together a small collective of young Kobe painters dubbed the Society of Saintly Bunglers (Seisetsusha), the aim of which was to promote religious themes in contemporary painting. Kagaku organized one exhibition in 1924 featuring works by members of this group. Although there were no subsequent exhibitions after its initial one, Kagaku kept the group alive for several years, and a few of the younger Kokuga Society members and Society Friends are known to have attended gatherings.66 In May of 1926 he held a solo exhibition of new works at Osaka’s Takashimaya department store, and in 1927 he journeyed to the Hokuriku region of Japan to visit Kanshinji and other famous temples, a lengthy and strenuous trip.67 All these activities show that, while Kagaku’s asthma was certainly serious (it would ultimately contribute to his early death in 1939), it was not yet so debilitating in the 1920s that he was unable to be productive and active in diverse ways. In short, after studying the evidence, it becomes clear that Kagaku’s withdrawal from the Kokuga Society was only partly illness-related. By 1927, it seems he had simply had enough of the group, its exhibition, and its associated activities and responsibilities, as outlined in two letters drafted to Nakai Sōtarō in April of that year:

I have no desire to exhibit my work [at the Kokuten] henceforth. It is too hard on me emotionally… [it feels] as if I am stepping backwards as the world moves forward, which is a lonely and difficult feeling… For these reasons, I want the others to allow me to exempt myself from the group; if not entirely, then at least as a member; I can be made a supporting member, anything will do… As for the other duties, I do not think I will be able to carry them out. I certainly will not do any more administrative work… I have been thinking in the back of my mind about resigning from the group for some time now… I want you to set me free… 68

While Kagaku struggled with his health and his growing disaffection with the Kokuga Society,  the mid 1920s proved to be a productive period  for Shihō. In March 1924 Shihō held a solo exhibition at the Osaka branch of Takashimaya  department store consisting mostly of small-scale bird-and-flower paintings, as well as a number of ceramics decorated with his brushwork. To mark the event, Takashimaya also published a volume of Shihō’s works, including those featured  in the show.69 October saw the release of another Shihō-related book: a collection of previously published and newly authored essays, mostly related to his approach to bird-and-flower painting,  and other sundry issues related to Nihonga.70 For the 1924 and 1926 Kokuten shows, Shihō exhibited one painting to each, White Herons on Snowy Willow (Setsuryū hakuro no zu) and Lotuses (Ren) respectively, demonstrating the range of his talents in the bird-and-flower genre.71 Of the two, critics preferred   Lotuses, for where Shihō intended the nearly monochromatic timbre of White Herons on Snowy Willow to express a natural spiritual purity, others saw sterility, and reviewer Kosugi Misei cautioned Shihō against the dangers of over-intellectualization, suggesting too much cerebral reflection can weaken a painting as surely as too little.72 Shihō originally intended to show two paintings in 1924, but the second work, entitled Lions (Shishi, figure 130),73 did not appear at the Kokuten until 1927. Years afterwards Shihō recollected how the work came into being: 207

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130 Sakakibara Shihō, Lions, 1927. Color on silk; framed diptych. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

painting “a classical, weighty feeling… that expresses the character of the king of beasts.”75 Other than Shihō’s substitution of a weasel as the lion’s morsel, the final work closely recreates the tableau he encountered at the zoo. His efforts, however, fell flat in the eyes of several critics, including Ishii Hakutei, who panned the painting.

I was strolling around the [Kyoto City] zoo when I came across a pair of lions, which had been given hares to eat… I decided to capture the impression I received at that time, one of muscular strength and raw power. The female lion was licking her paw after feeding herself, eyeing the male who was pacing the cage without touching his food. Males will be males, and this one was conscious of the fact that the female was scrutinizing him, and he growled as she eyed his food. I found this visual

I cannot say that the execution of Sakakibara Shihō’s

counterpoint very exciting.74

Lions is all that interesting. One comment I overheard [in the gallery] is that the lions resemble camels, a cri-

Shihō visited the zoo daily for nearly two weeks, making endless sketches and compositional studies until he felt he had arrived at the desired design. To express the physical power he had experienced in his initial encounter at the zoo, he chose not to use the soft, feathery kegaki brushwork with which painters typically rendered animal fur, seen earlier in Takeuchi Seihō’s Lion of circa 1901 (Figure 6), choosing instead to generate the lions’ mane and hair with rippling iron-wire lines colored with broad expanses of largely unvariegated pigment; his inspiration for this unusual technique may have been ancient Assyrian relief carvings of lions, which Shihō also studied in order to afford his

tique not without merit, considering [Shihō] included something resembling humps on the lions’ shoulders. Furthermore, whereas Shihō’s bokashi [ink gradation] is usually so skillfully handled in other works… in places here it is an utter mess.76

As for Banka, he marked his return from Europe with his first Tokyo solo exhibition held in autumn of 1923, which included sketches, oil paintings, and Nihonga works, most of which were related to his Western travels. That same season he contributed two works selected for the one-off Japan Art Exhibition, including a Nihonga work entitled Four Girls (Yonin no shōjo), now lost, which was based on 208

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sketches Banka made during his travels in Spain.77 Banka was not able to maintain this success streak, however, and fell into difficulties with his contribution to the 1924 Kokuten, a screen painting entitled Children of the Spanish Countryside (Supein no inaka no kodomo, Figure 131). Like Fishermen Returning Home at Sunset of 1920, this work was another foray into experimental pigment manipulation, this time examining the potential of guzumi variations. Literally translated as “ink pigment,” guzumi is created by mixing white gofun and black sumi ink, resulting in an opaque blue-gray paste. Banka’s idea was to use other water-based colors in addition to sumi,78 possibly with the idea of replicating the pigmentinfused plaster of fresco paintings, but critics responded to Banka’s pigment experiments much as they had in the past, with Ishii Hakutei finding them artless and awkward,79 and veteran Nihonga painter Kawabata Ryūshi (1885–1966) comparing them to crayon scribblings.80 The catalogue for the 1926 Kokuten lists Banka’s contribution as Country Maiko (Inaka no maiko), but it is not the work he ended up exhibiting. Realizing he would not finish it in time, Banka

put Country Maiko aside and turned his attention to a different work entitled Women Fetching Water (Mizukumi ni iku onna), which he explained (with possible ironic reference to Ishii’s critique of his previous Kokuten offering) was intended to evoke the simplicity of “Suiko-era Buddhist images, Greek sculpture, and terra-cotta vase painting… I wanted to create something seemingly artless, and so I painted somewhat spontaneously.”81 In the end, however, he was unable to finish this work either, and exhibited it an incomplete state, after appending “study” (shūsaku) to the title.82 Reviewers of the exhibition mostly avoided mentioning the work, but one critic, Nakamura Gakuryō (1890– 1969), himself a Nihonga artist, minced no words in condemning it, calling the brushwork “drastically oversimplified,” the composition “unskilled and childish,” and the coloration “terrible.” “I can find nothing I can admire in this work,” he wrote, “and not just because Banka’s approach and my own are so far apart. I can only hope for better things from him at the next exhibition.”83 Banka’s completed his maiko-themed work the following year, and showed it at the 1927 Kokuten

131 Nonagase Banka, Children of the Spanish Countryside, 1924. Color, ink on canvas; two-panel folding screen. Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

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under the title Maiko of a Seaside Town (Umi chikaki machi no maiko, Figure 132). The origins of this painting are found in a trip Banka took with fellow Nihonga painter Itō Keisui (1880–1967) in 1925 to the spa town of Gobō in Wakayama prefecture. There they stayed for a week at a local inn, where they got to know two teenaged maiko hired by the innkeepers as entertainers, who ended up sitting for Banka, modeling for sketches that became the basis for Maiko of a Seaside Town.84 For this work, Banka chose a traditional if somewhat uncommon (at least for application in Nihonga) pigment preparation called doro-enogu (“mud colors”), in which the mineral colors are ground to an exceedingly fine, powdery consistency and combined with glue to create a thick, opaque emulsion not unlike Western distemper. Stylistically, the painting represents Banka’s return to values more traditionally associated with Nihonga, utilizing outlines rendered with guzumi to generate the models’ forms, and dispensing with unorthodox blending of mineral pigments. The results tentatively redeemed Banka in the eyes of Ishii Hakutei, who noted that here that the artist’s intentional artlessness and naïve style was combined with fine coloration to create a praiseworthy painting.85

Chikkyō’s first Kokuten work after his return  from Europe was Spring Tilling (Shunkō, Figure 133), shown in 1924. Writing for the journal Shōbi, Chikkyō described his vision for this painting as follows:

133 Ono Chikkyō, Spring Tilling, 1924. Colors on silk; twopanel folding screen. Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

132 Nonagase Banka, Maiko of a Seaside Town, 1927. Colors on canvas; framed. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

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Chikkyō studied along with that of Giotto, Cimabue, and other Italian painters of the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods. Yet the results proved to be as personally unsatisfying as many of his earlier attempts to manipulate mineral pigments in a Yōga-esque fashion. 1926 marked another important turning point for Chikkyō, for his painting that year, Chōmon Ravine (Chōmonkyō), demonstrates a level of engagement in line-based painting aesthetics not encountered in his Kokuten works until then, and marks his public reengagement with the Nanga style. Chōmon Ravine, lost today and known only through a souvenir postcard image (Figure 135), was based on sketches Chikkyō made the previous year of this famous ravine on the Abugawa River in

Spring Tilling is a view of Yunosagi, [a village in] Kishū. Years earlier I had sketched farmers there tilling in the clear, bright light of early spring. Planning how to capture this scene and the look of the Yunosagi landscape in a large composition [was difficult], and the shita-e mock up took a long time… I was trying for a kind of systematic realism, of the sort one experiences in the paintings of Mantegna, as well as a more decorative kind of beauty, but in the end I was unable to achieve either very well.86

It is interesting to note that Chikkyō was still searching for ways to achieve realism with Nihonga pigments, in this case through studying the “systematic” or mannered realism of such artists as Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506, Figure 134), whose work

134 Andrea Mantegna, Agony in the Garden, c.1458 – c.1460. Tempera on panel. National Gallery, London. Source: Fiocco, Le pitture del Mantegna (1961), plate 20.

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showed two seascapes of Nakiri that were even more quiet in their feel and more modest in scale, with references to Nanga amplified and those to Cézanne muted.88

the eighth kokuten and the dissolution of the kokuga society We have seen how the founding members of the Kokuga Society struggled to find a way to keep their Kokuten exhibition afloat amidst its ballooning running costs and increasingly tense interpersonal relationships. We also witnessed how they coped with personal struggles in the mid-1920s. Only Chikkyō seemed to find his bearings during this difficult period, and to emerge satisfied and confident in his Nanga-inspired approach. In 1928, for what would prove to be the last Kokuten, Bakusen announced his intention to exhibit a screen painting entitled Morning Glories (Asagao), but when the exhibition opened at the Tokyo Prefectural Art Museum on April 27 his painting was not on display; nor, for that matter, were Shihō’s or Banka’s, for none of them had been able to complete their works on time.89 By then Kagaku was associated with the group by name alone, thus of all the founding members only Chikkyō’s contribution, a series of landscapes entitled Album of Winter Days (Tōjitsucho, Figure 136), appeared in the galleries for the exhibition's opening. Banka had prepared to show a reworked version of Women Fetching Water from 1925, featuring a new background and different handling of colors, but was utterly dissatisfied with his efforts and withdrew from the exhibition entirely.90 Bakusen continued work on Morning Glories and debuted it a week late, albeit in a still-unfinished state, midway through the show’s Tokyo run (Figure 137). Shihō, whose delay was caused by influenza, also pressed on with his painting, Winter Morning (Tōchō, Figure 138), managing to finish and exhibit it three days before the close of the exhibition’s Tokyo leg. Critic Kawano Tōkoku was one

135 Ono Chikkyō, Chōmon Ravine, 1926, from souvenir postcard of the 6th Kokuten Exhibition. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Yamaguchi prefecture. While Chikkyō was enthusiastic and even energized about exploring anew the painterly possibilities of the calligraphic ink line, Chōmon Ravine, which uses only light, waterbased pigments, puzzled and even disappointed many viewers who admired the bold coloration with which he had come to be so closely associated. Nakamura Gakuryō was one of reviewers who admired Chōmon Ravine, but noted how curious it was to see Chikkyō, who had long been one of the Kokuga Society’s most progressive painters, now moving in such a traditionalist, even conservative direction.87 For the 1927 exhibition, Chikkyō 212

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136 Ono Chikkyō, from Album of Winter Days, 1928. Ink, light color on paper; six framed works. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

137 Tsuchida Bakusen, Morning Glories, 1928. Color on silk; pair of two-panel folding screens. Nakano Art Museum.

of the few reviewers who mentioned Shihō’s painting, and at the same time took a jab at Bakusen's character.

painting until it was complete, delaying its debut until the exhibition was half over. That says a lot. Shihō’s attitude shows the prudence of a true artist, while Bakusen’s actions demonstrate that he places more

Bakusen insisted on showing his Morning Glories in an

value on his reputation… This attitude is common

incomplete state, while Shihō refused to exhibit his

among modern artists, who put their name above their

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138 Sakakibara Shihō, Winter Morning, 1928. Color, gold on silk; pair of two-panel folding screens. Osaka Municipal Museum of Modern Art.

two-fold screens that depict a reed-covered lakeside captured on a cold morning, populated with ducks and white herons. To generate shasei studies for this work, Shihō spent more than a month in a rental cottage on the shores of Biwako,95 a large lake located on the far side of Kyoto’s eastern mountain range in Ōtsu prefecture. The theme of waterfowl among reeds in winter is an ancient one explored by such important premodern Japanese painters as Sesshū Tōyō, whose winter scene in Screen of Birds of Four Seasons (Shiki kachōzu byōbu) employs a similar composition of water fowl and herons among yellow reeds and leafless trees on a frozen lake, a precedent which may have served Shihō as an inspirational reference.96 Chikkyō’s Album of Winter Days made even more open and enthusiastic reference to Japan’s Edo-period Nanga tradition than had Blue Sea and Billows of the previous year. The scale of the paintings in the series was uniformly small (each work less than 50 centimeters on its longest side), hardly ideal for a large-scale exhibition catering to several hundred viewers at any given time. Yet some visitors may have found the intimacy of the works and their delicate, elegant description offered a quiet refuge from the bustle of the expanded (some might say bloated) Kokuten. Chikkyō unambiguously acknowledged that the poetic feel intended to evoke such Edo-period Nanga works as Ike Taiga’s (1723– 1776) Ten Conveniences (Jūbenzu), and explained

art. With such an attitude, the spiritual light of their art will inevitably be dimmed.91

When it was finally on view, Bakusen’s painting reminded some viewers of the morning glory murals at Nishihonganji temple by Kano Sanraku, but in fact Bakusen’s inspiration for this painting came from a set of Edo-era screen paintings the artist viewed at Seianji, a lesser-known temple on the outskirts of Ōtsu, Shiga prefecture.92 Tanaka Hisao notes that these screens inspired Bakusen to raise morning glory flowers in his own garden, which he sketched for over three years before he finally selected them as the topic of his Kokuten painting.93 Most critics were unable to include Bakusen’s painting in their reviews due to its late arrival in the galleries, but Kawaji Ryūkō took the time to discuss it, noting that although Morning Glories was unfinished, viewers could still discern the painting’s fine decorative qualities. “An artist first makes careful studies of nature,” he explained, “which he then modifies and stylizes, using interesting compositions and skilled techniques.” This, he argues, is the way the decorative aspect of Japanese painting is captured, “and it is just such a process we find has been utilized in Morning Glories.”94 After the poor reception of Lions in 1927, for the seventh Kokuten Shihō returned to the theme for which he was best known, namely, bird-and-flower painting. Winter Morning consists of a pair of 214

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Furthermore, we recall Bakusen’s unapologetic defence of the Kokuga Society’s Kyoto-centric selection policies in 1918, in which he frankly stated that, despite their perennial hopes for high-quality submissions from Tokyo, artists there seemed only capable of producing old-fashioned Nanga works and “emakimono-like” screens that missed the point of the Kokuten entirely.101 Now, eight years later, Bakusen offered fawning compliments and openly solicited the very same traditionalist works by the Tokyo artists he formerly spurned. By mid-July, however, the media was printing rumors about the expected breakup of the Kokuga Society and the discontinuation of the Kokuten, as reported in the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun:

that he made his preparatory sketches over a month-long visit to his hometown of Kasaoka, walking along the coast, in the hills, and in the mountains.97 In this way, Chikkyō documented his experience of nature in much the same way that the poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) recorded impressions he received in his travels in haikai poetry verse.98 That year reviewers were prepared for his new Nanga-inflected style and reacted in a much more positive manner to this series than they had to his seascapes the previous year. Kawaji Ryūkō noted, “One could say that Chikkyō’s ability to harmonize Nanga-esque line and color in this way is his special creative strength,” and ended his critique by stating how pleased he was that Chikkyō had finally found his way after years of struggling.99 By the end of exhibition in mid-May, signs of decline in the Kokuga Society’s Nihonga section were too obvious to ignore. Public submissions were at an all-time low, funding was scarce, and yet Bakusen was not yet willing to let his lingering optimism for the exhibition die. Soon after the seventh Kokuten’s close, he published an announcement in the Yomiuri Shinbun, in which he laid out a new vision for the exhibition:

In 1918, Tsuchida Bakusen, Sakakibara Shihō and several others founded the Kokuga Society based on their dissatisfaction with the Bunten, and with a firm desire for independence. Ever since then, the importance of this group was acknowledged throughout the painting world, and their reputation stands today. Suddenly, however, news is circulating that [the Kokuga Society] will break up. The reason given is the unhealthy economic climate, which has made it impossible to hold [the Kokuten] on an annual basis. Apparently the group has been losing nearly ¥8,000 per year… Other rumors

From this point on, we would like to celebrate [Nihon-

say that the members are not getting along, or that

ga’s] East Asian aspect, and request that painters who

Bakusen has been recommended for membership in

explore these directions to submit the paintings. For

the Imperial Art Academy, which may be the real

example, Tokyo has a wonderful Ukiyo-e tradition, and

reasons for the break-up… An official announcement

the Tosa School’s true artistic lineage is alive there as

will be made on July 30, when the Kokuga Society

well. We look forward to submissions from artists who

will meet [for a press conference] at the Tokyo Imperial

are interested in exploring these styles.100

Hotel.102

This was an extraordinary announcement, insofar as it contradicted a number of positions on which the Kokuga Society had stood firm since its inception. After a decade of defending the right of Nihonga practitioners to express their affinity for Western artistic modernism, Bakusen was basically announcing that the Kokuten judges would now prioritize submissions that showed reverence  for Japan’s premodern painting traditions, a policy that would have heartened the staunchest conservative.

On the appointed date, reporters gathered at the hotel where they were met by the Kokuga Society’s Nihonga section, represented by senior members Bakusen, Shihō, and Chikkyō (by then Banka had followed Kagaku by more or less ending his association with the society) and thirteen junior members, and the Oil Painting section, represented by its leaders Umehara Ryūzaburō and Kawashima Ri’ichirō.103 The Nihonga section handed out a printed statement offering a detailed explanation as 215

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1939, with Fukuhara Shinzō (1883–1948) and Nojima Yasuzō serving as its first directors. The Kokugakai held its first restructured Kokuten exhibition in 1929, and has remained active to this day, holding its annual spring exhibition every year since its reorganization, with the exception of a one-year hiatus in 1945 at the height of the Second World War.105 According to the Kokuga Society’s dissolution notice, at the heart of the crisis were the group’s precarious finances. Fujimoto Shōzō (1896–1992), publisher of Atorie, Garon and other art journals, was friend of Bakusen who recalled the final days of the organization and shed light on the depth of its fiscal troubles, as well as the lengths to which Bakusen was willing go to keep the Kokuten afloat. Fujimoto recalled the night before the official press preview of the seventh Kokuten, when he was keeping Bakusen company in the darkened galleries as the painter made a final effort (unsuccessful, in the end) to complete Morning Glories in time for the reporters’ arrival. As he worked, Shihō entered the galleries and had a quiet word with Bakusen, who replied by saying, “Fine. We will be all right if we sell the bathers by Cézanne. If that is not enough, then sell the Rousseau as well.”106 To meet the exhibition’s expenses, Bakusen was selling off his valuable collection of modern French oil paintings and drawings collected during his trip to Europe seven years earlier. As for the other theories floated about the reasons for the Kokuga Society’s break up, the one regarding Bakusen’s nomination for membership at the Imperial Art Academy proved to be untrue, for this did no occurred until 1930, when he was invited to serve on the Teiten selection jury. The other rumor about internal discord among the membership, however, deserves closer examination. Earlier we discussed Shihō’s displeasure with Bakusen’s policy of creating “bread pictures” for fund raising purposes, as well as Kagaku’s discontent over the steadily expanding scope of the Kokuten that eventually led to his retreat from the society in 1925. Bakusen’s assertive character often seemed to be a cause

to why the Nihonga section was disbanding, parts of which read as follows: After deep deliberation, we announce today that the Kokuga Society’s Nihonga division has been disbanded… At the time of the group’s foundation, we members and advisors found the financial management of the group to be comparatively easy, and we were able to concentrate purely on the creation of art. Accompanying the sudden and precipitous societal changes that have occurred since then, however, is the fact that the exhibition’s financial expenses have soared at an astonishing rate… A solution would be to drag our unwilling bodies through these difficult times and boldly carry on, yet upon reflection, it seems that what is necessary to solve these problems is beyond the scope of our mission and our skills as artists. Instead of spending all our energy and resources trying to manage these difficulties, it would be more meaningful to concentrate on our art. With this in mind, we have decided to dissolve the group.104

Next, Umehara took the floor and announced that the Kokuga Society’s Oil Painting Section would not be dissolved along with the Nihonga section. Instead, it would be reorganized under the new byname of Kokugakai, and would feature additional sections for sculpture, prints, and fine crafts; in other words, it would continue in much the same way as it had, albeit without Nihonga, and under a new name. The Oil Painting Section had recently recruited oil painter Yamawaki Shintoku (1886– 1952), sculptor Kaneko Kuheiji, printmaker Hiratsuka Un’ichi (1895–1997), and ceramic artist Tomimoto Kenkichi, and over the next few years it grew larger still, expanding to incorporate several individuals from the now-defunct Shirakaba circle, including Mushanokōji Saneatsu, the journal’s former editor, Takamura Kōtarō, sculptor, poet, and author of the seminal essay “Green Sun” of 1910, as well as several participants in the Folk Art (Mingei) movement, such as potters Hamada Shōji (1894–1978) and Englishman Bernard Leach (1887–1979), and the print artist Munakata Shikō (1903–1975). A Photography Section was added in 216

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opening, Woman with Balloon was not on display. He asked a member of the gallery staff about the painting, and was told to speak to Bakusen, who had borrowed space at a local temple to complete a painting in time for the opening (a lesser work featuring poppies, which appeared in the galleries several days late). Tadaoto went to the temple to speak to him, and years later he recalled their conversation as follows:

of internal friction, and Komatsu Hitoshi later corroborated that his teacher frequently quarreled with the other senior members, particularly Shihō.107 No single episode demonstrates Bakusen’s headstrong personality and autocratic tendencies more than his confrontation with Kainoshō Tadaoto in 1926, which later came to be known as the “filthy painting affair” (kitanai-e jiken).108 At the core of the two painter’s disagreement lay a work entitled Woman with Balloon (Onna to fūsen), which survives today solely as a sepia-toned photographic image (Figure 139).109 The painting was one of four Tadaoto created for the Kokuten that year, but when he arrived at the exhibition site in Tokyo to examine their placement before the show’s

I found Bakusen and several of his assistants putting final touches on his painting. “What is it you want?” he said, sitting with his knees drawn up, a brush in his hand, his body trembling slightly, and his face like a devil mask… Please let me exhibit my painting, I said, as I had worked so hard on it. “Oh, we cannot have that. Such a filthy painting will sully the entire gallery. You would do better to give it up. Besides, don’t you have three other works in the exhibition?” I ended up returning to Kyoto straightaway, without attending the opening ceremony.110

In 1926 Tadaoto was a full member of the Kokuga Society, and as such Bakusen had no authority to remove his painting. Tadaoto never forgot the episode, and yet did not allow Bakusen’s highhandedness to embitter him; instead, he worked from that time onward “to overthrow ‘beautiful paintings’ with my ‘filthy’ ones.”111 Another source of internal discourse between the Kokuga Society senior members was Bakusen’s practice of recruiting students and followers from among the young contributors to the Kokuten. In May 1923, after his return from Europe, Bakusen established an atelier in west Kyoto near Ryōanji temple named the Bakusen Freedom Research Institute (Bakusen Jiyū Kenkyūjo), where he began holding ikenkai gatherings and private sketching  sessions with hired models, much as the Higashiyama Circle had done prior to forming the Kokuga Society; regular participants including  Suita Sōboku, Okamura Utarō, Itō Sōhaku, Kayukawa Shinji, and other junior Kokuten participants. The following year, Bakusen built an atelier  near Hakubaichō in northwest Kyoto,

139 Kainoshō Tadaoto’s Woman with Balloon, 1926. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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his “Cottage South of the Mountain” (San’nansō, named for its situation to the south of Mount Kinugasa) and established a larger study group which, in addition to members of the Freedom Research group, expanded to include Kainoshō Tadaoto, Sakakibara Shikō, Sugita Yūjirō, as well as several promising new graduates from the Specialized School for Painting. Within a few years, Bakusen expanded the atelier again, renaming it the Tsuchida Painting Juku and South-of-the-Mountain Association (Tsuchida Gajuku San’nansha), with Bakusen’s circle of followers increasing to include more of the Kokuten’s newest participants like Komatsu Hitoshi, Fukuda Toyoshirō (1904– 1969), Tada Keiichi (1900–1981), and Tamaki Suekazu (1897–1943). At its height, Bakusen’s juku counted over one hundred students and senior members.112 Bakusen’s establishment of a successful private juku atelier school was not unusual in itself; rather, it was the zeal with which he pursued this enterprise that set him in stark contrast to the rest of the Kokuga Society members, none of whom demonstrated similar ambitions to gather an army of followers. Shihō, for example, was frequently approached in the 1920s by young painters eager to train under him, most of whom he turned away.113 Shihō explained his policy regarding mentoring younger painters in an essay unambiguously titled “Why I Do Not Take Students,” published in his 1924 essay collection, in which he argued that the way to paint truly sensitive bird-and-flower painting, or for that matter works featuring any natural subjects, was in fact unteachable, and could only be achieved by a painter already in possession of natural inclination and talent. “This, however,” he remarked, “is something that artists who eagerly surround  themselves with students will never understand.”114 Yet despite the deterioration of the Kokuga Society’s inner social dynamic, its financial and organizational failings, and the very public creative and practical struggles of its founding members, by 1928 the organization had earned a place in the developing narrative of modern Japanese art. This

fact was made manifest the previous year at an historical retrospective exhibition entitled “Meiji and Taishō Era Masterpieces”  (Meiji Taishō Meisaku Tenrankai), which ran from June 3 to 30, 1927, at the Tokyo Municipal   Art Museum. The landmark event was underwritten by the Asahi Shinbun newspaper company, which described the exhibition in its June 4 front-page headlines as “An Ambitious and Unprecedented Art Historical Enterprise.”115 Bakusen was invited to serve as one of the exhibition’s advising councilors (hyōgiin), joining the illustrious company of Takeuchi Seihō, Yamamoto Shunkyo, Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, Ishii Hakutei, Fujishima Takeji, Takamura Kōun, and many more of the country’s most important Nihonga artists, oil painters, and sculptors. The monumental exhibition featured a total of 450 artworks displayed in twenty rooms, including several works by Kokuga Society members from both the Bunten and Kokuten periods, including Kagaku’s Amida (1916) and Nude (1920), Shihō’s Red Pines (1919) and Forest of Nara (1920), and Bakusen’s Spring Birds in Clear Weather (1917) and Bathhouse Maiden (1918). This last work was chosen along with Terasaki Kōgyō’s (1866–1919) Tall Mountains in Clear Autumn (Kōsan seishū, 1914) to represent the entire Taishō era in an illustrated preview of the exhibition published in the pages of Tokyo Asahi Shinbun in the days before the exhibition’s opening (Figure 140). In the ten intervening years, the inaugural Kokuten of 1918 had entered the national memory as a significant episode in the history of modern Japanese art, with Bakusen’s Bathhouse Maidens serving as a symbol of the progressive creative spirit of Taishō Japan. It was with such an historical perspective that Toyoda Yutaka contemplated the history of the now-defunct Kokuga Society and its legacy, in an article entitled “Broken Glass: Mourning the Kokuten.” Toyoda placed Bakusen and company at the end of a long lineage of Edo- and Meiji-era painters who explored Western-derived artistic influence, including Maruyama Ōkyo, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Watanabe Kazan (1793– 218

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140 “Finally, to Open on the 3rd: Exhibition of Masterpieces of the Meiji and Taishō Eras.” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, June 2, 1927. Text and image in public domain.

1841), Shiba Kōkan, Kano Hōgai, and Hashimoto Gahō. Toyoda pointed out that while experimentation with Western-derived pictorial values was nothing new to Japan, what made the art of groups like the Kokuga Society different was their desire to go beyond merely mimicking the styles and appearance of foreign art, to develop reflexive understandings of the underlying ideas and priorities of modernist Western art movements. Yet they never forgot their artistic roots, and merged their enthusiasm for modernist art with a deep knowledge of and respect for Japan’s traditional painting heritage. This, Toyoda argued, is why the first Kokuten and first Inten exhibitions   were both so meaningful, and why they influenced so many young artists. But what, he wondered, would happen next? Now that the Kokuga Society had disbanded, would the ideals they once championed disappear as well?

The mainstream current in today’s Nihonga community   remembers and honors tradition, but traditionalism was only one aspect of the [Kokuga Society]. Another aspect was their confrontational attitude. Young artists today flirt with the Tosa school, with academic Chinese painting, and with art of [Rinpa painters] Sōtatsu and Korin, but now the stone thrown by the Kokuten and Inten rolls to their feet. There it sits, glinting, offering the sensation and the sensuality of the modern. No one can turn back time. The Kokuten is broken, and yet we will still somehow  manage to keep its spirit alive, for it will never be exorcised.116

Through the example of their idealistic rhetoric and their unconventional exhibitions, he concludes, Bakusen and company helped shape a vision of Nihonga for the twentieth century, and in the process proved that traditionalism and modernism are not mutually incompatible.117 219

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the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, an event that changed the direction of modern Japanese society more than almost any other, on par with the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and Japan’s subsequent engagement in the Pacific War. The Kokuga Society survived and persevered through the mid 1920s only by adopting many of the same characteristics that had once allowed it to stand apart from the Bunten and the Inten. In the Kokuten’s last phase, Bakusen and his peers in the Kokuga Society sought to redefine and then hone new artistic identities, and their works from the late 1920s are emblematic of the contemporary discourse at the time aimed to rekindle interest in Japan’s “classical” (kotenteki-na)” past. Bakusen’s Poppies (Keshi, Figure 141) from 1929 is emblematic of his post-Kokuten phase. More than a decade earlier, just as the Kokuga Society was forming at the end of 1917, Furukawa Osamu wrote a lengthy essay entitled “A Critic Looks at Bakusen” for the journal Chūō Bijutsu, in which he offered a detailed explanation of Bakusen’s career, his personality, and his artistic outlook up to that point. Furukawa concluded that Bakusen was a “romanticist” (romanchishisuto) whose “nihilism” (nihirizumu) stemmed from his refusal to stand for any critical interference, “which Bakusen sees as a form of artistic brutality.”1 Ten years later, Bakusen’s artistic idealism had not left him, but what had changed over the intervening decade was the aesthetic focus of his “romanticism.” In Poppies, gone are the implied eroticism of Hair, Island Women, Abalone Divers and Bathhouse Maiden, and the idealized bucolics of Woman of Ōhara of 1915 and of  Spring. In their place, Bakusen focuses on achieving a harmonious, unified composition, a technically flawless execution of line and color application, and the subjective idealization of carefully observed reality, hints of which we experienced as early as 1914 in Sange. Poppies stands

n the early 1910s, Bakusen had felt tremendous frustration over his inability to achieve the kind of matière-based expression with mineral pigments that he associated with Post-Impressionism, leading him to attempt various idiosyncratic methods of pigment manipulation, the most extreme of which was the palette knife scraping of the painting surface utilized in Abalone Divers. After the forming of the Kokuga Society in 1918, he supported the intentions of his fellow Society colleagues and young graduates of the Kyoto Specialized School of Painting who experimented with blending mineral pigments to achieve an approximation of Western-style painterly expression and pictorial mimesis. These were techniques that transcended (critics said “denied”) the central agency of the calligraphic outline historically associated with Nihonga, and Bakusen publicly applauded their results. The “art pilgrimage” that took Bakusen, Chikkyō and Banka through Europe in some ways deepened Bakusen’s admiration for Western painting of the nineteenth century, and in other ways dampened his interest in developing a modernist style for Nihonga based on Western Impressionist and Post-Impressionist models. Instead, the line work and flat, patternized use of color he discovered in late medieval Italian frescoes reawakened him to these qualities in Nihonga. Two shocks in the early 1920s woke the Kokuga Society (and much of Taishō-era Japan’s cultural sphere) out of the utopian, self-sufficient world it had created for itself, and forced the group to expand. The first came in 1920, in the form of Japan’s post-World War One economic recession, which put the Kokuten on unstable financial ground for the first time since its founding. The second was

Tsuchida Bakusen, Poppies, 1929, detail of fig. 141.

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141 Tsuchida Bakusen, Poppies, 1929. Color on silk; framed. Museum of Imperial Collections (Sannomaru Shozokan).

topic of the Chinese academic bird-and-flower painters in an essay written shortly after the debut of Poppies at the Teiten in 1929, in which he reiterated his high regard for their handling of mineral pigments, noting that painters in Japan no longer held such mastery, a situation worth mourning.3 Bakusen went even further two years later, when he opined that Nihonga’s own mineral pigments were in some ways superior to oils, noting the difference between the soft white of gofun and the reflective, silvery blanc d’argent white used in oil painting, naming gofun as much more suitable for the depiction of flower blossoms.4 Nihonga’s “pigment problem,” Bakusen seems to have discovered, could be solved even before he picked up a brush, simply by choosing the right subject, and by establishing appropriate goals of execution.

for Bakusen’s return full circle to Asian painting aesthetics, as exhibited in Sung and Yuan dynasty academic painting, in Japan’s Rinpa tradition, and in the Shijo style he learned as a novice artist at Seihō’s juku. It also symbolizes the renewal of his faith in the potential of Nihonga’s mineral pigments to achieve formal beauty, if not the exuberant self-expression he promoted and sanctioned in the 1910s. The origins of Poppies date back to 1920, when Bakusen returned to the study of Chinese academic painting, including works by the Southern Tang dynasty painter Xu Xi (active tenth century) and Yuan dynasty painter Lu Ji (1477–?) in preparation for Spring. At that time he wrote of his admiration for the technical prowess and mastery of coloration he discovered in their works.2 He readdressed the 222

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kagaku, shihō, banka and chikkyō in the post-kokuten period

that the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art held the first Kokuten retrospective, marking the 45-year anniversary of the founding of the Kokuga Society. Shihō continued painting and exhibiting in retirement, and passed away peacefully in 1971 at the age of 84.6 In the last chapter we learned that Kagaku began to distance himself from the Kokuga Society as early as 1924, the year he moved to Ashiya, and how after 1926 he was a member only in name. In 1927 he returned to his childhood home in Kobe and further secluded himself from the larger art world, contenting himself with participating in small group and solo exhibitions held mostly in local venues. His post-Kokuten period is dominated by small-scale ink and light color compositions featuring Nanga-style landscapes, peonies and other flowers, but it is for his Buddhist-themed works (Figure 143) that he became enthusiastically admired among an ardent body of patrons. One group of supporters and collectors, organized under the homonymic name Kagakukai (“Lotus Cup Society), was responsible for a large Kagaku

After the dissolution of the Kokuga Society’s Nihonga section in 1928, the five founding members took independent paths. Shihō exhibited often over the next fifty years of his life, mostly at small-scale group exhibitions or solo shows in the Kansai area. He retained his reputation as one of Japan’s most significant specialists working in the bird-and-flower genre, deepening his mastery of his personal hybridized style of Shijō and Sung-Yuan academic style brushwork (Figure 142). In 1935 he was named a Recommendee to the national juried exhibition, but never showed his works there. In 1937 he returned to his alma mater, the Kyoto Specialized School of Painting, where he taught for nearly thirty years, first as a painting teacher and after 1950 as a professor in the expanded painting department, when the school was reconfigured into an art college.5 Shihō retired from his post at the college in 1963, the same year

142 Sakakibara Shihō, Sparrows in a Spring Wind, c. 1933. Color on silk; hanging scroll. Adachi Museum.

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retrospective exhibit in 1934, for which they contributed works from their individual collections for display at the gallery Eiraku Club (Eiraku Kurabu) of Tokyo. This constituted the largest retrospective of Kagaku’s art held in his lifetime.7 In 1935 Kagaku was named a Recommendee to the national juried salon, the same year as Shihō, although he, too, never acknowledge the honor by contributing paintings. By then his frail health often left him bedridden, yet he continued to paint for the several more years, sometimes with an industriousness that defied his weakened physical condition. In the last year of his life, he contributed small works to nine separate exhibitions between March and July, and passed away in November 1938 at the age of 52 from complications stemming from his chronic bronchial asthma. Unlike his former Kokuga Society colleagues, Nonagase Banka was never invited to contribute to the Teiten as a Recommendee, but considering his life-long antipathy towards juried art exhibitions, this was probably not a source of professional disappointment. In 1930 Banka traveled to Korea and Manchuria on a sketching excursion, and the following year relocated to Ashiya, not far from Kagaku’s former residence, where he opened a small juku named Shōtōkyo (“[Studio] Amidst Green Wild Pears”). He returned to Manchuria in 1932, 1935, and 1936, trips that were underwritten by the Osaka offices of the newspaper Asahi Shinbun in return for regular reports and illustrations as a special correspondent. Each time he came back from these trips, Banka held exhibitions of paintings based on the sketches he drew during these tours. Most of these works were created with ink and light-color on paper, a medium and a style conducive to the role of traveling artist-documentarian (Figure 144). In 1936, Banka published a collected volume of his paintings on Manchurian themes,8 and in the same year relocated to Tokyo, opening a studio in the Ōmori district. During this time, he also worked as a director at a factory that produced railroad cars (his elder brother was the firm’s vice president), where he stayed employed until 1942. In  the post-World War II era, Banka became

143 Murakami Kagaku, Avalokitesvara, 1930. Ink, light color on paper. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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144 Nonagase Banka, Rainbow and Shepherd, c. 1932–36. Ink, color on silk. Kumano Kodō Nakahechi Art Museum, Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture.

interested in song composition, and formed a group of artists and composers named the Hakuensha (“White Flame Society”), with whom he participated in fourteen small exhibitions held from 1946 to 1956. After the dissolution of the Hakuensha, Banka remained active over the next eight years as a song composer and painter, and lived to see the Kokuga Society Retrospective Exhibition of 1963 before passing away the next year from pulmonary edema at the age of 74.9 Chikkyō’s professional path in the postKokuten period led him in the opposite direction from those followed by his Shihō, Kagaku, and Banka. In 1929 Chikkyō accompanied Bakusen back to the national salon’s fold, and in 1935 he was promoted to the Teiten selection jury, and remained

involved in the government-sponsored salon’s management through its various changes over the next thirty years. For the most part, Chikkyō’s art in the post-Kokuten period remained fairly consistent with that displayed at the last two Kokuten, executed in a contemplative, line-based style derived from Nanga, although in his later years he sometimes reasserted the flamboyant use of color for which he was formerly famous. (Figure 145). In 1945, Chikkyō became involved in the reconstitution of the Kyoto Art Association (Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai) and worked on the organization of its associated Kyoto City Fine Arts Exhibition (Kyotoshi Bijutsu Tenrankai), founded in 1935; first known colloquially as the Shiten, it was latter redubbed the Kyōten, the name by which it is called today. 225

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145 Ono Chikkyō, Glowing Sky Beyond the Trees, 1974. Color on silk; framed. Kasaoka Municipal Chikkyo Art Museum.

Chikkyō served intermittently as a judge at the Kyoten and at the Teiten for the next thirty years, and along with Banka and Shihō he lived to see the opening of the Kokuten retrospective in 1963. In 1976, he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kunshō) by the national government for his lifetime contribution to Japanese culture, and passed away two years later at the age of 89.

Kokei, Yasuda Yukihiko, and Maeda Seison) and four from the Teiten painters (Kaburagi Kiyokata and Hirafuku Hyakusui from Tokyo, and Kikuchi Keigetsu and Bakusen from Kyoto). Bakusen participated in five of the six Seven String Society exhibitions held between 1930 and 1936, contributing mostly small-scale still lifes and natural landscapes. In 1932 Bakusen was invited to join the Pure Light Society by impresario Gotō Shintarō (1894– 1954). Gotō had trained in Nihonga as a youth but turned away from painting in adulthood to become a publisher of art books, and later an art promoter. The Pure Light Society was his first commercial art exhibition venture. A photograph taken in April 1933 shows a group portrait taken at the time of the first Pure Light Society exhibition in Tokyo. Members included Nihonga painters Bakusen, Kobayashi Kokei, and Yasuda Yukihiko, oil painters Umehara Ryūzaburō, Yasui Sōtarō, and Sakamoto Hanjirō (1882–1969), and sculptors Takamura Kōtarō and Satō Chōzan (1888–1963) (Figure 146). Art historian Tanaka Atsushi has remarked on the practical character of this group, which lacked any particular unifying principle.10 The seemingly haphazard makeup of the group’s membership was also mentioned by Mushanokōji Saneatsu in his review of the group’s 1933 exhibition, in which he noted the Pure Light Society seemed to be more a

intellectual formalism: bakusen’s later years Bakusen returned to the government salon in 1929, marked by the appearance of Poppies in the Teiten galleries. The following year he was invited to serve as a Teiten judge, and was promoted to membership in the Imperial Art Academy in 1935. He also remained active in several non-government exhibition collectives, joining the Seven String Society (Shichigenkai) in 1930 and the Pure Light Society (Seikōkai) in 1933, but unlike the Kokuga Society, these collectives were commercial endeavors, with no hint of reformist agendas. The Seven String Society was an organization managed and underwritten by Mitsukoshi Department store, the name being a reference to the seven artists invited by the store’s gallery directors to participate in the exhibition group: three from the Inten (Kobayashi 226

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146 Members of the Pure Light Society, 1933. Front (L-R): Umehara Ryūzaburō, Satō Chōzan, Yasui Sōtarō. Rear (L-R): Tsuchida Bakusen, Takamura Kōtarō, Sakamoto Hanjirō, Kobayashi Kokei, Gotō Shintaro. Image courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

group of rivals than of colleagues,11 a comment that suggests there was little of the shared camaraderie and interpersonal goodwill, not to mention shared artistic ideals, that characterized the Kokuga Society at the time of its inception fifteen years earlier.12 In the same year that Bakusen joined the Pure Light Society, he made his first trip to Korea, where he made preliminary studies for a work entitled Daybed (Heishō, Figure 147), featured in the 1933 Teiten. Daybed features two Korean gisaeng or courtesans, a subject Bakusen selected, no doubt, as counterpoint to Japan’s maiko, a thematic with which Bakusen had been associated since 1916. Aida Yuen Wong writes that thanks to a contemporaneous trend of “gisaeng tourism” popular among Japanese males, it was a subject familiar to many visitors to the Teiten.13 Bakusen made a second trip to Korea in 1935, and his surviving sketchbooks from this trip include more detailed studies of gisaeng models, as well as the interior architecture  and furnishings of the houses in which they entertained. These were to be the basis for a painting entitled Gisaeng House (Kiisan no ie),

probably intended for the Teiten, but the national salon was canceled in 1935, and Gisaeng House is known today only in the form of its preparatory   shita-e mockup, kept today at the National Museum of Korea.14 The reasons for the Teiten’s cancelation in 1935 trace back to a bid by Education Minister Matsuda Genji (1876–1936) to force further reforms on the national salon. One of the changes that resulted was the nomination of several prominent younger painters to full membership in the Imperial Art Academy, with Bakusen counted among the honorees.15 He was not able to enjoy the honor long, however, before his life was interrupted by a series of health emergencies. In February 1936, Bakusen was admitted to the Kyoto Red Cross Hospital for surgical treatment of a persistent duodenal ulcer, a procedure that to all appearances was successful. He remained active during his lengthy recovery by producing a number of small paintings, and he stayed involved in the unfolding debate about the future of the Teiten.16 In late May, however, symptoms returned, and he was readmitted to the 227

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147 Tsuchida Bakusen, Daybed, 1933. Color on silk; framed. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

qualities of mineral pigments. What Bakusen appears to have concluded in this last phase of his career is that his engagement with Nihonga’s “pigment problem” was never located in the pigments themselves, but rather in his own feelings of artistic inadequacy in the face of his heroes of modern Western art in the first two decades of Japan’s twentieth century. By the late 1920s, Bakusen was himself one of Japan’s most famous and successful artists, and as Shimada Yasuhiro explains, he was able to “sublate the messy human [passions]” that drove his earlier work to arrive at “a pure intellectual formalism,” pioneering the “Neoclassicism” (Shinkotenshugi) that characterized much of Nihonga in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.20 Hints of this “intellectual formalism” Shimada describes are traceable in Bakusen’s writings as early as 1919, when he described his approach to his

hospital, where he died on June 10 of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer.17 The year after Bakusen’s death, a book entitled The Art of Tsuchida Bakusen (Tsuchida Bakusen no geijutsu) was published, intended as a memorial of his passing as well as a celebration of his career and oeuvre. In the book’s introduction, co-author Toyota Yutaka reveals that his original intent for a title was “Painter-Saint Tsuchida Bakusen” (Gasei Tsuchida Bakusen),18 demonstrating the degree to which the artist’s image was transfigured in the wake of his premature death from that of a talented, ambitious, and often headstrong painter into a saintly artist-hero.19 In terms of Bakusen’s artistic output in the postKokuten era, the style of his paintings from 1929 to his death in 1936 is generally defined by his confident expression and mastery of the decorative 228

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en’s formalist works succeed as celebrations of Nihonga’s decorative aspect, rendering formal subjects in pure, carefully structured, and highly artificial settings: beauty cultivated through exquisite artifice. This approach combines the precedents provided by antique Tang, Sung and Yuan-dynasty Chinese academic painting, as well as Japan’s earliest examples of Yamato-e landscapes and portraiture, to represent East Asia’s “classical” beauty. Bakusen’s dedication to this new decorative approach had many contemporary supporters, including Kinbara Seigo (1888–1958), an aesthetician and art historian, and one of the founders of the Imperial Art School (Teikoku Bijutsu Gakkō), known today as Musashino Art University (Musashino Bijutsu Daigaku). In his review of the 1930 Teiten, Kinbara reflected on Bakusen’s heavy employment of gofun white in Elegant Adornment, lauding its profundity, which he described as uniquely East Asian in character. “Bakusen’s white is everything,” he wrote. “It absorbs all other color, coalesces them, and releases them. When taken this far, we are no longer able to think of white as mere pigment… it becomes a concept that is realized through an internal ennobling, and cultivated in a manner that is pure East Asia. As a result, a rarified, dignified solemnity emerges, such as is found in all great East Asian art works.”23

maiko subjects as similar to that he adopts towards still life objects. In 1921, just prior to his departure for Europe, Bakusen wrote, “My desire for painting is to create a harmonious blend of objectively captured beauty (shajitsu no bi) and [subjectively expressed] decorative beauty (sōshoku no bi),” and described the process by which beauty is created as “the purification of nature,”21 achieved by reducing one’s subject to color and mass. Only by following this principle was he able to “realize the serene tranquility on display” in such works as Three Maiko of 1919.22 If that work was Bakusen’s first attempt to achieve the intellectual formalism Shimada describes, then Poppies of 1929 represents his absolute embrace of it. Another representative work from this period is Elegant Adornment (Meishō, Figure 148) of 1930, exhibited at the Teiten that year. The setting for this painting is a second story zashiki tatami room of an exclusive tea house. The room is empty of decoration, furnished only with a small portable incense burner. In such a clean and austere setting, the maiko subject, sitting with perfect rigidity in elaborate costume, hairdressing and makeup (the title word “meishō” is an antiquated reference to beautiful dress, hairstyle or maquillage), serves as the room’s sole embellishment. The geometrical formality of the composition, with its strong horizontal and vertical emphases, creates a rational austerity, as does the near-absence of pigment apart from the maiko’s robes. The practically monochrome background makes the colors of the kimono stand out all the stronger, and the single red line of maiko’s rouged lower lip, painted against her pale visage, appears like a red splash in a field of white. It is interesting to compare Elegant Adornment with the sensuality present in the women subjects of Okamoto Shinsō’s Lip Rouge (1918) and Three Maiko Playing Ken (1920), in which Shinsō uses makeup to emphasize the expressly human imperfection and fallibility of his subjects, in strong contrast to the artifice and perfection displayed a decade later in Elegant Adornment. If Poppies and Elegant Adornment lack the human warmth of Shinsō’s bijin paintings, Bakus-

the kokuga society’s legacy We recall how in September 1928 critic Toyoda Yutaka mourned the breakup of the Kokuga Society and questioned the future of Nihonga if no new painters arose to challenge the status quo. Some artists did in fact take up where the Kokuga Society left off their praxis-based engagement with questions regarding the expressive potential of ganryō pigments, although many critics would have been delighted to learn that the “Kokuten style,” the general term for Nihonga works that mimicked formal qualities associated with oil painting, did not receive the same kind of attention from rising artists in the post-Kokuga Society period as it during the group’s hey-day. Instead, many painters took up the 229

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r:

148 Tsuchida Bakusen, Elegant Adornment, 1930. Color on silk; framed. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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formalism and traditionalism promoted by the group members, especially Bakusen, Chikkyō, and Shihō, in their later exhibitions. An example of this is found in Fukuda Heihachirō’s Ripples (Sazanami, Figure 149) of 1932, a work that relies entirely on traditional Japanese painting materials and techniques, and which manages to make conceptual references to both pre-Meiji Japanese painting styles (in this case, the decorative, pattern-centered Rinpa aesthetic) and modern abstraction. The results seem to fluctuate before the eyes of the viewer, shifting between pure pattern and convincing verisimilitude, and achieving a balance between subjectivity and objectivity of the sort so keenly sought by the Kokuten painters’ later works. As for the glistening stone of rebellion to which Toyoda referred, the tendency to rebel against authority is a proclivity common to modern artists worldwide, and there are countless examples in Japan alone of artist collectives and movements founded on anti-establishment platforms. There is evidence, however, that the stand taken by the Kokuga Society against the Bunten in 1918 was transformed in the mythic consciousness of Kyoto’s next generation of Nihonga painters into a singular and memorable moment in the history of modern Japanese art. This perception was nurtured on the merit of the Kokuten’s decade long association with the Kyoto Specialized School of Painting, the institution that supplied many of the Kokuten’s contributing participants, as well as many of the Kokuga Society’s junior members. Over the years as the school underwent substantial transformation to eventually metamorphose into the Kyoto City University of Arts, the name by which it is known today, its historical ties to the Kokuga Society continuing to serve as a point of pride. No doubt the long presence of Sakakibara Shihō and Nakai Sōtarō on the school’s faculty kept memory of the group alive among the students and teachers at the Kyoto City University of Arts well into the 1960s, perpetuating the status of the Kokuga Society as an important proto avant-garde art movement in the history of early twentieth century Kyoto.

Evidence of this is found in the inspirational role played by the group during the early development of the Pan Real Art Association (Pan Riaru Bijutsu Kyōkai), a collective created in 1948 by Nihonga artists Yamazaki Takashi (1916–2004), Mikami Makoto (1919–1972), and several other mid-century graduates of the Kyoto Specialized School of Painting. Originally a non-media specific group, by 1949 Pan Real had transformed itself into an expressly avant-garde Nihonga exhibition society, “complete,” Matthew Larking notes, “with a vitriolic manifesto that sought to ‘gouge out the eyes’ of the ‘conservative anachronisms of Nihonga painting circles.’”24 Pan Real participant Fudō Shigeya (b.1929) later recalled how in 1949 he and other members asked Nakai Sōtarō to serve as official advisor, a reprisal of the role he played for the Kokuga Society advisor. They also consulted Nakai on their 1949 manifesto, and here, too, the Kokuga Society’s precedent may have helped shape their ideas and ambitions. For example, the Pan Real manifesto expresses their desire to “abolish the limits set upon our destinies” by the rote transmission of motifs, materials, and methods, “and to expand and embody the possibilities of the art of mineral pigments.” To achieve this goal, the manifesto concludes, “we hereby reject painting that mingles amidst society’s feudalistic spirit, mechanisms and institutions (kikō),”a recrafting of the position defined in the Kokuga Society Manifesto’s opening line, “Art is something born, not produced by mechanism or institution (kikō).” Work 1964 – Ha (Sakuhin 1964 – ha, Figure 150), contributed by Mikami Makoto to the 22nd Pan Real exhibition, demonstrates how the group’s rhetoric was translated into art, and demonstrates how its members sustained their push for freedom to interpret and redefine Nihonga and its associated aesthetics nearly fifty years after the founding of the Kokuga Society. For Work 1964 – Ha, Mikami eschewed the use of traditional painting surfaces, choosing wood board over paper or silk, recalling Nonagase Banka’s choices of canvas and hemp for his painting substrates. Furthermore, Mikami 231

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emphasized the material effects of applying and abrading red mineral pigment, not unlike the way Bakusen scratched and scored his the surface of Abalone Divers in 1913. Mikami takes these

experiments one step further, however, by using scorched cross-sections of tree limbs and branches. Sumi ink, of course, is made from charcoal, thus Mikami's use of charred wood conceptually expands the definition of Nihonga pigments to include the raw constituent matter that goes into their making. Mikami’s work reflects an interest in broadening the sanctioned limits of what constitutes Nihonga, much like the experiments of the Kokuga Society artists and other Taishō and early Shōwa painters who explored Nihonga’s matière in the 1910s and 1920s. Heihachirō Ripples and Mikami’s Work 1964 – Ha demonstrate the potency and continued relevance of the observations made by Toyoda Yutaka regarding the living legacy of the Kokuga Society, which hold true from the time of the group’s dissolution through the pre- and post-Pacific War years, into more recent decades and even up to the present day, during which time generations of Nihonga painters have grappled unceasingly with similar

149 Fukuda Heihachirō, Ripples, 1932. Color on silk; two-panel folding screen. Osaka City Museum of Art.

150 Mikami Makoto, Work 1964Ha, 1964. Mixed media on wood. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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conclusions

questions to those with which Bakusen and company were engaged during the Kokuten period. This is true at the micro level of individual artistic practice, for the conscious decision to utilize traditional mineral pigments remains a culturally loaded one. It is also true at the macro level, as artists continue to balance the benefits of affiliation with painting circles such as Pan Real or other artist

organizations that emerged in the post-war period, and of participating in juried salons, be they government sponsored exhibitions like the Nitten (short for Nihon Bijutsu Tenrankai, the current form of the Bunten), or non-government ones like the Inten, weighing the price of entry (which includes the sacrifice of at least some degree of artistic autonomy), with the benefits of association.

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Appendix 1

Documents Related to the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai 1) statement of purpose (riyūsho ), 1918

like ours. This fact being recognized, it is our methods that make our group significant. Needless to say, we members must take an extremely prudent, and at the same time a particularly strict attitude towards the judging of others’ art works. Towards this end, we have consulted with our teacher, Takeuchi Seihō, for whom we share the warmest regard. He told us that if our motivations are purely artistic, and if we forsake our personal needs for something that will benefit the world of Nihonga as a whole, then he would willingly offer his approval, and even agree to serve as a judging consultant. On the 20th of this month, we will hold the opening ceremony for our group. As was previously mentioned, we members are resolved to devote ourselves completely to the creation of pure art. Yet we do not have the protection that government power and authority lend to the Bunten, nor do we have a long history like that enjoyed by the Bunten. We will need to be self-reliant in our isolation, and for this reason we hope to count on everyone’s good will for the continued development of our association. January 16th Ono Chikkyō, Tsuchida Bakusen, Murakami Kagaku, Nonagase Banka, Sakakibara Shihō

Concerning the founding the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai, we want to establish right away that our aim is the production of pure art, and by making this art available to the public, to contribute somehow to the development of Japanese art in general. This was our basic incentive for establishing this group. There may be people who mistakenly believe that the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai is no more than an anti-Bunten movement. In fact, our ideals go further than this. It is our desire to give life to pure art as a whole, and towards this aim we want our artwork to pass on to future generations. However, we cannot deny that one of the factors pressuring us into forming this group is indeed related to the Bunten. The Bunten has moved away from the attitude towards art that was in place at the time of its founding, and its recent tendencies have moved it further still from our own artistic convictions and opinions. If we adopted the attitude of the Bunten, the purity of our artistic production would be sullied, and our individuality would suffer injury. These things we could not endure. As our self-awareness became stronger, and our convictions grew firmer, we became more and more keenly aware that we could no longer remain associated with the Bunten. That is why here and now we unequivocally sunder all ties with the Bunten. For those who want to know more about our artistic convictions, we have recorded them in our manifesto, which we would ask you all to read. Since art is something that belongs to the individual in the first place, it may be that individual exhibitions are preferable over group shows. Yet at the same time, we believe there is significance in participating in a social movement  with kindred spirits who carry the same beliefs. In the past, other social movements have been formed, and others have held similar ambitions. We acknowledge that there have been others in the past who promoted comparable ideas, and who organized social movements much

2) kokuga society manifesto (kokuga sōsaku kyōkai sengensho ) and regulations (kiyaku ), 1918 Art is something born, not produced by mechanism or institution. When fostered deep within the spirit, art reveals the true qualities of humanity; when permeated with the senses, it brings to the surface the flow of life. Only after nurturing themselves, can artists create art works; only after creating art works, can they witness their own growth. We feel a bond of friendship with any comrades who live by these convictions. We hereby establish the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai to

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appendix i provide the means to present our own and our comrades’ art, and in this way contribute, however slightly, to the development of Nihonga. Irrepressible individuality is the life of a work of art. Although we establish this group and exhibit our works together, there will be no regulations or restrictions imposed to limit each individual’s characteristic qualities, or on subject matter or technique. Each work of art stands alone and independent, a world unto itself, different in kind from any other, and sharing no comparable elements. It is something completely new in the universe. If artists sometimes demonstrate what critics identify as a principle or a life philosophy, it merely represents the reality of deep felt experiences. It is irrelevant whether or not they are conscious of it. Is this not all the more reason why artists should not be detoured and have their work restricted through [critics’] abstraction of their principles or outlooks? With this in mind, it is no exaggeration to state that the paintings created by this group’s membership lack any common elements. Each individual gives life to individualized, free creation. Yet if this is the case, why do we now establish this group as an exhibition organization? When we see displayed together a variety of dissimilar works, each a banner waving to express those attitudes and convictions that form the artist’s creative wellspring, we see with abundant clarity that artistic uniqueness is inviolate. It is on this principle that our alliance is firmly pledged. Our creation is an expression of our love of nature. We are filled with the love that fills the tiniest nook and corner of nature, and so we hear the mysterious voice of the universe. Individuals are purified through eternal spirituality, while eternity is enriched by the flow of individuality. Indeed, a work of art serves as a singular symbolic religion. When one stares into the reality of an object, one is moved by the reality of the sensation, and for this reason we greatly respect objectivity. Yet when practicing shasei [studies from life], we eschew the superficial sketch that holds nothing of the artist’s own experience in its depths. We value the subjectivity of a moment’s impression, and thus, in order to stay faithful to the experience of an instant, we allow our subjectivity to surge. Yet we reject the empty efforts of artists who futilely seek out novel themes and associate themselves with fads in order to conceal the poverty of their art. We seek out a tradition that allows for the fusion of many qualities, a tradition that was once associated with Nihonga, and for this reason, we may appear quite conservative. Yet we refuse to follow old-fashioned gourd painters whose creative needs are hampered by a singular definition of Nihonga. The creation of art must be practiced with complete freedom. We are artists, and consequently we wish to avoid any ambiguous abstractions or formalities as we proclaim the reasons for establishing this group. Rather, in this statement we have concretely expressed our basic intentions for its founding. In short, we place the highest

priority on freedom of creativity. This manifesto implies no restrictions of any kind to our creative activity. In fact, we hope eventually to be able to transcend even this manifesto in order to remain faithful to our individual talents. January 1918 Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Members: Ono Chikkyō, Tsuchida Bakusen, Murakami Kagaku, Nonagase Banka, Sakakibara Shihō Regulations • The group will contribute to the development of Japanese art through a wide range of facilities. • The group will organize an annual autumn exhibition of artwork by our members to take place in Tokyo and Kyoto. • The group will also consider works submitted by nonmember artists from across the country, and will display those works which are chosen by the members and the advising judges. • Members and advising judges are listed by name as follows: Members: Ono Chikkyō, Tsuchida Bakusen, Murakami Kagaku, Nonagase Banka, Sakakibara Shihō Advising Judges: Takeuchi Seihō, Nakai Sōtarō

3) kokuga sōsaku kyōkai submission and exhibition rules and protocols (kokuga sōsaku kyōkai tenrankai shuppin kiyaku), 1918 Section 1: General Rules 1.

The society will hold an annual autumn painting exhibition in Tokyo and in Kyoto. 2. All submissions to the exhibit must be original works created by the submitters, all of whom have chosen to submit freely. 3. All submissions will undergo evaluation, and only those selected will be exhibited. Submissions shall be evaluated one at a time. 4. The society members and advising judges will undertake the evaluation of submissions. 5. If a single society member feels strongly that a particular work should be included, then that work will be exhibited. Each member is allowed just one such special selection over the course of the judging sessions.

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painting circles reserves the right to treat it in a manner it deems appropriate.

6. If a new member is recommended to the society, they will be admitted only on the approval of the society’s current members and advising judges. 7. The first exhibition will take place as follows: Tokyo: November 1–15, Nihonbashi-dōri, Itchome, Shirokiya Department Store Kyoto: November 27–December 11, Okazaki Dai Ichi Kangyōkan 8. For an exhibition work to be included in the printed catalogue, it must be delivered to the Tokyo exhibition location between October 20 and 23, between the hours of 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM. (see bylaw 10 for more details) 9. The society will cover packing and shipping costs for those submissions selected for exhibition.

Section 4 21. Those interested in purchasing works on exhibit should make their requests through the society’s business office. 22. Purchasers of works on exhibit should tender the purchase cost immediately, or pay a deposit amounting to one third of the purchase price, with the remaining two thirds of the fee to be tendered within five days. In the event of a breach of purchase agreement, deposits will be forfeited and retained by the artist. 23. If an exhibited work is purchased, the society will receive twenty percent of the sale price from the artist. 24. When an exhibited work is sold, the society will inform the artist, who will receive the sale proceeds after the close of the exhibition in exchange for a bill of sale. 25. Any purchased works should be collected by the purchaser with five days of the close of the Kyoto leg of the exhibition. 26. A special business office will be established on-site during the exhibition period. 27. Any inquiries or questions related to these regulations should be directed to the following business offices.

Section 2: Bylaws 10. Shipping service will be offered for exhibition participants from Kyoto and the greater Kyoto area, pending weight and capacity limits. Those wishing to ship their works to Tokyo via this service should deliver their works to the Kyoto Dai-Ichi Kangyōkan on October 15 between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM. 11. Individuals will be allowed to exhibit a maximum of two works. 12. The society bears no responsibility for any unforeseen damage to submissions. 13. The society reserves the right to publish photographs of submissions and exhibited works. 14. Only works that have not been previously featured in an art exhibition may be included in the exhibition. 15. Every work should be tagged with a label showing either the title of the work or the name of the submitter. 16. The installation staff retained by the society shall install artworks in the exhibition galleries in the manner they deem best.

Business offices: Kyoto, Kawabata Demachi sagaru, c/o Nakai, Tokyo, Yoyogi 134, c/o Nakashima Kyoto Teramachi Gojō agaru, Yamamoto Gennosuke (telephone: 2–1-1–4) June 1918 Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai

Addendum: Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Supplemental Exhibition Regulations

Section 3 17. The main judging session for the inaugural exhibition will take place on or after October 24 at the Tokyo exhibition site. 18. A separate process will be established to arrange for the distribution of scholarship awards to selected exhibitors. 19. Works selected for exhibition may not be removed until after the close of the exhibition. 20. All artworks must be removed with three days of the close of the exhibition. If an artworks remain at the end of the removal period, the society

1.

If a work is accepted during the preliminary Kyoto judging session but rejected during the primary judging session in Tokyo, the cost of returning the work will be met by the society. 2. If the cost of shipping and handling of an exhibition  work is the responsibility of the society, the method of shipping and handling will be determined by the society. In the case where the artist has special requirements, such as a preference that the work be shipped in its frame, then the

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appendix i artist will be responsible for shipping and handling  fees. 3. If a work is rejected at either the preliminary or the main judging session, the submitters shall be informed by the society, and the works returned within three days in exchange for proof of submission documents. If a rejected work is not claimed within three days, the society reserves the right to treat it in a manner it deems appropriate. September 1918 Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai

under threat. In the end, we realized that we needed to do something before the danger became too great. In short, for the Kokuga Society to function simultaneously as a significant art group and as a social institution, we need access to unlimited financial resources and unlimited physical health. One solution is to drag our unwilling bodies through these difficult times and boldly carry on, yet after much thought, it seems that what is necessary to solve these problems is beyond the scope of our mission, as well as our skills as artists. We feel that, rather than using up all our energy and resources searching for a solution to these difficulties, it would be more meaningful to concentrate on our art. With this in mind, we have decided to dissolve the group. The Kokuga Society formed in 1918, ten years ago. In the intervening years, we have held seven exhibitions. In the process, we believe we worked as hard as we could for the benefit of the Japanese art world. While we feel that original mission of the group is still not fully accomplished, and that there is still the need for artistic movements devoted to pure artistic creation, at the same time we feel somewhat satisfied with what we have been able to accomplish up to this point. We are very thankful for the tremendous support we have received over the years. Our decision to disband is accompanied our deep respect and gratitude, and as individuals we hope to continue benefitting from your good will. July 1928 Members of the First Section of the Kokuga Society Irie Hakō, Itō Sōhaku, Ono Chikkyō, Okamura Utarō, Kayukawa Shinji, Kainoshō Tadaoto, Tsuchida Bakusen, Murakami Kagaku, Nonagase Banka, Sakakibara Shihō, Sakakibara Shikō, Suita Sōboku, Sugita Yūjirō

4) kokuga society dissolution notice (kokuga sōsaku kyōkai kaisansho), 1928 Today, after deep deliberation, the Kokuga Society’s Nihonga division has disbanded. As we report this development, we hope the public will understand [our reasons]. At the time of the group’s foundation, we members and advisors found the financial management of the group to be comparatively easy, and we were able to concentrate purely on the creation of art. Accompanying the sudden and precipitous societal changes that have occurred since, however, is the fact that the financial expenses necessary to maintain the exhibition have soared at an astonishing rate. In the end, expenses have climbed to reach figures that we are no longer able to support. Our administrative managers have not been able to announce anything other than deficits. These facts, as well as the reality of a world becoming increasingly industrialized, illustrate that things are growing more complicated year by year. As we struggle to maintain our association, we find our own individual artistic practices increasingly

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Appendix 2 List of Characters Abugawa 阿武川 Aihara Gozaburō 相原五三郎 Akamatsu 赤松 Akigusa 秋草 Akita 秋田 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 芥川竜之介 ama 海女 Amagasaki Sannosuke 尼崎三之助 Amakasu Masahiko 甘粕 amazake 甘酒 Ame no Kiyamachi 雨の木屋町 Amida 阿弥陀 Anchin 安珍 Ansekiryū 安石榴 Ao’ume 青梅 Arai Akio 新井昌夫 Arai Kinya 新井謹也 Araki Jippō 荒木十畝 Arashiyama 嵐山 Arima 有馬 Arishima Ikuma 有島生馬 Asa 朝 Asagao 朝顔 Asahi Shinbun 朝日新聞 Asai Chū 浅井忠 Ashiya 芦屋 Asuka 飛鳥 Awataguchi 粟田口 Ayatsuri ningyō Dōjōji 操り人形道 成寺 Bakusen Jiyū Kenkyūjo 麦僊自由研 究所 Bakushū 麦秋 banzuke 番付 Batsu 罰 bekka 別科 Benisu no tsuki ベニスの月 bi 美 bijin 美人画 Bijutsu Gahō 美術画報 Bijutsu Jiten 美術辞典 Bijutsu Shinpō 美術新報

denkiburan デンキブラン Dōjōji 道成寺 Dōjōji-mono 道成寺物 doro-enogu 泥絵の具

birōdo 尾籠度 Biwako 琵琶湖 bokashi 暈し Bokido 忘帰洞 bonbori ぼんぼり Bosatsu 菩薩 Bugi rinsen 舞妓林泉 Bunka Kunshō 文化勲章 Bunten 文展 butsuzō 仏像 byōbu 屏風 Byōdōin 平等院 Byōji fuken no zu 猫児負喧之図

e 絵 Edogawa 江戸川 Eiraku Kurabu 永楽クラブ Ekaki no mura 絵描きの村 emakimono 絵巻物 engi 縁起 Enoshima 江ノ島 ezōya 絵草屋

chairi 茶入り Chigusa Sōun 千種掃雲 Chikkyō-ha 竹喬派 Chikujōkai 竹杖会 Chion-in 知恩院 Chion-in ha 知恩院派 Chishakuin 智積院 chiyogami-e 千代紙絵 Chizanha 智山派 Chogyūshō 樗牛賞 chōkokuka 彫刻科 Chokuninkan 勅任官 Chōmonkyō 長門峡 chonmage ちょんまげ Chōzeibi 徴税日 Chūō Bijutsu 中央美術 chūsei 中性 Chūshojima 中書島

fuhekishun 斧劈皴 Fujii Keihō 藤井惠圃 Fujii Shunsui 藤井春水 fūkei 風景 Fukuda Heihachirō 福田平八郎 Fukuda Toyoshirō 福田豊四郎 Fukuhara Ryōjirō 福原鐐二郎 Fukuhara Shinzō 福原信三 Fusehara Yoichirō 伏原佳一郎 Fukumoto Koyō 福本古葉 Fukumura Sho’undo 福村祥雲堂 furoshiki 風呂敷 furusato 故郷 fusuma 襖 Fuyu 冬 Fūzoku Gahō 風俗画報 fūzokuga 風俗画 fūzokushi 風俗史

Dai Ikka 第一科 Dai Nihonkoku hokekyōkenki 本国法華経券機 Dai Nika 第二科 Daianji 大安寺 Daidō Hirō 大道弘雄 Daikakuji 大覚寺 daikon 大根 Daiō 大王 dantai 団体

gadan 画壇 gaki 餓鬼 gakkō 学校 ganryō mondai 顔料問題 gasei 画聖 gasshō-tsukuri 合掌作り gatenkan 画展観 geijutsu 芸術 Geijutsukai Shōsoku 芸術界消息 geisha 芸者

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大日

appendix 2 Genkō shakusho 元亨釈書 Gion 祇園 Gobō 御坊 gofun 胡粉 Gogatsu no koro 五月之頃 Gokayama no uki 五箇山の雨期 Gōma 降魔 Gonsō 勤操 Gotō Shintarō 後藤眞太郎 Gunyōki 軍用記 guzumi 具墨 gyofu 漁夫 Hachijōjima 八丈島 Hada Teruo 秦テルヲ haikai 俳諧 hako-shimada 箱島田 Hakubai 白梅 Hakubaichō 白梅町 Hakuensha 白炎社 hakurankai 博覧会 Hakutō’ō 白頭翁 Hamada Shigemitsu 浜田葆光 Hamada Shōji 浜田庄司 Hanazono Shusai Banka Sakuhinten 花園主催晩花作 品展 Hannya 般若 haori 羽織 Harada Jirō 原田治郎 Haru 春 Hasegawa Kyūzō 長谷川久蔵 Hashimoto Gahō 橋本雅邦 Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪 Hashimoto Kōei 橋本虹影 Hatō 波涛 hauta 端唄 Heian Shobō 平安書房 Heike Monogatari 平家物語 Heishō 平牀 Hibo Kannon 非母観音 Hidakagawa 日高川 Hidakagawa iriai zakura 日高川入 相花王 Hie Taisha 日吉大社 Hiezan 比叡山 hifu 被布 Hifu kitaru shojo 被布きたる処女 Higashi Honganji 東本願寺 Higashiyama-ren 東山連 Hirafuku Hyakusui 平福百穂 Hirai Baisen 平井楳仙 Hirano 平野 Hiratsuka Un’ichi 平塚運一 Hirosawa no ike 広沢池

Hishida Shunsō 菱田春草 Hishikawa Moronobu 菱川師宣 Hōjō 褒状 Hokke genki 法花験記 honka 本科 horo 幌 Hōryūji 法隆寺 Hōshukuten 奉祝展 Hyakki yakō 百鬼夜行 hyōgiin 評議員 Hyōgo 兵庫県 Ichiriki-tei 一力亭 Idani Kenzō 伊谷賢蔵 Ike Taiga 池大雅 ikenkai 意見会 Ikenoryō 池の寮 Imamura Shiko 今村紫紅 Inagaki Chūsei 稲垣仲静 inaka fūzokuga 田舎風俗画 Inaka no maiko 田舎の舞妓 Inten 院展 Inyū 院友 Irie Hakō 入江波光 Ise Sadatake 伊勢貞丈 Ishii Hakutei 石井柏亭 Ishizaki Kōyō 石崎光瑤 Issatei 一茶亭 Itō Hakudai 伊藤柏台 Itō Jakuchū 伊藤若冲 Itō Keisui 伊藤溪水 Itō Sōhaku 伊藤草白 iwashi 鰯 Izu kakei 伊豆夏景 Izu Shichitō 伊豆七島 Japonisumu ジャポニズム jidai 時代 Jiji Shinpō 時事新報 jikkei 実景 jikoku chūshinshugi 自国中心主義 jinkakushugi 人格主義 Jinseiha 人生派 Jittoku 拾得 jiyū 自由 Jōruri 浄瑠璃 juban 襦袢 Jūbenzu 十便図 juku 塾 Juntoku 順徳 Kabutoya Garō 兜屋画廊 kachōga 花鳥画 Kagakukai 跏萼会 kaiga 絵画

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Kainoshō Tadaoto 甲斐湛楠音 Kaisen Bikō Yūkai Tenrankai 絵専 美校誘拐展覧会 Kaitō 海島 kaiyū 会友 Kajiwara Hisako 梶原排佐子 Kaka zangyō 瓜茄残暑 kakejiku 掛軸 Kamakura 鎌倉 Kami 髪 Kamijima 上島 Kamisaka Shōtō 神坂松濤 Kanada Warō 金田和郎 kanbijin 漢美人 kanbun 漢文 Kaneko Kuheiji 金子九平次 Kangakai 鑑画会 Kanji 漢字 Kano Eitoku 狩野永徳 Kano Hōgai 狩野芳崖 Kano Sanraku 狩野山楽 Kano Tanyū 狩野探幽 Kanokogi Takeshirō 鹿子木孟郎 Kansai 関西 Kansai Bijutsuin 関西美術院 Kansaten 監査展 Kantō 関東 Kanzaki Ken’ichi 神崎憲一 Kanzan 寒山 Karashishi 唐獅子 Kasaoka 笠岡 Kashino Nanyō 樫野南陽 Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 Kawabata Gyokushō 川端玉章 Kawabata Ryūshi 川端竜子 Kawai Unosuke 河合卯之助 Kawaji Ryūkō 川路柳虹 Kawamura Manshū 川村曼舟 Kawase Hasui 川瀬巴水 Kawashima Ri’ichirō 川島理一郎 Kayukawa Shinji 粥川伸二 kazari 飾り kegaki 毛描き Keichō 慶長 Keihan 京阪 Ken o uteru sannin no maiko no shūsaku 拳を打てる三人の舞妓 Keshi 芥子 Kibi ururu koro 黍熟るる頃 Kichijōten 吉祥天 Kiisan no ie キイサンの家 kikō 機構 Kikuchi Hōbun 菊池芳文 Kikuchi Keigetsu 菊池契月 Kimura Buzan 木村武山

painting circles kin 金 Kinbara Seigo 金原省吾 kindaiteki 近代的 Kinji 金治 Kinoshita Mokutarō 木下杢太郎 kinpaku 金箔 kinpun 金粉 Kinreisha 金鈴社 Kinugasa 衣笠 Kirare Otomi 切られお富 Kishi Chikudō 岸竹堂 Kishida Ryūsei 岸田劉生 Kishū 紀州 Kiso no saigo 木曽最期 Kitagawa Utamaro 喜多川歌麿 kitanai-e jiken 汚い絵事件 Kitano Tsunetomi 北野恒富 Kiyohime 清姫 Kobayashi Gokyō 小林呉嶠 Kobayashi Kokei 小林古径 Kobayashi Wasaku 小林和作 Kobe 神戸 Kobori Tomoto 小堀鞆音 kōchakai 紅茶会 Koi nyōbō somewake tazuna 恋女房 染分手綱 kokubungaku 国文学 kokuga 国画 Kokuga Gyokuseikai 国画玉成会 Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai 国画創作 協会 Kokugakai 国画会 kokugaku 国学 kokugo 国語 Kokuritsu Seiyō Bijutsukan 国立西 洋美術館 kokushi 国史 Kokuten 国展 Kokuten no tachiba 国展の立場 Kokuten-ha 国展派 Kokutenshō 国展賞 komainu 狛犬 Komatsu Hitoshi 小松均 Komuro Sui’un 小室翠雲 Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物 語集 Kōno Bairei 幸野楳嶺 Kōno Bairei jūshū nensai shikkō tsuitōten 幸野楳嶺十週年祭追 悼展 Konoshima Ōkoku 木島桜谷 Korona 光茫 Kosugi Hōan 小杉放庵 Kosugi Misei 小杉未醒 kotenteki 古典的

Kuchibeni 口紅 Kudō Risaburō 工藤利三郎 Kudō Seika 工藤精華 Kuon no josei 久遠の女性 Kuramadera 鞍馬寺 Kureyuku teiryūjo 暮れゆく停留所 Kuriyagawa Hakuson 廚川白村 Kuroda Jūtarō 黒田重太郎 Kuroda Seiki 黒田清輝 kusazōshi 草双紙 Kusha mandara 倶舎曼荼羅 Kyōdo fūkei 郷土風景 Kyōten 京展 Kyoto Bijutsu Kōgeihinten 京都美 術工芸品展 Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai 京都美術協会 Kyoto Hinode Shinbun 京都日出新 聞 Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Daigaku 京 都市立美術大学 Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō 京都市立美術工芸学学 Kyotofu Gagakkō 京都府画学校 kyūha 旧派 Kyūmeikai 九名会 Li Gonglin 李公麟 Lu Ji 呂紀 machiēru マチエール Maeda Kanji 前田寛治 Maeda Seison 前田青邨 maiko 舞妓 Mainichi Shinbun 毎日新聞 Maruyama Kōen 円山公園 Maruyama Ōkyo 丸山応挙 Maruyama-ha 丸山派 Masaki Naohiko 正木直彦 Mashizu Junnan 益頭峻南 Matsubayashi Keigetsu 松林桂月 Matsuda Genji 松田源治 Matsukata Kōjirō 松方幸次郎 Matsumiya Hōnen 松宮芳年 Matsumoto 松本 Matsumoto Fūko 松本楓湖 Matsumoto Matatarō 松本亦太郎 Matsumura Keibun 松村景文 Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 Matsuoka Eikyū 松岡映丘 matsuri 祭り Meiji 明治 Meiko Kakiemon 名工柿右衛門 meisaku 名作 meishō 明粧 Midori みどり

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Midori iro no taiyō 緑色の太陽 Mie 三重 Miei みえい Mikami Makoto 三上誠 Minami-za 南座 Minamizono no hitosumi ni okeru kyoku to nemuri 南園の一隅に おける曲と眠り Minamoto Yoshinaka 源義仲 Mine Yoshikichi 峰芳吉 mingei 民芸 Miraiha 未来派 Mitsukoshi 三越 Mitsuo 弘男 Mitsuritsukai 密栗会 Mitsutani Kunishirō 満谷国四郎 Mizukumi ni iku onna 水汲に行 く女 Mochizuki Kinpō 望月金鳳 Monbushō 文部省 Mori Ōgai 森鴎外 Moritani Nanjinshi 森谷南人子 mōrōtai 朦朧体 Mōsōchiku 孟宗竹 Mumeikai 無名会 Munakata Shikō 棟方志功 Murakami Gorōbei 村上五郎兵衛 Murakami Kagaku 村上華岳 Murakami Yoshiko 村上よしこ Murogimi 室君 Musume gonomi ukina no yokogushi 処女翫浮名横櫛 Nagasaki-e 長崎絵 Naiki Seibei 内貴清兵衛 Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai 内国絵 画共進会 Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai 内国 勧業博覧会 Nakagawa Rogetsu 中川蘆月 Nakagawa Shimei 中川四明 Nakaheji 中辺路 Nakai Aiko 中井愛子 Nakai Sōtarō 中井曾太郎 Nakamura Fusetsu 中村不折 Nakamura Gakuryō 中村岳陵 Nakazawa Iwata 中沢岩太 Nakiri 波切 Nakirimura 波切村 Nanban 南蛮 Nanga 南画 Nanzenji 南禅寺 Nara no mori 奈良の森 Natsu no Gokayama 夏の五箇山 Natsu no maiko 夏の舞妓

appendix 2 nehan 涅槃 Nezu Kaichirō 根津嘉一郎 Nichidan 日暖 Nichiren 日蓮 Nigatsu no koro 二月之頃 nihirizumu ニヒリズム Nihon 日本 Nihon Bijutsu Gakuin 日本美術 学院 Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai 日本美術協会 Nihon Bijutsuin 日本美術院 Nihon Bijutsuten 日本美術展 Nihon Fūkeiron 日本風景論 Nihon Kaiga Kyōkai Kaiga Kyōshinkai 日本絵画協会絵画 共進会 Nihon Kokugo Dai Jiten 日本国語 大辞典 Nihon Ryōiki 日本霊異記 Nihon shoga hyōka ichiran 日本書 画評価一覧 Nihonga 日本画 Nihongo 日本語 Nihonjin 日本人 Niibomura 新穂村 Niigata 新潟 Nijō 二条 Nika 二科 Nikakai 二科会 nikutaibi 肉体美 ningenmi 人間味 ningyō jōruri 人形浄瑠璃 Ninomaru 二の丸 Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 Nishihonganji 西本願寺 Nishimura Go’un 西村五雲 Nishiyama Suishō 西山翠嶂 Noh 能 noibara 野薔薇 Nojima Yasuzō 野島康三 Nomura Itsushi 野村一志 Nomura Kanjūrō 野村勘十郎 Nonagase Banka 野長瀬晩花 nue 鵺 nueteki 鵺的 Nyoirin Kannon 如意輪観音 Oboroyo 朧夜 Ōhara 大原 Oharame 大原女 Ōhashi Suiseki 大橋翠石 oiran dōchū 花魁道中 Okada Saburōsuke 岡田三郎助 Okajima Kazuo 岡島一雄 Okakura Tenshin 岡倉天心

Okamoto Shinsō 岡本神草 Okamura Utarō 岡村宇太郎 Okazaki 岡崎 Ōmichi Chiyō 大道千代 Onna to fūsen 女と風船 Ono Chikkyō, before 1923 小野竹橋 Ono Chikkyō, 1923 onwards 小野竹 喬 Ono Chikutō 小野竹桃 onsen 温泉 Osaka Jiji Shinbun 大阪時事新聞 Osugi Sakae 大杉栄 Otake Chikuha 尾竹竹坡 Otake Kokkan 尾竹国観 Ōtsu 大津 Pan no kai パンの会 Pan Riaru Bijutsu Kyōkai パンリア ール美術協会 pan-e パン絵 Pari no onna パリの女 Rafu 裸婦 raigō 来迎 Rakka 落下 Ranga 蘭画 Reiko 鏡子 rekishiga 歴史画 ren 蓮 Rinpa 琳派 riyūsho 理由書 Rokkō 六甲 romanchishisuto ロマンチシスト Ru Masuku 仮面会 Ryōanji 龍安寺 Sado Rekishi Hakubutsukan 佐渡歴 史博物館 Sadogashima 佐渡島 Saga 佐賀 Saikō Nihon Bijutsuin 再興日本美 術院 Sakakibara Rokō 榊原蘆江 Sakakibara Shigeko 榊原重子 Sakakibara Shihō 榊原紫峰 Sakakibara Shikō 榊原始更 Sakakibara Uson 榊原雨村 Sakamoto 坂本 Sakamoto Hanjirō 坂本繁二郎 Sakuma Tetsuen 佐久間鉄園 San’nansha 山南社 San’nansō 山南荘 Sange 散華 Sannin no maiko 三人の舞妓 Sanron 三論

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Sasa 笹 Satō Chōzan 佐藤朝山 satogaeri 里帰り Satomi Katsuzō 里見勝蔵 Sawamura Gennosuke 澤村源之助 Sazanami 漣 Seianji 盛安寺 Seija no shi 聖者の死 Seikai 精海 Seikōkai 清光会 Seisaku 制作 Seisetsusha 聖拙社 Seisho 清暑 Seki Shinjirō 関真次郎 Senami 瀬波 sengai 選外 Senge Motomaro 千家元麿 sengensho 宣言書 senmon 専門 Sensei ni mirarete 先生に見られて Seppō no zu 説法の図 Sesshū Tōyō 雪舟等楊 Seto 瀬戸 setsugekka 雪月花 Setsuryū hakuro no zu 雪柳白鷺 之図 setsuwa 説話 Sha Noāru 黒猫会 sha’i 写意 shaba soku shakkō jōdo 娑婆即寂光 浄土 Shafu no kazoku 車夫の家族 shajitsu 写実 Shaka 釈迦 shake 鮭 shasei 写生 shaseichō 写生長 Shen Nanpin 沈南蘋 Shiba Kōkan 司馬江漢 Shichi-go-san 七五三 Shichigenkai 七弦会 Shiga 滋賀 Shiga Shigetaka 志賀重昂 Shijō 四条 Shijō Kurabu 四条倶楽部 Shijō-ha 四条派 Shiki kachōzu byōbu 四季花鳥図 屏風 Shinko Shoga 新古書画 Shima 志摩 Shima nisaku 島二作 Shimabara 島原 Shimomura Kanzan 下村観山 Shin Bunten 新文展 Shin-Nihonga 新日本画

painting circles Shingon 真言 Shinkai Taketarō 新海竹太郎 shinkei 真景 Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai 新古美 術品展覧会 Shinkoten 新古展 shinkotenshugi 新古典主義 shinpa 新派 shinri byōsha 心理描写 Shirakaba 白樺 Shirokiya 白木屋 Shishi 獅子 shita-e 下絵 Shitennō 四天王 Shō Kannon 聖観音 Shōgaku 松岳 shohō jissō 諸法実相 shōjō 蕭条 Shoka no nagare 初夏の流れ Shōkakubō 正覚坊 Shōsan un’en 松山雲煙 Shōwa 昭和 shukuboku 宿墨 shunga 春画 Shunkin chinsei 春禽趁晴 Shunkō 春耕 Shunyōkai 春陽会 shūppinsaku 出品作 shūsaku 習作 sōshoku 装飾 sōzō no seishin 創造の精神 Subaru スアバル Sudaku mushi すだく虫 Sugita Yūjirō 杉田勇次郎 Sugiura Kōhō 杉浦香浦 Suimitsutō 水蜜桃 Suisensha 推薦者 Suita Sōboku 吹田草牧 sumi 墨 Supein no inaka no kodomo スペイ ンの田舎の子供 Sūtai-in 崇泰院 Suzuki Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 Suzuki Harunobu 鈴木春信 Suzuki Hyakunen 鈴木百年 Suzuki Ki’itsu 鈴木其一 Suzuki Shōnen 鈴木松年 Suzuki Shōsen 鈴木松僊 Suzuki-ha 鈴木派 Tabata Shūtō 田畑秋濤 Tada Keiichi 多田敬一 Tagasode hyakushu 誰袖百種 Taguchi Kikutei 田口掬汀

Taiheiyō Gakai Kenkyūjo 太平洋画 会研究所 Taishō 大正 Taizan 苔山 Takamura Kōtarō 高村光太郎 Takarazuka 宝塚 Takashima Hokkai 高島北海 Takayama Chogyū 高山樗牛 Takayama Seika 高山精華 Takeda Akimitsu 武田誠三 Takeda Nobuyoshi 武田信義 Takehisa Yumeji 竹久夢二 Takeuchi Itsu 竹内逸 Takeuchi Seihō, before 1901 竹内棲鳳 Takeuchi Seihō, 1901 onwards 竹内栖鳳 Tanaka Kisaku 田中喜作 Tanaka Zennosuke 田中善之助 Taniguchi Kōkyō 谷口香喬 Tatakaeru hito 戦える人 Tawaraya Sōtatsu 俵屋宗達 Teikoku Bijutsu Gakkō 帝国美術 学校 Teikoku Bijutsuin 帝国美術院 Teiten 帝展 Tamukeyama Hachimangu 手向山 八幡宮 tenji kaiga 展示絵画 Tenma Tenjin 天満天神 tenrankai 展覧会 Terasaki Kōgyō 寺崎広業 Tōchō 冬朝 Tōdaiji 東大寺 Tōjitsucho 冬日帖 Tōkakai 桃華会 Tokumi Ōkokudō 徳美大谷堂 Tokunaga Kakusen 徳永鶴泉 Tokusen 特選 Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō 東京美術 学校 Tokyo Daihakurankai 東京大博 覧会 Tomimoto Kenkichi 富本憲吉 Tomioka Tessai 富岡鉄斎 Tomita Keisen 富田渓仙 Tomoe Gozen 巴御前 Torii Kiyonaga 鳥居清長 Tosa 土佐 Tōshūsai Sharaku 東洲斎写楽 Tōyōtei 東洋亭 Tsuchida Bakusen 土田麦僊 Tsuchida Chiyokichi 千代吉 Tsuchida Eirin 土田英林

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Tsuchida Kyōson 杏村 Tsuda Seifū 津田青楓 Tsutomu 茂 Tsuyubare 梅雨晴れ Ueda Bin 上田敏 Uemura Shōen 上村松園 Ugo no mōsōchiku 雨後の孟宗竹 Uji 宇治 uki-e 浮き絵 ukiyo-e 浮世絵 Umehara Ryūzaburō 梅原龍三郎 Umi chikaki machi no maiko 海近き 町の舞妓 urahaku 裏箔 Ushi 牛 wabun 和文 Wada Eisaku 和田英作 Watanabe Kazan 渡辺華山 Xi Shi 西施 Xu Xi 徐熙 Yae tsubaki 八重椿 yaki-e 焼き絵 Yamabuki Gozen 山吹御前 Yamada Kaidō 山田介堂 Yamada Kōun 山田耕雲 Yamaguchi 山口 Yamaguchi Kayō 山口華陽 Yamamoto Gasendō 山本画箋堂 Yamamoto Gennosuke 山本源之助 Yamamoto Kanae 山本鼎 Yamamoto Shunkyo 山本春挙 Yamashita Shintarō 山下新太郎 Yamato-e 大和絵 Yamawaki Hōgen 山脇抱玄 Yamawaki Shintoku 山脇信徳 Yamazaki Takashi 山崎貴 Yanagi Muneyoshi 柳宗悦 Yasuda Yukihiko 安田靫彦 Yasui Sōtarō 安井曾太郎 Yasumi doki 休み時 Yōfūga 洋風画 Yōga 洋画 Yōga kusai 洋画臭い Yōgabu 洋画部 yoka 予科 Yokogushi 横櫛 Yokoyama Taikan 横山大観 Yomiuri Shinbun 読売新聞

appendix 2 Yonin no shōjo 四人少女 Yoshida Chūsaburō 吉田忠三郎 Yoshikawa Reika 吉川霊華 Yoshino 吉野 Yozakura 夜桜 Yuan 元 Yūhi ni kaeru gyofu 夕日に帰る漁夫 yūjo 遊女

Yuki ゆき Yūki Somei 結城素明 Yuna 湯女 Yunosagi 湯乃鷺 zakkan 雑感 zashiki 座敷 zasshi 雑誌

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Zeami Motokiyo 世阿弥 元清 Zenkoku Bijutsu Kōgeihin ten 美術工芸品展 zenmetsu 全滅 zu 図 zuanka 図案科 zukushi づくし

全国

notes to pages 1–13

Endnotes the Painted Line,” which expanded the application of Meier-Graefe’s personality theory to pre-modern East Asian sumi ink painting. Hitomi Shōka, “Byōsen ni awareru jinkaku,” Bi, vol. 18, no. 5 (October 1926), pp. 102–110. 9 While the particular approach I adopted for this study is useful in learning certain things about Bakusen’s life and practice, by its nature it leaves out almost as much as it covers. Bakusen was a very prolific painter, and a comparative study of his large-scale exhibition paintings versus small-scale works created as private commissions, for example, would reveal much about his Nihonga practice that this book, due to thematic and practical restraints, does not address. For example, Bakusen’s kakejiku (small-scale hanging scrolls) paintings from around 1912 to 1917, a selection of which appears in Tsuchida Bakusen: Kindai Nihonga no risō o motomete (2009), demonstrate an ongoing interest in Nanga landscape painting. Yet the paintings he created for the Bunten during the same period show little evidence of such an interest. This question of why and how Nihonga painters in the early twentieth century segregated their creative efforts, choosing one style or approach for private consumption and another for public exhibition, is an intriguing one ready for future study. 10 Watsuji Tetsurō, Pilgrimages in The Ancient Temples in Nara, trans. by Hiroshi Nara (Portland, Maine: Merwin Asia, 2011).

Introduction 1 Mavo dissolved in 1925, while the Second Section Society’s exhibition, the Nikaten, continues to this day. See the discussion of the role of the Second Section Society and its associated Nikaten in catalyzing the founding of the self-identified avant-garde art group Mavo in Gennifer Weisenfeld, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 1–5, 22, 26. 2 Anthony Giddens, “Living in a Post-Traditional Society,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000), pp. 56–57. 3 The exhibition in question, entitled “The Consciousness of the Avant-garde and the Development of Expression” (Zenei no ishiki • Hyōgen no zenshin), was held 12 June-29 August 2004, and displayed twentieth century oil paintings and Nihonga works from the museum’s permanent collection side-by-side. As a result, they successfully illustrated the fact that modern Japan produced a significant body of “neotraditional” Nihonga paintings that were fully engaged in areas of artistic inquiry and discourse more customarily associated with a “modern” (read “Western”) avant-garde. 4 Ellen Conant elaborates on this incident, noting that while Okakura was largely coerced into introducing the Yōga division, it was just one of several gaps that emerged between Okakura’s vision for the school and that of other culture officials at the Ministry of Education vis-à-vis “such larger concerns as art education, museum policy, Japanese art history, exposition management and planning, and, more to the point, the character and future course of Nihonga.” Conant, “The Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Development of Nihonga, 1889–1906,” pp. 27–28. 5 Quoted in Shimada Yasuhiro, Kyoto no Nihonga: Kindai no yōran (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1991), pp. 223–24. 6 Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 4. 7 Alicia Volk, “Authority, Autonomy, and the Early Taishō ‘Avant-Garde,’” in Positions, vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring, 2013), p. 413. 8 As late as 1926, painter Hitomi Shōka (1887–1968) wrote an essay entitled “The Presence of Character in

Chapter 1 1 Despite the fact that Bakusen did not adopt this art name until 1905, for the sake of consistency and clarity I will use it to identify him at all stages of his life and career. 2 Takeuchi Itsu, “Bakusen tsuisō,” Bakusen isakushū (Kyoto: Geisōdō, 1940), p. 12. 3 Tsuchida Kyōson, “Ani Bakusen no shōnen jidai,” Tsuchida Kyōson zenshū, vol. 15 (Tokyo: Daiichi Shobō, 1936), p. 148. 4 The Sado Museum of History is in possession of nearly forty volumes of hand-bound books of sketches produced by Bakusen over the course of his life. Most of the volumes have cover pages marked with the handwritten title “Bakusen sketchbook” (Bakusen shaseichō), while others have blank covers. The books have numbered museum inventory labels, but the ordering of these is unsystematic, with no reference to chronology, and no dates are indicated on any of the volumes.

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5

6 7 8

I created an approximate chronology of these sketchbooks by decade (from the later 1900s through the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s) by identifying certain figures or motifs recognizable from Bakusen’s dated paintings or events in his known biography, including information supplied by Tsuchida Kyōson regarding his brother’s youthful penchant for copying famous paintings reproduced in art periodicals, which helped me to identify the books holding his earliest sketches. According to Tanaka Hisao, Bakusen’s respect for Hashimoto Gahō was particularly keen, and at one point he wrote to Gahō asking for permission to become his student (apparently Gahō never replied). Tanaka Hisao, Nihonga, Ryōran no kisetsu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Kōransha, 1984), p. 61. Bakusen chose other art names as a youth, including “Hokuriku,” which Kanai Tokiko suggests he selected to signify his determination to become the finest painter in Japan’s Hokuriku area. Kanai Tokiko “Tsuchida Bakusen no tai’ō seikatsu to sore igō,” Hikaku Bunka, no. 5 (1959), p. 54. Bakusen used this name and gave his age (“Painted by 13-year-old Hokuriku”) on one of the earliest surviving paintings done in his hand, a copy of a Buddhist composition featuring Avalokitesvara rescuing women souls from the hell of the Pond of Blood (Chi no ike Kannon). The painting, owned by the Sado History Museum, is reproduced in Tsuchida Bakusen: Kindai Nihonga no risō o motomete (Niigata: Niigata Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2009), p. 8. Kanai Tokiko, “Tsuchida Bakusen no tai’ō seikatsu to sore igo,” Hikaku Bunka, vol. 5 (December 1959), p. 54. Tsuchida Bakusen: Sono hito to geijutsu. Tokyo: Yamatane Bijutsukan (1973), p. 32. “Bakusen no shokan,” Tsuchida Bakusen: Sono hito to geijutsu, p. 87. Bakusen’s prolific letter writing practice provides testament to the abiding friendship he shared with Mine, to whom he addressed many letters over the span of his lifetime, the last of which is dated just days before Bakusen’s death in 1936. Bakusen letters are reproduced and discussed in many places, most recently by Keira Katsunori and Ueda Aya of the Sado Museum of History, which published a volume dedicated to the letters held in the museum’s collection. Keira Katsunori, Ueda Aya (eds.), Tsuchida Bakusen Aihara Gosaburō ate shokan (Nibomura, Sado: Nio Kenkyūkai, 2004). An even broader sampling of letters is found in Katō Kazuo, “Tsuchida Bakusen no shokan,” Niigata Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu Kiyō, vol. 25, no. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 472–480, and vol. 26, no. 1 (Summer, 1984), pp. 151–166. Two large compendiums of Bakusen’s correspondence are found in volumes 4 and 6 of Bigaku bijutsushi ronshū, the first of which reproduces Bakusen’s letters written to friend and patron Nomura Itsushi, while the second is dedicated the letters he wrote to

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his wife and friends while in Europe from 1921 to 1923. Tanaka Hisao (ed.), “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” “Tsuchida Bakusen no Yoroppa kara no shokan,” Bigaku bijutsushi ronshū, vol. 4 (1984), pp. 18–186, and vol. 6 (1987), pp. 45–171. This letter is reproduced in Muramatsu Shōfū, “Honchō gajinden: Tsuchida Bakusen,” Chūō Kōron no. 56 (October 1941), pp. 279–280. Hyakunen is believed to have started his artistic training by learning Chinese academic styles, and later may have acquired his knowledge of Nanga via Ōnishi Chinnen (1792–1851), a Maruyama-style artist who was once a student of the literati painter Tani Bunchō (1763–1841). Harada Heisaku has noted the difficulty in obtaining a clear picture of Hyakunen’s early artistic life, a fact repeated by Paul Berry, who notes the heady mix of stylistic influences often attributed to the Suzuki school (which in the past have included Chinese academic styles, Nanga, the Sesshū lineage of Zen ink landscapes, the Maruyama and Shijo schools, the Kishi, Kano and Tosa styles, and even imported Western oil painting) is partly the result of the paucity of accurate biographical information on Hyakunen, who has been ascribed with studying and mastering an implausibly long and varied list of painting traditions. For more on this issue, see Harada Heisaku, Bakumatsu Meiji: Kyōraku no gajintachi (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1985), pp. 80–84; and Paul Berry, “Suzuki Hyakunen,” Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1999), p. 64. Harada Heisaku, Bakumatsu Meiji: Kyōraku no gajintachi (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1985), pp. 93–94. To demulsify ink, a painter prepares standard sumi by grinding and mixing it with water, but rather than using it immediately, the ink is allowed to sit, sometimes for several days (the origins of the term "shukuboku" or “rested ink”), during which time the sumi loses its miscibility and separates into powdery particles. The interview is recorded in Nagamine Baikei, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no hitobito,” Chūō Bijutsu vol. 4, no. 3 (March, 1918), p. 74. In 1903, 40 yen was more than the monthly salary of a white-collar worker in Japan around; for example, the starting monthly pay for a bank employee in 1906 was approximately 35 yen. See Kinoshita Nobuo, Nedanshi nenpyō: Meiji Taishō Shōwa (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1988), p. 51. The early history of the Kyoto Exposition is slightly confusing, due to the fact that two different but related events were organized using the same title. In 1871 a trial Kyoto Hakurankai was held on the grounds of Nishihonganji temple, and after this was deemed a success, an organization named the Kyoto Exposition Corporation (Kyoto Hakuran Kaisha) was established to plan and managing the event on a larger, annual basis.

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For this reason, the First Kyoto Exposition of 1872 was in fact the second to be held in the city. See Kyoto no rekishi 8: Koto no kindai (Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1975), pp. 124–128. The catalogue shows that even when fine arts and craft products were displayed, the raw materials that went into their making received equal emphasis; for example, Nishijin brocades were exhibited in the same booths as bolts of undecorated silk and spools of colored thread. See Kyoto no rekishi 8, pp. 128, 250. Kyotofū hyakunen no nenpyō: 8, p. 82. The Kyoto Art Association was founded in 1890 by representatives of Kyoto’s art, commercial, industrial and political worlds, primarily at the instigation of Yoshida Hidetaka (1834–1900), director of Kyoto Prefectural Painting School, with the support of Kitagaki Kunimichi (1836–1916), then governor of Kyoto, and the interested participation of Mitsui Takaaki (1856–1921) of the trading firm Mitsui Bussan, Iida Shinshichi (1852–1909) of Takashimaya, Nishimura Sōzaemon (1855–1935) of the Kyoto yūzen dyeing shop Chisō, Nishimura Jibei (1861–1910) of the clothing and fabric shop Chigiriya, cloisonné artist Namikawa Yasuyuki (1845–1927), and others. The organization counted 140 members at the time of its founding, with another 200 joining shortly afterwards; by 1900, members numbered over 1000, and the group was among the most influential professional art associations in the country. The two main avenues through which the Kyoto Art Association interfaced with the Kyoto art world were its media organ, Kyoto Art Journal (Kyoto Bijutsu Zasshi), established in 1890 and expanded in 1892 as the Kyoto Art Association Journal (Kyoto Bijutsu Kyokai Zasshi), and its sponsored annual Shinkoten, the first large-scale version of which was held on the grounds of Heian Shrine from October 15 to November 25, 1895. For the next decade, the Shinkoten was the most important local juried art event of the year, eclipsed only by the national government-sponsored Bunten exhibition in 1906. For more information on the Kyoto Art Association, see Kanzaki Ken’ichi, Kyoto ni okeru Nihongashi (Kyoto: Kyoto Seiban Insatsusha, 1929), pp. 38–39, 45, and Shimada Yasuhiro, Kyoto no Nihonga: Kindai no yōran (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1991), pp. 177–181. By 1913, the diminished esteem of the Shinkoten was confirmed by the newspaper Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, which reported that the ratio of new paintings to antique works at the exhibition was the lowest yet, and that only a few established artists had bothered to submit works that year. See Kyotofū hyakunen no nenpyō: 8, p. 146. The letter, dated June 5, 1904, is reproduced in Keira Katsunori, Ueda Aya (eds.), Tsuchida Bakusen Aihara

Gosaburō ate shokan p. 14. The letter’s date shows it was written about 2 weeks after the close of the 1904 Shinkoten, which ran from April 1 to May 20, 1904. For a summary of details about the exhibition, see Kyōto Furitsu Sōgō Shiryōkan, Kyotofu hyakunen no nenpyō: 8 Bijutsu kōgei hen (Kyoto: Kyotofu, 1970), p. 120. 20 These extended meanings of the Shinpa and Kyūha labels are supported in other Meiji period cultural contexts, where they were used in a similar oppositional manner. In the world of Meiji theater, for example, the term Kyūha referred to performances that remained largely faithful to the Edo-era Kabuki tradition, including the use of all-male acting troupes, while Shinpa was used for productions featuring new storylines (often adapted from Western plays), contemporary settings and costumes, and experimental set design, and by the 1900s, female actors. In relation to modern Japanese painting, it can be argued that Shinpa and Kyūha as categories are too imprecise to serve as truly meaningful rubrics, yet we cannot disregard how frequently “Shinpa” was self-applied by progressive artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to extol their own practices and “Kyūha” to denigrate their conservative rivals; the same is true contrariwise. Perhaps this tendency on the part of painters to define themselves and each other as either “for progress” or “for tradition” serves as a reminder of how reflexively Meijiera Japanese framed their own contemporary culture in relation to a fascination with imported Western systems on the one hand, and by a perceived need to stem the erosion of traditional Japanese ways and values on the other. 21 The ninth Shinkoten ran from April 1 to May 20, 1904, during which time Japan won its first important victory over Russia at the Battle of Yalu River on May 1, 1904, a fact that may help explain why Bakusen chose to compare the results of the exhibition with the ongoing Russo-Japanese War. 22 The following is a list of prizewinning painters of the 1904 Shinkoten and their work titles: Abe Shunpō (1877–1956), Chickens (Niwatori); Hosono [Kikuchi] Keigetsu, Falling Flowers (Rakka); Tokuda Rinsai (1882– 1947), Countryside in Spring (Shunkō); Hashimoto Ryōka (act. late 19th-early 20th c), Misty Rain (Sai’u); Hachida Seisui (1882–1944, later Kōyō), Sparse Woods at Night (Sorin bogetsu); Nishiyama Suishō, Opening Doors of Fortune (Iwaido aki); Konoshima Ōkoku, Paradise (Tōgenkyō); Ueda Banshū (1869–1952), Chicken among Reeds (Ashi ni niwatori), Fujii Keihō, Late Autumn (Banshū). All of these artists except Keihō were students of Kikuchi Hōbun, Takeuchi Seihō, or Imao Keinen, three important Kyoto painters and educators loosely associated with the Shinpa approach. The juku affiliation of Keihō is unknown, but this name may be

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an alternate go for Fujii Shunsui (dates unknown), listed as a prizewinner at the seventh Shinkoten three years earlier. The judging results for the 1904 Shinkoten were originally published in Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai Zasshi, no. 142 (April 1904). They are reproduced in Kyotofu hyakunen no nenpyō: 8 Bijutsu kōgei hen (Kyoto: Kyotofu, 1970), p. 120. My thanks go to Kuribayashi Ryō, curator of the Mizuno Art Museum, for providing this identification. Private correspondence, September 25, 2010. “The Death of Kiso” chapter is the basis of the 1739 Bunraku drama Hiragana Seisuiki (“Simplified Record of the Rise and the Fall [of the Minamoto]”), which includes both the characters of Yamabuki Gozen and Tomoe Gozen. For more information on these plays, see “Production: The Battles of Genji and Heike / Hiragana seisuiki / July 1981.” The Barbara Curtis Adachi Bunraku Collection at C.V. Starr East Asian Library. Accessed October 4, 2011. . A detailed description of Minamoto Yoshinaka is mentioned in “The Death of Kiso,” including the appearance of his horse, his armor, and his black rattanwrapped bow. See Chapter 9, Section 4. Burton Watson (translation), Haruo Shirane (ed.), The Tales of the Heike (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 85. The horo cloaks when attached this way were evidently thick enough to inhibit missile penetration but not so densely woven as to impair the rider’s vision. Imaizumi Teisuke, (Zōtei) Konjitsu sōsho, vol. 21 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1928), p. 342. An illustration of a thirteenth century mounted soldier with cloak arranged in this fashion is included in the Gunyōki, and is a possible source for Keigetsu’s composition treatment of Yamabuki Gozen. This illustration is reproduced in Arai Hakuseki, The Armour Book in Honchō-Gunkikō, translated by Mrs. Y. Ōtsuka, edited by H. Russell Robinson (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company Inc., 1964), p. 112. My deepest thanks go to Dr. Anton Schweizer of Heidelberg University, who very generously shared his expertise on the subject of medieval Japanese armor and provided me with references for the (Zōtei) Konjitsu sōsho and Gunyōki. There are precedents for the utilization of themes from past history or legend by Japanese painters as early as the Heian period, but these are different from the historically specific term rekishiga, which is used to describe paintings specifically created with public moral edification in mind. Rekishiga were the subject of Toyama Shōichi’s (1848–1900) 1890 lecture, “The Future of Japanese Painting” (Nihon Kaiga no mirai), in which Toyama suggested the most appropriate subjects for exhibition paintings were scenes from history, and that purely imagined or entirely mundane subjects

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should be avoided. See Takashina Shūji, “History Painting in the Meiji Era: A Consideration of the Issues,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, Ellen P. Conant (ed.) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 56–64. For examples of Meiji-era Japanese “history painting,” see the exhibition catalogue Egakareta rekishi: Kindai Nihon bijutsu ni miru dentō to shinwa (Kobe: Hyōgo Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1993). Pre-Meiji precedents of Western-derived illusionism in Japan have been the subjects of several studies and books. A discussion of Nanban painting is included in the catalogue of an exhibition dedicated to pre-Meiji Western-style paintings in Japan, in Narusawa Katsushi, “Two Streams of Namban Painting,” Japan Envisions the West: 16th-19th Century Japanese Art from Kobe City Museum, edited by Yukiko Shirahara (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2007), pp. 57–73. Timon Screech covers the myriad ways Edo-era painters and print designers explored and interpreted Western ways of picturing the world in Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). The Akita Ranga school and the study of Western illustrated books in general by Edo-period painter-scholars is the subject of Hiroko Johnson, Western Influences on Japanese Art: The Akita Ranga Art School and Foreign Books (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005). Tsuchida Bakusen Aihara Gosaburō ensho kan, p. 15. Tanaka Hisao speculates that the intermediary mentioned in the letter was once again Mine Yoshikichi, the benefactor who introduced Bakusen to Suzuki Shōnen, or possibly a Seihō student named Nagata Taiko, about whom little is known today. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 63. This event’s official title was “Exhibition in Honor of the Ten-year Memorial Service for Kōno Bairei” (Kōno Bairei jūshū nensai shikkō tsuitōten). It ran from February 2–3, 1904, and was held on the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace. See Kyotofu hyakunen no nenpyō: 8, p. 120. It is difficult to imagine Bakusen or any Kyotobased painter not attending this exhibition, since it featured works by many of the most important and influential artists from across the greater Kansai region, in addition to many of the finest paintings by Bairei, a highly prominent and influential figure in the Meiji-era Kyoto gadan. Ono Chikkyō, “Waga shi: Seihō sensei,” Tōjitsuchō, p. 246; reprinted from “Kaiji jūwa,” Mainichi Shinbun, February 21–23, 1936. Tanaka Hisao notes the recorded reason for Bakusen’s sudden departure from Kyoto was a case of typhoid fever, necessitating his return home to Sado for

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recuperation. The short amount of time that passed between Bakusen’s dropping out of Shōnen’s juku and his subsequent enrollment at Chikujōkai, however, gives grounds for Tanaka to speculate Bakusen’s illness may have been a useful pretext that allowed Bakusen and Shōnen to sever their ties in a neat and neutral fashion. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 63. The name Seihō selected for his new student consists of the Chinese character for “barley” (baku) chosen for the yellow-gold hues favored by both Bakusen and Seihō at that time, paired with “mountain hermit” (sen), a commonly used suffix in art names. Ibid. Ono Chikkyō, “Jōkyōgo ichi, ni nen: Nyūmon no koro,” Tōjitsuchō, pp. 21–22. Although his name is little remembered today, Ono Chikutō was an interesting and eclectic figure who was active in the worlds of literature and theater as well as the pictorial arts. He showed strong promise as a painter from a young age, on which merit he was accepted to Seihō’s juku in 1900. In 1905, approximately two years after Chikkyō came to Kyoto, Chikutō left Seihō’s juku, having decided to pursue poetry. He moved to Tokyo, and taking the pen name Benka began making a name for himself as a haiku poet. In 1909 he joined the eponymous Literary Association (Bungei Kyōkai) formed by Waseda University professor Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), and was accepted into the first class of students at the association’s Center for Theater Studies (Bungei Kyōkai Engeki Kenkyūjo). In 1914 Ono founded the shingeki group Art Theater (Bijutsu Gekijō) along with oil painter Nabei Katsuyuki (1888–1969) and print maker Nagase Yoshirō (1891– 1978). But throughout his many literary and theatrical endeavors, he did not entirely abandon his painting practice, as shown by Chikutō seeing his Nihonga submissions accepted at the reformed government-sponsored salon, the Teiten, in 1919, 1920, and 1921, and in the mid-1920s Chikutō contributed both paintings and prints to several Kokuten exhibitions. Yui Kazuto, 20 seiki bukko Nihongaka jiten. Tokyo: Bijutsu Nenkansha (1998), p. 97. Ono, “Jōkyōgo ichi, ni nen,” pp. 23–24. Ibid, p. 24. Like Bakusen, he received his art name “Chikkyō” from his new teacher Seihō soon after starting at the juku, and retained this name for his entire career, although later in life he utilized a simplified character for “kyō.” “Chikkyō,” which mean “bamboo bridge,” may have been selected in reference to Chikujōkai, the name of Seihō’s juku, or possibly to Chikkyō’s preliminary trial period spent copying bamboo painting, the successful completion of which marked his readiness to officially enter the juku. For more on Ono Chikkyō’s early life, see John Szostak, The Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai and Kyoto Nihonga Reform in the Meiji, Taishō and Early Shōwa Years (1900–1928).

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PhD dissertation, University of Washington (2005), pp. 27–32. Ibid, p. 25–26. Kushimoto is the southernmost point on the island of Honshū. Ishizaki Kōyō, “Tsuchida Bakusen kun no kugaku jidai,” Tōei, July 1936. Quoted in Tanaka, Nihonga, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 64. Chikkyō made his juried exhibition debut in 1905 at the Japan Art Association Exhibition (Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkaiten) with Moon in Early Evening (Gesshō), a work that is lost today. In Japan, many exhibition catalogues and dozens of folios cover these same basic details of Takeuchi Seihō's early life and training, yet there are few published articles and even fewer books written in Japanese or any other language dedicated to Seihō and his art. In Japanese, Tanaka Hisao produced a monographic study of Seihō that is fact-rich in biography but largely avoids critical analysis of Seihō’s paintings. Tanaka Hisao, Takeuchi Seihō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988). More recently Hirota Takashi wrote a collection of essays on Seihō, his relationship with his teacher Bairei and his followers, including Bakusen, which does much to help to contextualize Seihō, his artistic practice and his legacy in modern Japanese art. See Hirota Takashi, Takeuchi Seihō, Kindai no Nihonga no genryū (Kyoto: Ōbunkaku Shuppan, 2000). One of the earliest English language studies of Seihō was written by Wallace Baldinger for The Art Bulletin in 1954, which provides the basic factual information about Seihō and his life, but Baldinger’s lack of source citations and his reliance on unsubstantiated information, including many fanciful anecdotes, significantly reduces the scholarly value of this essay. Wallace S. Baldinger, “Takeuchi Seihō: Painter of Post-Meiji Japan,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 1 (March 1954), pp. 45–56. Ellen P. Conant’s essay on Seihō for the journal Impressions offers a description of the artist’s public and private lives, and provides details unavailable in print in English or Japanese. Conant also effectively communicates the difficulties inherent in writing about an artist who attained mythic status in his or her lifetime, which may partly explain why there is as of yet no truly comprehensive monograph on this important Kyoto artist. Ellen P. Conant, “Cut from Kyoto Cloth: Takeuchi Seihō and his Artistic Milieu.” Impressions 33 (2012). pp. 71–93. Ellen Conant comments on Bairei, the effectiveness of his teaching, and the importance of his juku to the development of the Kyoto Nihonga gadan in the late nineteenth century, in Ellen Conant, “Kōno Bairei,” Nihonga, Transcending the Past: Japanese Style Painting, 1868–1968, edited by Ellen Conant (St. Louis: The Saint Louis Art Museum, 1995), p. 311.

notes to pages 23–25 42 Cat and Kittens Lazing in the Sun is lost today and known only through a blurry newspaper-print photo, reproduced in Hirota, p. 211. 43 “Kyotoshi Bijutsu Kōgeihin Tenrankai (dai roku): Kaneko Seishi no kakinozoki,” Kyoto Shinbun, 22 April 1892. 44 Nue appears in the Kojiki (712), Wamyō Ruijushō (c. 934), and other Nara and Heian period literary sources as the bird known today in English as White’s Thrush. By the thirteenth century, nue appears in the Tales of the Heike (c.1240) albeit spelled with a different Chinese character, in a scene describing hero Minamoto Yorimasa shooting a monstrous creature hidden in a dark cloud on the roof of the Heian imperial palace, from where it had been haunting dreams of the Emperor Konoe. In this section, the nue Yorimasa destroys is described as having the body of a raccoon-dog (tanuki), the head of a monkey, the legs of a tiger, and a snake for a tail, and the ability to sing in the beautiful voice of its namesake bird to bewitch its victims. “Nihon Kokugo Daijiten.” Japan Knowledge. Accessed 25 July 2012. . 45 Tanaka Hisao, “Takeuchi Seihō #56,” Kyoto Shinbun, 2 February 1962. 46 “Kyotoshi Bijutsu Kōgeihin Tenrankai (dai roku): Kaneko Seishi no kakinozoki.” Kyoto Shinbun, 22 April 1892. 47 Kuroda Tengai, “Takeuchi Seihō (2),” Hinode Shinbun, 9 September 1898. 48 John Szostak, “Takeuchi Seihō, Chigusa Sōun and John Ruskin’s Modern Painters: Reconciling Realism with Japanese Painting, 1900–1910,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence - Proceedings of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, ed. by Jaynie Anderson (Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2009), p. 837–841. 49 Shimada Yasuhiro,”Chigusa Sōun Nihonga kakushin ni kaketa yume,” in Nihonga kakushin no yume: Chigusa Sōun (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1992), pp. 50–51. 50 Toshio Watanabe and Yūko Kikuchi, Ruskin in Japan: Nature for Art, Art for Life (London: “Ruskin in Japan 1890–1940” Exhibition Committee, 1997), p. 274. 51 Usage of the term fūkei in reference to landscape or scenery is in fact found in sources dating as early as the eighth century, showing that it predates the Meiji era by more than a millennium. In the context of Japanese modernism, however, fūkei takes on a close association with evolving paradigms among Meiji-era painters regarding landscape as a subject of art, one that moved from a human-privileged view of scenery to one that did not rely on human presence to afford it with meaning. An important moment marking this attitudinal

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shift is the publication in 1894 of Shiga Shigetaka’s (1863–1927) best-selling Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron). In this book, Shiga places Japan’s mountains at the center of a scientifically informed description of Japanese nature, praising the unique beauty and appeal of Japan’s native scenery and arguing it to be as inspiring and worthy of pictorial and poetic commemoration as Western landscapes, which feature so prominently in Western art and literature. For more on Shiga’s book and ideas on landscape and their contemporaneous impact on Meiji-era Japanese painting, see Shin-ichi Anzai, “Unmediated Nationalism: Science and Art in Shiga Shigetaka’s The Japanese Landscape (1894),” JTLA: Journal of the Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, Aesthetics, vol. 39 (2009), pp. 65–81. For Masako Gavin’s study of Shiga’s life and work, including a deconstruction of Shiga’s later reputation for jingoism and the part later played by Japanese Landscape in fomenting Japan’s imperialist agenda, see Masako Gavin, Shiga Shigetaka 1863–1927: The Forgotten Enlightener (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 27–46. John Ruskin, “Of Ideas of Truth,” in David Barrie (ed.), Modern Painters (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1987), p. 13. Seihō’s activities in Paris are described in his postcards and letters reproduced in Shiryōshū Takeuchi Seihō no subete: Daisankai Takeuchi Seihō-ten (Hatsukaichi: Ōshajō Bijutsu Hōmotsukan, 1987). Seihō’s travel itinerary included Lyon, Paris, London, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Münich, Vienna, Budapest, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Rome, and Napoli. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 50. Tanaka Hisao, Takeuchi Seihō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), p. 159. Ibid, pp. 167–168. Takeuchi Seihō, “Shishi no sakuhin ni tsuite,” Bi, issue 1 (July, 1909). Tanaka Hisao suggests the impact of Gérôme on Seihō in Tanaka, Takeuchi Seihō, p. 159. Inaga Shigemi also makes note of Seihō’s encounter with the French academic painter as an inspirational origin for Seihō’s Lions, as well as a tiger painting contributed to the 1900 World Exposition by Nihonga painter Ōhashi Suiseki (1865–1945), which Seihō evidently admired. Inaga Shigemi, “‘Tasha’ to shite no ‘bijutsu’ to, ‘bijutsu’ no ‘tasha’ to shite no ‘Nihon’: ‘Bijutsu’ no teigi o meguru bunka masatsu,” in Bijutsushi to tasha, Shimamoto Kan, Kasuya Makoto (eds.) (Tokyo: Kōyō Shobō, 2000), pp. 171, 183. Imai Atsushi, “Takeuchi Seihō no to’ō to shinhakken no zuhan ni tsuite 1,” Sōsaku suru jimin (Kyoto: Kyotoshi Shakai Kyōiku Shinkyō Zaidan, 1997), np. A small monochrome photograph of Seihō’s Lions from 1901 is reproduced in Kindai Nihonga no kyoshō:

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Takeuchi Seihō to sono monkaseitachi (Hiroshima: Umi no Mieru Mori Bijutsukan, 2005), p. 100. Dokkan Kyoshi, “Tenrankai no gihyō (zokkō),” Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai Zasshi, no. 112 (October 1901). Kanzaki, p. 111. Kanzaki, p. 112. The text of the lecture appears in “Takeuchi Seihō-kun enzetsu,” Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai Zasshi, no. 110 (August 1901), pp. 1–5. Seihō’s avoidance of the question of painting styles in his lecture makes it difficult to judge whether or not he was promoting East-West stylistic amalgamation or something different. It is possible that what he had in mind was closer to the position taken by Okakura Tenshin in an 1887 lecture to the Tokyo-based Painting Appreciation Society (Kangakai), in which Okakura argued against stylistic hybridization, but also against the intentional segregation of pure Eastern and Western styles of painting, arguments for which, he proclaimed, “have ceased to have any force.” Instead, he suggested that the only fertile course for Nihonga is a natural development that “does not make any distinction between East and West.” Tenshin’s lecture is discussed and presented in English translation in Michele Marra, “Hegelian Reversal: Okakura Kakuzō,” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 65–78. Moon over Venice (Benisu no tsuki) was one of three paintings commissioned by the Osaka department store Takashimaya as prototypes for dyed cut velvet (birōdo yūzen) wall hangings for the 1910 British-Japan Exposition. The other works in this trio, which, as Julia Sapin points out, form a variant on the “snow, moon and flower” (setsugekka) theme, are Yamamoto Shunkyo’s Snow in the Rockies (Rokkī no yuki, 1905) and Tsuji Kakō’s Cherry Blossoms at Yoshino (Yoshino no sakura, c. 1903). The three original paintings are in the collection of Takashimaya, whereas the cut velvet reproductions are owned by the British Museum. Julia Sapin, “Merchandising Art and Identity in Meiji Japan: Kyoto Nihonga Artists’ Designs for Takashimaya Department Store, 1868–1912,” Journal of Design History, vol. 17, no. 4 (December 2004), pp. 328, 336. Dokkan Kyoshi, “Tenrankai no gihyō (zokkō),” Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai Zasshi, no. 112 (October 1901). It should be noted that Nakazawa Iwata’s defense of Seihō’s Lions is not unexpected, since he was a close friend of the painter who accompanied Seihō during his tour of Europe. His comments appear to have been part of a concerted effort by the Kyoto Art Association’s senior membership to support their colleague Seihō, and to promote this particular work upon his return from Europe, which may explain why the Nakazawa-headed selection jury awarded Lions a gold medal, the first time

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a painting received the highest prize at the Shinkoten since the exhibition’s inception. Hirota, pp. 135–6. Ikeda, p. 83. Yamaguchi Kayō, Egakakitaute (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1984), p. 61. Uchiyama Takeo, “Tsuchida Bakusen no shōgai to geijutsu,” Kindai Nihon Bijutsu Zenshū 4: Murakami Kagaku/Tsuchida Bakusen (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1972), p. 84. Today Punishment appears to us differently than the work exhibited at the Bunten in 1908, which contemporary photographs show as a six-panel folding screen. Sometime in the past the painting was taken off the screen panels and set in a frame, and a close examination will reveal the seams where the separate screen panels were stitched together for remounting. Furthermore, the painting’s original composition was about twenty percent wider, and offered a more extensive description of the classroom interior on the left side of the screen. This suggests the work was severely cropped when it was framed, in order, perhaps, to center the figures of the children and achieve a more centered and, evidently to its then-owner, a more agreeable compositional balance. Ono, “Jōkyōgo ichi, ni nen,” p. 25. Tsuji Kyōko, Kaisō no chichi Tsuchida Bakusen (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1984), p. 149. Shiokawa Kyōko, Kindai no fūzokuga: Kaiga ga kataru sesōshi (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Kaiga, 1994), p. 73. Bakusen painted countless depictions of maiko over the span of his career, including two important exhibition works, one for the Bunten in 1916 and one for the Kokuten in 1919, and again just two years before his death for the government-sponsored Teiten in 1934. Bakusen even chose maiko Ōmichi Chiyō, who modeled for him for several works in the last years of Meiji, to become his wife in 1915. His frequent selection of maiko as the subject of his paintings was as effective a way of linking himself and his artistic practice with his adopted city of Kyoto in the same way that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s many popular images of cabaret performers buttressed the Albi-born artist’s strong identification with fin-de-siècle Paris in the public eye. Katō Kazuo and Uchiyama Takeo, Gendai Nihon Bijutsu Zenshū 4: Murakami Kagaku/Tsuchida Bakusen, p. 115. Punishment is not the first painting Bakusen created in the “rural genre painting” rubric. In 1907 he created a screen painting entitled Song of Spring, which won a second prize at the Shinkoten. Song of Spring, along with Three Maiko, Bakusen’s contribution to the second Kokuten exhibition of 1919, were lost along with the rest of an extensive art collection kept by the Bandai Kankō Hotel, a luxury inn in Fukushima prefecture, when it was destroyed by fire in 1969.

notes to pages 30–38 which Nakai argues that painters must search for inspiration by reflecting on the nature of human social experience. Nakai Sōtarō, “Jinsei hihan no gaka,” Kyoto Bijutsu, vol. 27 (April 1913). Nagai Takenori discusses the Jinseiha movement and other critical trends in 1910s Kyoto Nihonga in Nagai Takenori, “1910–20 nendai Kyoto no bijutsu hihyō to geijutsuron,” in Iwaki Kenichi (ed.), Geijutsu/Katō no genba: Kindai Nihon geijutsu shisō no kontekusuto (Kyoto: Kōyō Shōbō, 2002), pp. 103–118. 86 The art-and-literature journal Shirakaba’s October 1913 issue was dedicated to the French painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), constituting the first critical biography of the French social realist painter to be available in Japanese. Nagayo Yoshirō, “Gyusutafu Kurube Hyōden.” Shirakaba, vol. 4, no. 10 (October 1913), pp. 1–114. 87 Ono Chikkyō, “Jinseiha no taido,” Tōjitsuchō, pp. 225–226.

76 Sociologist Jennifer Robertson has produced an informative study of the term furusato and various nuances surrounding its contemporary usage in Japanese. Jennifer Robertson, “Furusato Japan: The Culture and Politics of Nostalgia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1988), pp. 494–518. 77 The expression “inaka fūzokuga” appears in such Edo period artwork titles as Rural Genre Painting Handscroll (Inaka fūzokugamaki) by Tatebe Sōchō (1761–1814), kept today in the collection of the Tokyo University of the Arts. The difference between these earlier works and later rural genre painting is that the former were intended to illustrate regional customs and note variation in a more or less neutral manner, thus performing a kind of documentary function, whereas illustrations of furusato created in the early twentieth century were usually imagined tableaus intended to appeal to the viewers’ romantic sense of nostalgia for a time gone by. 78 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xv. 79 Tsuchida Bakusen Aihara Gosaburō ensho kan, p. 24. 80 Nishimura Goun, “Kyojin otsu,” in Bakusen isakushū futsuisōshū (Kyoto: Geisōdō, 1940); reproduced in Shiokawa Kyōko, “Kenkyū repōto: Santen no jinbutsuga ni tsuite,” Kyoto no bijutsu 4: Takeuchi Seihō no shiryō to kaidai (Kyoto: Kyotoshi Bijutsukan, 1990), p. 7. 81 Bakusen submitted a painting entitled Moso Bamboo after Rain (Ugo no mōsōchiku) to the Bunten in 1909, but it was not selected. Tsuchida Bakusen ten, (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1997), p. 170. This instance comprised both the first and last time Bakusen was entirely shut out of the Bunten once he began to submit on an annual basis. 82 Kuroda Tengai, “Kotoshi no Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai.” Kyoto Bijutsu, no. 16 (July 1909), p. 3. 83 Ibid. 84 Chikkyō wrote that the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) were very influential due to his sharp psychological portrayals of his characters. Ono Chikkyō, “Jinseiha no taido,” Tōjitsuchō (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1979), pp. 225–226. The Russian novelist’s Crime and Punishment was known in Japan as an abridged translation by Uchida Rōan as early as 1892, with Dostoevsky’s larger oeuvre becoming widely available to Japanese readers by 1917. See Mochizuki Tetsuo, “Japanese Perceptions of Russian Literature in the Meiji and Taishō Eras,” in J. Thomas Rimer (ed.), A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters 1868–1926 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 18. 85 The term Jinseiha may be traceable to an essay published that year by Nakai Sōtarō entitled “A Painter Who Critiques Human Life” (Jinsei hihan no gaka), in

Chapter 2 1 See Sakakibara Yoshio’s description of the school’s organization and curriculum in Sakakibara Yoshio, “The Kyoto-Prefecture Painting School and the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting,” in Ellen P. Conant (ed.), Nihonga: Transcending the Past (St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum, 1995), pp. 84–85. 2 Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), p. 54. 3 I identify the subject of this painting as a courtesan based on her hair setting, a simplified variation of the “Box Shimada” (hako shimada) coiffure, which was associated with courtesans in the late Edo period. 4 Of the ninety-nine Nihonga paintings featured at the first Bunten, sixty were by Tokyo artists, 34 by Kyoto painters, and five by artists from other areas of the country. The results of the first and all subsequent Bunten exhibitions can be found in Taishōki Bijutsu Tenrankai Shuppin Mokuroku (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūsho, 2003), pp. 5–43. 5 For a longer discussion of the founding and organization of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, see Victoria Weston, “Institutionalizing Talent and the Kano Legacy at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, 1889–1893,” Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), pp. 147–177. 6 The Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts came into being with the 1901 expansion of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyotofu Gagakkō), founded in 1880. In addition to painting, the new school featured a design section (zuanka) and sculpture section (chōkokuka) to help prepare young artists and artisans

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notes to pages 39–41 for practical work as professional painters, and to provide designers and skilled workers for Kyoto’s textile, ceramics, lacquerware, metalwork, and other fine crafts industries. Most of the students began the school’s two years of study immediately upon finishing their compulsory elementary education, thus the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts might be best viewed as a technical high school. In the 1940s the School of Arts and Crafts was reorganized as the Kyoto Municipal High School of Art (Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Kōtō Gakkō), and exists today as Kyoto Dōda High School of Arts and Crafts (Kyoto Shiritsu Dōda Bijutsu Kōgei Kōtō Gakkō). The school is briefly discussed in Sakakibara Yoshio, “The Kyoto-Prefectural Painting School and the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting,” Nihonga: Transcending the Past, pp. 84–85. 7 Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku Bijutsugakubu (ed.), Gagakkō-Kyoto Geidai 100 shūnen kinen: Sotsugyō seisaku Nihonga shūei. (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1980), p. 269. 8 Kyotofu hyakunen no nenpyō 8: Bijutsu Kōgei shū, pp. 130, 138. 9 The remaining three members of the Kyoto School for Painting’s first graduating class were Irie Hakō (1887– 1948), Matsumiya Hōnen (1886–1970) and Shihō’s brother Sakakibara Uson (1885–1963), all of whom exhibited paintings at Kokuten exhibitions in the late 1910s and 1920s. The fifth founding member of the Kokuga Society, Nonagase Banka, also initially enrolled as a first-year student in the new school’s practicum course, but dropped out sometime in his second year. Wadaka Nobuji, Banka’s biographer, notes that official documents show Banka made excellent progress in his first year at the school, but records the reason for his departure from the school as “family related,” which Wadaka suggests is a euphemism for financial difficulties. Wadaka Nobuji, Nonagase Banka (Wakayama: Shadan Hōjin Chikano Shinkōkai, 1975), pp. 31–33. 10 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 85. 11 Many of the students enrolled in the school, including Bakusen and Chikkyō, had only an elementary school education, and were unprepared to enroll in some of the advanced courses taught in the standard course track. Wadaka, pp. 32–33. 12 The specialty areas available for selection in the third year were landscapes, figures, bird-and-flower and animal themes. The last two subjects were not taught as part of the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting’s regular and practicum tracks, but they were a primary focus of the preparatory track, and they held a prominent place in the painting curriculum at the Kyoto School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Several third-year students, including Shihō, chose to specialize in bird-andflower or animal painting during their third year at the Specialized School for Painting. Wadaka, p. 33

13 Yamaguchi Kayō, Egakakitaute (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1984), p. 44. The school’s annual graduation exhibition was known as the “Kaisen and Biko Boosters Association Exhibition” (Kaisen Biko Yūkai Tenrankai), which, as its title suggests, featured works produced by students of both the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting (Kaisen, shortened from Kaiga Senmon Gakkō) and the Kyoto School of Fine Art and Crafts (Biko, an abbreviation of Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō). The first Kaisen-Bikoten, as it came to be popularly known, was held in late March 1911, and its organization and management is discussed in “Seisakuhin tenrankai,” Bi, vol. 2, no. 9 (March 1911), p. 14. For Takeuchi Seihō’s response to the first graduating class’s diploma paintings, see Takeuchi Seihō, “Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō Dai Ikkai Sotsugyō Seisaku,” Bi, vol. 2, no. 11 (May, 1911), pp. 2–17. 14 Ono Chikkyō, “Kokuten kaiko,” Tōjitsuchō (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1979), pp. 142–145. 15 Tanjō 110 nen botsugo 20 nen kinen ten: Ono Chikkyō, p. 209. 16 Nagai, p. 105. 17 For more on Umehara’s time in France and his relationship with Renoir, see Shimada Hanako, Umehara Ryūzaburō to Runoāru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 2010). 18 Kuroda Jūtarō, Kyoto Yōga no reimeiki, p. 207. 19 The Nameless Society has received scant attention by art historians in Japan, and even less in the West, despite its important role in disseminating information about Western modern art movements in Kyoto. A discussion of this group, including summaries of some of the lectures delivered at its meetings, see “Mumeikai kiji,” Miru, no. 231 (September 1986), pp. 3–5. Shimada Yasuhiro also gives an overview of this group and summaries of members lectures in Shimada Yasuhiro, Kyoto no Nihonga: Kindai no yōran (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1991), pp. 380–406. 20 Eiko Ikegami offers an overview of amateur art, poetry and drama groups in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo from the 17th through 19th centuries, and how these allowed people of various social backgrounds to share experiences based on common aesthetic interests, in Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 140–170. Anna Beerens offers a more concise study of these intellectual and cultural circles, including lists of the various activities they pursued, the names and backgrounds of the most significant practitioners and teachers in Edoperiod Japan’s largest urban centers. Beerens also demonstrates that most participants in these activities were involved in two or more circles, expanding the matrix of influence and exchange even further. Anna Beerens,

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Friends, Acquaintances, Pupils and Patrons, Japanese Intellectual Life in the Late Eighteenth Century: a Prosopographical Approach (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2006), 232–272. Sakai Tadayasu, Hashi Hidebumi, Egakareta monogatari: Bijutsu to bungei no kyōen (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997), p. 87. For example, Kyoto Hinode Shinbun included a lengthy synopsis of the very first lecture delivered to the Nameless Society in January 1910 by Tanaka Kisaku, in which Tanaka offered an integrated theory of painting and art criticism based on precepts drawn from James McNeil Whistler’s polemical Gentle Art of Making Enemies. According to this summary, Tanaka proposed that the central aim of a modern painter should be the expression of the artist’s character in the “musical” aspects of painting, described by Whistler in terms of harmony of color, melody of line, et cetera. By extension, Tanaka argued, the role of the art critic should be restricted to evaluating the success or failure of an artwork in expressing the character of its maker through its visual musicality. Tanaka Kisaku, “Garon (ichi),” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 10 January 1911. Kuroda Jūtarō, “Nakai Sōtarō san no omoide,” Tōka ryūsui, p. 36. Of the two, Nakai would have the deeper and longer-lasting impact on the Kyoto art world, first as a teacher at the Specialized School for Painting, then later as a professor and eventually director of the Kyoto City College of Art (Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku). For more on Nakai’s thought and its influence on Kyoto Nihonga, see Tano Hatsuki, “Kyoto gadan to Nakai Sōtarō: Sono rinen to jissen.” Bijutsu Kyōiku, no. 291 (1998), pp. 24–29. The Peach Blossom Society was formed in early 1910 by ten graduates of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, including Sakakibara Uson (brother of Kokuga Society founder Sakakibara Shihō), Hirai Baisen, and Matsumiya Hōnen. Nakai became involved in the group as advisor and director early on and recruited more members from among his students at the Specialized School for Painting, including Murakami Kagaku and Sakakibara Shihō. The Peach Blossom Society was originally intended as an artists’ ikenkai, much like the Nameless Society, but plans for an exhibition were made soon after the group’s establishment. The Peach Blossom Society’s inaugural show was held on February 12, 1910 and four more annual exhibitions were organized before the group dissipated in 1913. For more on this group and Nakai’s involvement with it, see Nakai Ai, “Naki otto o kataru.” Tōka ryūsui (Kyoto: Nakai Ai, 1966), pp. 192–3. Tanaka’s announcement of the Chat Noir’s founding appears in the December 23, 1910 issue of Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, and is reproduced in Shimada, Kyoto no

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Nihonga: Kindai no yōran, p. 417. In some Japanese and Western studies, the name of Tanaka’s group is written Kuronekokai, using standard kunyomi pronunciation of the name. When Tanaka announced the group’s formation in 1910, however, the newspaper appended furigana notational text to the name, indicating the nonstandard ateji pronunciation Sha Noāru, an approximation of the French “chat noir,” was preferred. As diverse as Chat Noir’s membership initially may seem, in fact its members mostly came from the same few Kyoto institutions. Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, Kashino Nanyō, Fukumoto Koyō and Sugiura Kōhō were all students of Takeuchi Seihō’s Chikujōkai juku academy, while Hada Teruo and Tsuda Seifū both studied Nihonga in the design department of the Kyoto School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Later, Tsuda switched to oil painting, and became a student at Asai Chū’s Kansai Art Institute, where Tanaka Kisaku, Tanaka Zennosuke, Kuroda Jūtarō, and Arai Kinya all studied. Even Seihō student Kōhō spent time as a pupil at Asai’s school, as Asai welcomed Nihonga artists who wished to incorporate Western-style drawing and painting techniques into their neotraditional practice. For the entire Japanese text of “Green Sun,” see Takamura Kōtarō zenshū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1981), pp. 217–223. An English translation is available in Takamura Kōtarō, A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kōtarō (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992). Also see John Clark’s discussion and partial translation of this essay in John Clark, “Modernity in Japanese Painting,” Art History, vol. 9 no. 2 (June 1986), p. 230. Ishii Hakutei, Kuroda Hōshin, and Yūki Somei, eds., Bijutsu jiten (Tokyo: Nihon Bijtsu Gakuin, 1914), p. 77. Quoted and discussed in Paul Berry, “The Origins of the Term Nihonga,” in Michiyo Morioka and Paul Berry, Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions, Nihonga from the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1999), pp. 19–20. Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 15 February 1911. The announcements and reports discussed in this section are also are cited and reproduced in “Sha noaru kiji,” Miru number 232 (October 1986), pp. 6–7. Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 11 March, 6 April 1911. Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 12 March 1911. Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 3 April 1911. Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 12 March 1911. I conclude that the “experimental period” of Taikan and Shunsō to which Bakusen refers was in fact their mōrōtai phase based on the fact that one of Bakusen’s Nihonga paintings created for the exhibition but lost today was given the title Hazy Evening, or Oboroyo in Japanese, with oboro alternatively readable as mōrō (from mōrōtai).

notes to pages 44–51 34 Shunpū Dōjin, “Daijūkai Kaiga Kyōshinkai Nihon Bijutsuin Tenrankai shuppin gaihyō,” Nihon Bijutsu, no. 30 (July, 1901), p. 16. Quoted in Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2003), p. 208. 35 Kuroda Jūtarō, “Tsuchida Bakusen no kotodomo,” Chūō Bijutsu, no. 22 (1936), pp. 46–48. 36 “Sha Noāru kaisan,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 4 May 1911. Cited and reproduced in “Sha noāru kiji,” p. 7. As detailed as Tanaka’s explanation was, many questions about the break-up of Chat Noir remain. For example, Tanaka does not name the members who protested the inclusion of the “vulgar” paintings, nor does he identify which works were deigned offensive or why; finally, Tanaka does not explain why Tsuda and the other members who opposed the “sanitization” of the exhibition demurred from participating in the new group, Le Masque. 37 Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 5 May 1911. See “Sha noaru kiji,” p. 7. Like Chat Noir, the new group’s name was supplied with notational furigana indicating the pronunciation “Ru masuku,” a Japanese katakana rendering of “Le Masque,” the title of a poem written by Charles Baudelaire and included in the 1861 edition of his famous volume Fleurs de mal (“Flowers of Evil”). 38 The quotation appears in L’oeuvre de Rodin, a catalogue of a Rodin exhibition from 1900. The pamphlet text reproduced in Kyoto no bijutsu II: Kyoto no Yōga shiryō kenkyū (Kyoto: Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsukan, 1980), pp. 103–104. 39 Seki, p. 31. 40 “Ru Masuku dai ikkai tenrankai hyō: ka,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 14 May 1911. 41 “Ru Masuku dai ikkai tenrankai hyō: ka,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 14 May 1911. 42 The four other assistants were Nishimura Go’un, Nishiyama Suishō, Iguchi Kashū (1880–1930) and Mori Getsujō (1887–1961). 43 Matsumoto Matatarō, “Inakateki joseiga,” Bi, vol. 4, no. 7 (January 1913), p. 2. 44 Uchiyama, Tsuchida Bakusen ten, p. 45. 45 In addition to Hair, Bakusen submitted a second work to the government-sponsored salon that year, a painting featuring a courtesan and entitled Woman of Pleasure (Yūjo). This painting, however, was rejected, and is no longer extant. 46 Urahara Ariaki, Bijutsu Gahō November 1911. Quoted in Tsuchida Bakusen ten, (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1997), p. 171. 47 Tsunetomi’s Chirping Insects is reproduced as a monochrome photograph in the catalogue of this artist’s 2003 retrospective, Kitano Tsunetomi ten (Tokyo: Tokyo Station Gallery, 2003), p. 150.

48 Proof of the increasing respectability of Ukiyo-e in Kyoto at this time can be found by examining the graduation works created at the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts between 1894 and 1911, during which period not a single floating world-themed diploma painting was created by graduating students. Bakusen’s Hair of 1911 thus marks the very first Ukiyo-e themed graduation work produced at a painting school run by the Kyoto municipality. The critical successes of first Tsunetomi’s and then Bakusen’s updated Ukiyo-e at the Bunten destroyed any lingering doubts about the respectability of such themes, and from 1912 onwards, “floating world” imagery was commonly featured in diploma paintings by students at the Specialized School for Painting and the School of Fine Arts and Crafts, not to mention in works exhibited at the Bunten. Graduation works created by graduating students of Kyoto’s two art schools from 1895 into the 1920s and beyond can be found reproduced in Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku Bijutsugakubu (ed.), Gagakkō-Kyoto Geidai 100 shūnen kinen: Sotsugyō seisaku Nihonga shūei (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1980). 49 Takashina Shūji uses a different but related expression, “Japanism’s homecoming” (Japonisumu no satogaeri), to describe reverse-Japanism. Takashina Shūji, “Japonisumu no satogaeri,” Nihon kindai bijutsu no biishiki (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1986), pp. 483–492. 50 Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 16. 51 Ono Chikkyō, “Kokuten kaiko,” Tōjitsuchō, pp. 226–227. 52 The two lost works Chikkyō produced for the first Le Masque show were entitled Morning (Asa) and Festival (Matsuri), the latter of which is known through a black and white photograph reproduced in Ono Chikkyō: Sono hito to geijutsu (Tokyo: Yamatane Bijutsukan, 1995), p. 128. In fact, Chikkyō had originally intended Festival to serve as his diploma painting, but after finding the finished work unsatisfying, he submitted the critically acclaimed Southern Country as his official graduation work in its stead. Ono Chikkyō, “Fukaki ji’ai no shita ni,” Nihon Bijutsu, October 1942, cited in Shimada, Tanjō 110 nen botsugo 20 nen kinen ten: Ono Chikkyō (Kyoto: Asahi Shinbun, 1999), p. 209. 53 Kawakita Michiaki, Kyoshō to no taiwa (Tokyo: Shunshūsha, 1984), pp. 177–181. Kawakita’s interview with Chikkyō was originally published in Sansai, vol. 82 (December, 1956). 54 Arishima Ikuma’s article, entitled “Painter Paul Cézanne” (Gaka Pōru Sezannu), is believed to be the first written on the French artist in Japanese. Ikuma was a novelist and painter who left Japan in 1905 to study in Italy and France, and helped found the journal Shirakaba upon his repatriation in 1910. His essay on

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notes to pages 52–60 Cézanne, published under his birth name “Mibuma,” appeared in the journal’s second issue. See Arishima Mibuma, “Gaka Pōru Sezannu,” Shirakaba, vol. 1, no. 2 (May 1910). Cézanne proved to be a popular artist with the editors of Shirakaba, who reproduced a total of 80 Cézanne works in the journal’s pages between 1910 and 1923, the year Shirakaba was dissolved (the only artist to appear more often was Rembrandt van Rijn, with 90 works). For a complete list of the works by Western artists reproduced in the pages of Shirakaba, as well as the issues of the journal they appeared in, see ‘Shirakaba’ tanjō 100 nen: Shirakaba-ha no ai shita bijutsu (Osaka: Yomiuri Shinbun Osaka Honsha, 2009), p. 193. 55 Kishida Ryūsei, “Jibun ga kindaiteki keikō o hanareta riyu.” Kishida Ryūsei zenshū. vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1979), p. 463. As the title of this essay suggests, Ryūsei later shifted away from Cézannism and other modernist styles, exploring the expressive potentiality of realism instead. Alicia Volk further supports Cézanne’s seminal role in promoting Western artistic modernism in Japan when she writes, “More than any [Western] artist it was Cézanne who triggered a new way of thinking about art and expression.” Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism, p. 96. Volk goes on to note that art historian and critic Yanagi Muneyoshi referred to Cézanne and the other Post-Impressionists as “truly, our greatest educators.” Quoted from Yanagi Muneyoshi, “Kakumei no gaka,” Shirakaba vol. 3, no. 1 (April, 1912) in Volk, p. 96. 56 Nagai Takenori and Inaga Shigemi have both published essays that discuss the manifestation of characterism in Japanese art and art-related literature of the 1910s. Nagai’s observations are part of a larger consideration of several critical trends, including characterism, which he describes as extremely influential among Kyoto artists and critics in the 1910s. See Nagai Takenori, “1910–20 nendai Kyoto no bijutsu hihyō to geijutsuron,” in Iwaki Ken’ichi (ed.), Geijutsu/Katō no genba: Kindai Nihon geijutsu shisō no kontekusuto (Kyoto: Kōyō Shōbō, 2002), pp. 103–118. Inaga discusses characterism in relation to Cézanne’s reception in Japan in the 1910s and 1920s, with consideration given to the role of Shirakaba in propagating this critical trend at that time. See Inaga Shigemi, “Hassan to shūshuku, ‘Sezanu shugi: Chichi to yobareru gaka e no reisan’ Yokoyama Bijutsukan hoka,” Aida, no. 156 (January 2009), pp. 13–20. 57 As Kenworth Moffett explains, “The idea of art as the expression of personality originated with romanticism and is a common notion in the nineteenth century, familiar to us from the criticism of Ruskin, Baudelaire, and Fromentin.” Meier-Graefe’s contribution was the development of a more strongly articulated theory of personality, which he promoted in his immensely

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popular books. Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1973), p. 92. Kenworth Moffett points out that Meier-Graefe’s exaggerated exaltation of genius seems very dated today, and yet it was by virtue of his theories that critics were enabled to compare and co-evaluate artists and artworks based on a single common denominator of character expression. Ibid. Chikkyō’s grandfather, Shirakami Tan’an (d. 1888), won several awards for his Nanga paintings, but died the year before Chikkyō was born. Chikkyō’s father, Ono Saijirō (dates unknown), was also a skilled painter and calligrapher, and served as his son’s first teacher. Ikeda Hiroshi, “Ono Chikkyō no geijutsu to shōgai.” Ono Chikkyō: Gendai Nihonga zenshū, daisankan (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1981), p. 82. Chikkyō discusses other aspects of his youth in Okayama in Ono Chikkyō, “Jōkyōgo ichi, ni nen: Nyūmon no koro,” Tōjitsuchō (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1979), p. 22. This essay was reprinted from an article originally published in the magazine Atorie in April 1929. “Ru Masuku dai ikkai tenrankai hyō: ka,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 14 May 1911. Tanaka Hisao, Nihonga: Ryōran no kisetsu, pp. 108–109. Winter was reproduced under the title The Turnip Garden in a Bunten review published in the English art journal The Studio. See “Studio Talk,” The Studio, vol. 59, no. 246 (August, 1913), p. 247. I discuss Winter and the circumstances around its creation in more detail in my doctoral dissertation. See John Szostak, The Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai and Kyoto Nihonga Reform in the Meiji, Taishō and Early Shōwa Years (1900–1928), doctoral dissertation, University of Washington (2005), pp. 155–157. Quoted in Seki Chiyo, “Shanoāru, Rumasuku nado oboegaki: Meiji matsunen ni okeru Kyoto gadan no ichidōkō,” Bijutsu kenkyū, no. 232 (Jan. 1964), pp. 33–34. Kuroda Jūtarō, Kyoto Yōga no reimeiki (Kyoto: Koto Shoin, 1947), p. 211. Eventually Tanaka came to represent such important painters as Kishida Ryūsei and Yasui Sōtarō.

Chapter 3 1 Letter dated April 22, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 86–88. 2 Takeda Michitarō, Taishō no Nihonga: Gendaibi no genryū o saguru (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1977), pp. 31–32. 3 Ono Chikkyō, “Shōki no Bunten,” Tōjitsuchō, p. 214. 4 Chikkyō’s Harbor is owned by the Yokohama Art Museum, and is reproduced in Tokubetsu ten: Ono Chikkyō: Sono hito to geijutsu (Tokyo: Yamatane Bijutsukan, 1995), pp. 30–31.

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Statement quoted in Saitō Ryūzō, “Bunten no kaisai: Katsuyō ni kōko no danjō,” Nihon Bijutsuin shi. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan (1974), p. 148. The Bunten’s amended charter was published in several newspapers, including the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 1 June 1912. Fukuhara Ryōjirō, “Bunten shinsa hōshin,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 2 June 1912. “Bunten shinsa i’in,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 23 June 1912. Quoted in Takeda Michitarō, Taishō no Nihonga: Gendaibi no genryū o sagaru. (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1977), p. 36. Matsumoto Matatarō, “Bunten to seken,” Kyoto Bijutsu, no. 25 (November 1912), pp. 4–5. The petition is reproduced in Shimada Yasuhiro, “Nikakai no 80 nen,” Dai 80 kai kinen: Nika kaikoten (Osaka: Keizai Shinbun Osaka Honsha, 1995), p. 147. Among the founding members of the Nika Society were former Chat Noir member Tsuda Seifū, Yamashita Shintarō (1881–1966), Arishima Ikuma, Ishii Hakutei, Umehara Ryūzaburō, Kosugi Hōan (1881– 1964), and Sakamoto Hanjirō (1882–1969). The Nika Society remains active today as Japan’s largest independent oil painting organization. For more on the founding of the Nika Society, see Nika 70 nenshi, 1914– 1943 (Tokyo: Shadan Hōjin Nikakai, 1985), pp. 5–34. Quoted in Saitō Ryūzō, Nihon Bijutsuinshi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1974), p. 208, 211–212. Inten is an abbreviation of the Saikō Nihon Bijutsuin Tenrankai (“Reformed Japan Art Institute Exhibition”). Founding members of the reorganized Japan Art Institute included Nihonga painters Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Imamura Shiko, and Kimura Buzan (1876–1942). Oil painter Kosugi Hōan (1881–1964), was entrusted with organizing a Yōga division. A detailed history of the Japan Art Institute is found in Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunenshi, volumes 1–3 (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunenshi Hensanshitsu, 1989–1995). For an English summary of this institution’s history and its associated Inten exhibition, see Matsuura Akiko, “The Japan Art Institute,” Nihonga: Transcending the Past, pp. 102–103. In fact Bakusen originally was slated to join the travellers, but just prior to their departure date, Seihō requested Bakusen's assistance on the Higashi Honganji ceiling commission described in the Chapter 2, leading to Bakusen canceling his participation. Shimada Yasuhiro, “Taishōki geijutsu shichō no naka no Bakusen,” in Tsuchida Bakusen ten, p. 27. Ueda Bin, “Pōru Gōgan,” Bi, vol. 2, no. 4 (April 1910), pp. 1–10. For example, a Kyoto Hinode Shinbun report on the very first Nameless Society meeting in January 1910

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summarizes a talk in which Tanaka Kisaku spoke at length on Gauguin’s subjective artistic relationship with nature, quoting a statement Tanaka ascribed to Gauguin regarding how, if for some reason an artist sees green where no green is present, then the artist must not only paint green but choose the most exquisite shades of green available. This point is interesting, since it predates a very similar argument made by Takamura Kōtarō in his famous essay “Green Sun,” published in the journal Subaru four months after Tanaka’s lecture. This suggests that Takamura, too, may have had Gauguin in mind when he wrote his polemic defense of artistic subjectivity. The Hinode Shinbun summary of Tanaka’s talk is reproduced in Shimada, Kyoto no Nihonga, p. 381–82. Koizumi Tetsu (trans), “Noa noa: Gōgan saku kikō,” Shirakaba, vol. 3, nos. 1, 2, 4, 7, 8 (Jan, Feb, Apr, July, Aug 1911), vol. 4, nos. 1, 10 (Jan, Oct 1912). Uchiyama Takeo, “Tsuchida Bakusen: Seiga naru risōbi no sekai,” Tsuchida Bakusen ten, p. 12. Ikeda Shinobu, Nihon kaiga no josei zō: jendā bijutsushi no kanten kara (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1998), pp. 178–79. Tanaka Hisao, Nihonga: Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 127. Over his life Bakusen wrote more than 250 letters to Nomura, the earliest dated November 27, 1911, and the last March 16, 1936, less than one month before Bakusen’s death, evidence of the longevity of their relationship. Later Nomura became an important friend, confidant, and patron to Ono Chikkyō, and to several of Bakusen’s students as well, which suggest he was an important source of friendship and patronage to many Kyoto Nihonga painters in the Taishō and early Shōwa years. For more on Nomura Itsushi, see Tanaka Hisao, “Tsuchida Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” Bigaku Bijutsushi Ronshū, no. 4 (August 1984), pp. 9–10. Letter quoted in Ikeda, p. 181. Letter dated July 27, 1912. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 24–25. “Chihō ibun: Hachijōjima,” Fūzoku Gahō, no. 394 (March 1909), pp. 22–23. Quoted in Motoe Kunio, “Shima no onna,” Tsuchida Bakusen ten (1997), p. 49. Bakusen described this intended composition in a letter to Nomura sent in June, after various accidents and misfortunes forced him to abandon his plans for a camellia-themed work. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 35–36. “I could go alone,” he wrote to explain this decision to Nomura, “but I cannot speak the local dialect, and I fear I would be too lonely.” Letter dated January 8, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 29.

notes to pages 66–70 36 Letter dated June 23, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 36. 37 Letter dated June 23, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 36. 38 Kobayashi Wasaku, born in Yamaguchi prefecture, came to Kyoto around the same time as Bakusen. He studied at the Kyoto School of Fine Arts and Crafts, afterwards continuing at the Kyoto Specialized School for Painting. He made his Bunten debut in 1910s, and continued to find moderate success as a Nihonga painter. In 1918 he made the permanent switch to oil painting, studying under Kanokogi Takeshirō and Umehara Ryūzaburō. Over his subsequent five-decade long career as a Yōga artist, Kobayashi participated in several oil painting groups including the Spring Sun Society (Shunyōkai), and was recipient of several awards and honors. Iwase Yukio, Yui Kazuto (eds.), 20 seiki bukkō Yōgaka jiten (Tokyo: Bijutsu Nenkansha, 1997), p. 123. 39 Toyota Yutaka, Inagi Takuji, Tsuchida Bakusen no geijutsu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Ōraisha, 1937), p. 82. 40 Letter dated June 23, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 36. Some of Bakusen’s sketches for Abalone Divers are reproduced in Kindai Nihonga no isai Tsuchida Bakusen ten, (Kyoto: Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 1984), 116. 41 Toyota and Inagi, p. 84. 42 In a letter to Nomura written from Nakiri, Bakusen wrote that he achieved two auspicious things since his arrival. The first was the finalization of the scheme of his Bunten composition, and the second was his procurement of authentic ama to serve as his models. Letter dated June 23, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 36. 43 Kobayashi Wasaku, “Omoide,” Bi no kuni, vol. 12, no. 9 (August 1936), p. 56. 44 Toyota Yutaka and Inagi Takuji, Tsuchida Bakusen no geijutsu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Ōraisha, 1937), pp. 82–83. 45 Kobayashi Wasaku, “Omoide,” Bi no kuni, vol. 12, no. 9 (August 1936), p. 56. 46 Takamura Kōtarō, “Garon (1908 nen 12 gatsu) Anri Machisu,” Shirakaba vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1913), pp. 71–86. 47 In her discussion of Abalone Divers, Doris Croissant suggests Utamaro’s famous print from the 1790s of ama divers at Enoshima was a more important source for Bakusen than any of the studies he made in Nakiri. Doris Croissant, “Icons of Femininity: Japanese National Painting and the Paradox of Modernity,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Marybeth Graybill (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), pp. 123, 125. Certainly this print, or one of the great many others

28 Letter dated January 17, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 29–30. 29 Hamada Shigemitsu was an oil painter who based his practice in Nara for most of his later career, which at earlier stages wove in and out of Bakusen’s own. Originally from Kōchi, he moved to Tokyo in 1906 to study with Mitsutani Kunishirō (1874–1936) at the Institute of the Pacific Oil Painting Association (Taiheiyō Gakai Kenkyūjo) in Tokyo. In the early 1910s he moved to the Kansai region, and after forging a friendship with Mushanokōji Saneatsu and Shiga Naoya, he was invited to participate in a Shirakaba-sponsored exhibition in 1911. He also contributed to shows organized by both the Fusain Society (Fyūzankai, 1912–13) and the Nika Society in the early years of that decade. From 1921 to 1923 Hamada studied in France, where he again crossed paths with Bakusen, and after returning to Japan and settling in Nara, he contributed a painting to the Oil Painting Section of the Kokuga Society’s fifth exhibition on 1926. Later in his career he turned to Nihonga as well as oil painting, and taking advantage of Nara’s environs, he became particularly known for his renderings of deer, examples of which are kept at the Nara Prefectural Museum of Art. 30 Letter dated February 7, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 30–32. 31 Letters dated February 23 and March 9, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 30–32. 32 Three years earlier, Arai contributed an oil painting entitled Shima Peninsula (Shima Hantō), featuring Nakiri’s scenery, to the first Le Masque exhibition in 1910. This painting is lost today, but works by other Kansai-based artists in the 1910s and 1920s who featured Nakiri as their subject are plentiful, including Chigusa Sōun (1873–1944), Kamisaka Shōtō (1882–1954), Ono Chikkyō, Irie Hakō, Itō Hakudai (1896–1932), Idani Kenzō (1902–1970) and many other Nihonga and oil painters, as well as print artists like Kawase Hasui (1883–1957). Nakiri was renamed Daiō sometime in the 1950s, and when I visited the town in summer of 2005, its approach was marked with an arch inscribed with the sobriquet “Village of Painters” (Ekaki no mura) and the symbols of a palette and brush, demonstrating that, despite its name change, the town still embraced its century-old reputation as a location of choice among landscape painters. 33 Postcard dated April 27, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 33. 34 Letter dated May 21, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 33–34. 35 Described in letters dated June 6 and June 23, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 35–36.

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that feature the subject of ama, may have been inspirational, particularly when we consider Bakusen’s own voiced admiration for Utamaro, yet I would hesitate before suggesting that Bakusen’s prolific preparations in the form of hundreds of drawings and color studies of living ama were of less importance in preparing this composition than were Ukiyo-e print prototypes. A study of Bakusen’s sketchbooks preserved in the Sado History Museum reveals many of the individual ama poses were initially devised in these sketches and later transferred to and arranged on the screens in the desired composition. Most of these drawings have never been reproduced, aside from a few examples included in the catalogue Tsuchida Bakusen: Kindai Nihonga no risō o motomete, p. 46. For example, in a letter dated September 19, 1913, Bakusen speaks of working continuously on pigment application for several weeks on end, and apologizes to Nomura for not writing during that time, noting the only time he could take for his correspondence came while he waited for paint to dry. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 37–38. Letter dated 19 September 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 37–38. Matsumoto’s conversation with Bakusen was related in a letter to Nomura Itsushi dated October 26, 1913. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 37–38. Kōno Hakukoku, “Nika no shosaku,” Bijutsu Shinpō, vol. 13, no. 1 (November 1913), p. 18. Ibid. Satomi Shōzō, “Bakusen ron,” in Bakusen isakushū (Kyoto: Geisōdō, 1940), p. 18. Bakusen, postcard to Nomura, October 15, 1913; reproduced in “Shokan,” 37–38. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, future Kokuga Society founder Nonagase Banka is an example of one such artist who declined to submit to the Bunten, choosing instead to rely entirely on local Kyoto juried exhibitions, artist-patron networks and small-scale group or solo exhibitions for his professional development. Nagamine Baikei, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no hitobito,” Chūō Bijutsu vol. 4 no. 3 (March 1918), p. 79. Sales records from 1913 show that paintings exhibited in the Nihonga First Section that year sold for an average of around 600 yen, while works in the Second Section averaged between 300 and 500 hundred yen. The highest purchase price commanded that year for Nihonga paintings was 1000 yen, charged by four artists, Kobayashi Gokyō (1871–1928) and Matsubayashi Keigetsu (1876–1963) of the First Section, and Tabata Shūtō (1879–?) and Yamada Kōun (1878–1956) of the Second

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Section; all of these works were screens. Ono Chikkyō’s painting that year, entitled Autumn Wheat (Bakushū), sold for 100 yen, while Bakusen’s Abalone Divers was listed as “not for sale.” Taishōki bijutsu tenrankai shuppin mokuroku (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 2003), pp. 20–21. Letter dated May 8, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 51–52. Letter dated April 16, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 50–51. Bakusen’s letter does not mention the Kōfukuji exhibition specifically, but his trip to the Nara National Museum in spring of 1914 corresponds with the scheduling of this show. Letter dated May 26, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 52. Bakusen’s sketched copies of figures from the Kusha Mandara are reproduced in Tsuchida Bakusen: Sono hito to geijutsu (Tokyo: Yamatane Bijutsukan, 1973), p. 38. Quoted in Toyota and Inagi, pp. 89–90. For more information on Kudō Risaburō and his photographic cataloguing of early Japanese Buddhist art, see Nakata Yoshiaki, Kudō Risaburō: Kokuhō o toshita otoko, Meiji no shashinshi (Tokyo: Kōyō Shobō, 2006). Letter dated July 5, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 53–54. According to a letter he wrote to Nomura in July, Bakusen was apprehensive about hiring models for this project, probably because they would be required to pose nude. After several private inquiries failed to produce suitable models, he finally decided to publish an advertisement. His ad ran in the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, as well as the Kyoto editions of the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers, and read as follows: “Wanted: female model, around twenty years of age. Tall, medium build, with scholarly, virtuous appearance. Beauty not required. Monthly salary staring at two yen. For details, contact Tsuchida, Suitai-in.” Despite his doubts about finding a suitable model through newspaper advertisement, to his delight the very first respondent turned out to be ideal for his purpose. “I could not have found a better model even in Tokyo. She is a university graduate, a practicing Buddhist… She is also interested in painting, and wants to be of service [to the arts]… Within three days [of hiring her], two other women also answered the ad… and though they were both rather pretentious, they had their charms, and so I hired them as well on a short-term basis.” Letter dated July 5, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 53–54. Shioe Kōzō, “Blake and Young Painters of the Kyoto School,” paper delivered at International Blake Conference - Blake in the Orient, Kyoto University, 30 November 2003.

notes to pages 77–84 64 Letter dated October 8, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 56–57. 65 “Dai hakkai Bunten gappyō.” Bijutsu Shinpō, vol. 14, no. 1 (November 1914), pp. 48–49. 66 Letter dated May 8, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 51–52. 67 Letter dated October 13, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 57–58. 68 Letter dated August 7, 1915. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 72–73. Bakusen notes in an earlier letter dated July 5, 1914 that he his first meeting with Keisen to discuss the possibility of forming a new exhibition group had taken place on that day. 69 Letter dated January 14, 1915. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 63–64. 70 Letter dated August 7, 1915. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 72–73. 71 The discrepancy in the romanization of the place name Ōhara (written with a macron) and that of oharame (written without) reflects the development of a distinct local pronunciation of the latter word since its colloquialization. 72 Letter dated June 3, 1915. Katō Kazuo, “Tsuchida Bakusen no shokan,” Niigata Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu Kiyō, Vol. 25, no. 2 (March, 1984), p. 165. Seki Shinjirō was a businessman involved in Kyoto’s silk industry. According to Bakusen’s surviving correspondence, Seki had occasionally provided Bakusen with financial support since as early as 1911, when he commissioned a painting. Bakusen’s final letter to Seki is dated to 1935, the year before the artist’s death, showing their association was a long one, not unlike Bakusen’s relationship with Nomura. Other Nihonga painters benefited from Seki’s patronage as well, including Yasuda Yukihiko (1884–1978). For more on Seki, see Segawa Akira, “Kamo no keizaijin Seki Shinjirō to Nihongaka Tsuchida Bakusen, Yasuda Yukihiko.” Minzoku Shiryōkan da yori, vol. 17 (March 2010), pp. 4–5. 73 Bakusen wrote a letter to Seki Shinjirō that is undated but probably sent in May or June of 1915, in which he asks Seki for a loan of thirty yen to cover the modeling fees for the Ōhara women posing for the painting. Katō Kazuo, “Tsuchida Bakusen no shokan,” Niigata Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu Kiyō, Vol. 25, no. 2 (March, 1984), p. 165. 74 Uchiyama, “Tsuchida Bakusen: Seiga naru risōbi no sekai,” p. 13. 75 Letter dated August 7, 1915. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 72–73. 76 In 1890, Denis wrote, “Remember that a picture – before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot – is essentially a flat surface covered with

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colors assembled in a certain order.” Maurice Denis, “Definition of Neo-Traditionalism,” in Harrison, C. et al (eds.), Art in Theory 1815–1900 (London: Blackwell, 1998), p. 863. To Denis may also be ascribed the expression “subjective deformation,” which he used in 1909 to describe the artist’s creative impulse: “Art is no longer a visual sensation which we record, only a photograph… It is a creation of our spirit of which nature is only the occasion… Thus we set free our sensibility, and art, instead of being a copy, became the subjective deformation of nature.” Italics are original. Maurice Denis, “Subjective and Objective Deformation,” in Peter Selz and Herschel Browning Chipp (eds), Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 106. Furukawa Osamu, “Bunten to Inten no kansō.” Bijutsu Shinpō, vol. 15, no. 1 (November, 1915), p. 19. Ibid. Motoe Kunio, “Oharame,” Tsuchida Bakusen ten, p. 59. Weisenfeld, Mavo, p. 278. There are several reasons why Ōgai’s translation, which was published anonymously, attracted so little notice. First is the fact that he tacked it to the end of a much longer article describing the activities of other artists and writers, all of whom were far more prominent in Japan than Marinetti at that time, thus the Futurist manifesto may have been lost amidst flamboyant descriptions of Maxim Gorky’s activities in Mexico and Oscar Wilde’s travels in Italy. Furthermore, Ōgai seems not to have understood Marinetti’s manifesto very well himself, or his intentions in writing it; he introduced the text by describing it as “a meeting between Victor Hugo and Nietzsche,” and offered little that might suggest to readers that Futurism or its ideas were relevant to modern Japanese art. Asano Toru, Genshoku gendai Nihon no bijutsu, no. 8: Zen’ei kaiga (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1978), p. 117. The reference to Futurism, which in fact characterized the movement not as something laudable but as decadent and contemptible, appears in Murakami Monme, “Biko sen zakkan (9),” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 7 May 1914. Letter dated October 20, 1915. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 74–75. Matsumoto Matatarō, “Bunten to seken,” Kyoto Bijutsu, no. 25 (November 1912), pp. 1–5. Letter dated February 4, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 81–82. Letter dated April 1, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 84–85. For more on the role of yuna in Edo-era society and their function as a subject in art, see Saitō Yasuhiro, Yuna-zu: Shisen no dorama (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993).

notes to pages 84–98 87 Letter dated April 22, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 86–88. 88 Letter dated June 3, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 90–91. 89 Letter dated July 17, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 93–94. 90 Letter dated October 5, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 97–98. 91 An example of a Keichō-era painting featuring period beauties (including two women engaged in a game using Western playing cards, much like Bakusen’s maiko) is the so-called Matsu’ura Screens (Matsu’ura byōbu), owned today by the Museum Yamato Bunkakan, Nara. 92 Tanaka Hisao, Nihonga: Ryōran no kisetsu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Kōronsha, 1985), pp. 158–159. 93 “Dai jūkai Bunten Nihonga gōhyō: Sakusei, Fūi, Ryūsei, Suzukawa, Midori.” Bijutsu no Nihon, vol. 8, no. 11 (November 1916). 94 In 1916, the Ministry decided to replace the ranked awards system, which consisted of first, second, and third prizes, plus honorable mention, with a single award category, “Selected with Distinction,” presumably as a way to further reduce wrangling among Bunten judges. 95 Ono, “Kokuten no sōsetsu,” p. 220. 96 Letter dated October 19, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 100–101. 97 Ibid. 98 Letter dated October 19, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 100–101.

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Chapter 4 1 Nagamine Baikei, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no hitobito,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 4, no. 4 (March, 1918), pp. 74–75. 2 The announcement describes the group as a kōchakai, or “tea gathering,” which seems to have replaced ikenkai as the preferred term referring to public or semipublic thematic seminars or study sessions on cultural topics. Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 27 June 1916. 3 Letter dated December 17, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 108. 4 Many of Chikkyō’s early paintings, including Kiyamachi in the Rain and all subsequent works he exhibited at the Shinkoten and the Bunten between 1907 and 1918, are reproduced in the retrospective exhibition catalogue Tanjō 110 nen botsugo 20 nen kinen ten: Ono Chikkyō (Kyoto: Asahi Shinbun, 1999). 5 Letter dated October 8, 1914. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 56–57. 6 Taikan’s trip to Kyoto and his efforts to recruit young painters there to the Inten was related in the April 1915 issue of the journal Shin Kyoto, as referenced in Kanzaki

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Ken’ichi, Kyoto ni okeru Nihongashi (Kyoto: Kyoto Seiban Insatsusha, 1929), p. 159. Ono Chikkyō, Ono Chikkyō sakuhinshū. (Tokyo: Sansaisha, 1967). Quoted in Uezono Shirō, Tanjō 110 nen botsugo 20 nen kinen ten: Ono Chikkyō (Kyoto: Asahi Shinbun, 1999), p. 40. Inaga, “Hassan to shūshuku, ‘Sezanu shugi: Chichi to yobareru gaka e no reisan’ Yokoyama Bijutsukan hoka,” pp. 13–20. Furukawa Osamu, “Nihonga no bu.” Waseda Bungaku, no. 132 (November 1916), p. 77. Shihō, whose birth name was Yasuzō, was the second son of Rokō, and the second of five Sakakibara brothers to become painters; the others were Kazan (1885–1963, also known as Uson), Taizan (1890–1963), Shikō (1896–1969) and Hiroshi (1898–1948). Rokō specialized in birōdo yūzen, a dye-resist method of painting on cut velvet, the results of which were usually displayed tapestry-style. Birōdoga, as pictures painted/dyed on cut velvet came to be known, were featured in most of the major early domestic industrial expositions in Japan as a potential new product for export to the West. On May 31, 1914, shortly before his death, the newspaper Osaka Mainichi Shinbun ran a feature on Rokō, in which he is described as one of the top birōdoga artists in the Kansai region. The article, entitled “Speaking on Birōdoga” (Birōdoga no hanashi), is reproduced in Fuji Masaharu, Sakakibara Shihō (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1985), pp. 33–37. Sakakibara Shihō, Shihō geijutsukan (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1940), pp. 124–125. A survey of diploma paintings created by students of the Kyoto City School of Fine Arts and Crafts and from the Kyoto Municipal Specialized Painting School are featured in Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku Bijutsugakubu (ed.), Gagakkō-Kyoto Geidai 100 shūnen kinen: Sotsugyō seisaku Nihonga shūei. (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin (1980). Shihō’s diploma paintings for both of these schools are reproduced in Sakakibara Shihō ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1983), pp. 17, 19. Ono, “Kokuten kaiko,” p. 143. The Kyoto Hinode Shinbun summary of Tanaka’s lecture was published in three installments on April 10, May 1, and May 15, 1910. The summary is reproduced in Shimada Yasuhiro, Kyoto no Nihonga: Kindai no yōran (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1991), p. 385–399. Quoted in ibid, p. 389. James McNeil Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London: W. Heinemann, 1890), p. 143. Both Autumn Flowers and White Plum are reproduced in Sakakibara Shihō ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1983). Shihō later wrote that he was eager for his 1915 Bunten submission to achieve a level of

notes to pages 98–106

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29 Yoshida Yoshio, “Irie sensei o shinobu,” in Irie Hakō, Garon (Kyoto: Kitaōji Shobō, 1949), p. 198. 30 Furukawa Osamu was one of several art critics who commented on Kagaku’s study of the Hōryūji murals in preparation for Amitābha. Furukawa Osamu, “Gyokudō, Kagaku, Chikkyō, Bakusen no shishi to watashi to.” Geijutsu Shinpō, vol. 16, no. 1 (November, 1916), p. 45. 31 Kagaku’s copy of the Tibetan painting is dated 1912, but it is not known how it came about that Kagaku visited the Tokyo School of Art that year to make this study copy. It is possible that he began the copy in autumn of the previous year, for in 1911 Kagaku’s Bunten submission, a landscape entitled Around February (Nigatsu no koro) was accepted and awarded Honorable Mention, and Kagaku may have traveled to Tokyo at that time to attend the exhibition’s opening. The original work on which Kagaku’s copy was based remains in the collection of the Tokyo University of the Arts today, catalogued under the title Thirty-Five Penitent Buddhas (Sanjūgo zange butsu). 32 Murakami, “Shūkyō geijutsu,” Murakami Kagaku Garon, p. 129. 33 For example, Kazuyoshi Oishi wrote, “For [Yanagi], the most advanced concept of ‘imagination’ was to be found in Buddhism, and even in his later years, he continued to hold Blake to be the only artist that could represent the Oriental philosophy of ‘imagination’.” Kazuyoshi Oishi, “An Ideological Map of (Mis)reading: William Blake and Yanagi Muneyoshi in earlytwentieth-century Japan,” in The Reception of Blake in the Orient (London: Continuum, 2006) p. 186. 34 Senge Motomaro (1888–1948), a member of the Shirakaba group and a poet who frequently reproduced works by Blake in the literary journals he edited, reinforced this understanding of Blake as artist-mystic when he wrote, “For me, Blake was a painter of the flame of the spirit, who will forever be deeply revered as a genius who grasped the key to the mysteries of the divine beauty of heaven and earth. The height of his humanistic expressive art is like a star that will be an eternal guiding hand for us Eastern poets.” Senge Motomaro, “Bureku ni tsuite,” Taiyōka, vol. 10 (1927), p. 5. 35 Martin Collcutt, “The Image of Kannon as Compassionate Mother in Meiji Art and Culture,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of NineteenthCentury Japanese Art, edited by Ellen P. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), p. 198. 36 Murakami Kagaku, “Butsuzō zakkan,” Garon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan), p. 15. 37 For a translation of this tale, see Kyoko Motomochi Nakamura, Miraculous Stories from the Japanese

emotional strength that had previously eluded him, and toward this end he immersed himself in studies of Kano school painters Eitoku (1543–1590) and Sanraku (1559– 1635), and even turned to reading existential philosophy, particularly the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844– 1900) in order to understand how he might achieve the impact he so desired. Sakakibara, Shihō geijutsukan, p. 142. It seems that several Kyoto painters soured on Taikan and the Inten around this time for reasons that are not clear today. Earlier we learned that in 1914, Bakusen had also viewed the Inten as a possible viable alternative to the Bunten, and as such he seriously considered submitting his work there. The following year, however, he wrote scornfully of the Inten and particularly of Taikan’s gesture of entitling his friends, proclaiming to Nomura Itsushi, “I would turn down such an honor from the Japan Art Institute until there came a time when I could firmly sympathize with their attitude.” Letter dated October 25, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 102. Miyako no hito, “Kyoto gadan yori,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 2 no. 12 (December 1916). Wadaka Nobuji revealed Chikkyō as the author of this anonymous letter, which which he signed with the pseudonym “a person of Miyako” (Miyakobito). Wadaka, p. 90. Kobayashi Wasaku, “Murakami Kagaku no koto,” Sansai no. 129 (August 1960), p. 25. Soon after her son’s adoption, Kagaku’s mother remarried and severed contact with her previous family, including her son. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 75. Murakami Yoshiko, “Kagaku no kakei sono ta,” Tōei (February 1940), p. 19. Shimada Yasuhiro, “Murakami Kagaku no seigai,” Murakami Kagaku ten (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 1995), pp. 8–10. Murakami Kagaku Garon (Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1962), p. 343. Murakami Kagaku Garon, pp. 343–4. Kobayashi, p. 24. The All-Japan Fine and Industrial Arts Exhibition was jointly organized by the Kyoto Exposition Society and the Kyoto Art Association, and was held in the Okazaki Center for Trade and Industry in autumn of 1914. The source of the second title for this work is an inscription on the work’s storage box, written and signed by Irie Hakō. Hakō’s inscription reads, “Evening Cherries, exhibited at the Kyoto Okazaki Art Association exhibition, early Taishō. A startling and eye-opening work at the time of its creation.” Kawakita Michiaki, Murakami Kagaku (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1969), p. 85. Ono, “Kokuten kaiko,” p. 143.

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Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon Ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 178. Yashiro Yukio, “Kindai to Shūkyoga: Nihon no Bukkyōga ni tsuite,” in Utsukushiki mono e no shibo: Yashiro Yukio bijutsu ronshu, p. 47. Murakami Kagaku, “Butsuzō zakkan,” Garon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan), p. 16 Nagamine Baikei, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no hitobito,” Chūō Bijutsu vol. 4 no. 3 (March 1918), p. 79. Little is known about Nakagawa Rogetsu, and few works by him survive, partly due to the extensive firebombing of Osaka during the Pacific War, which destroyed countless works and records of this and many other Osaka-based artists. Wadaka, p. 16. Wadaka, p. 24. Wadaka, p. 28. “Banka” translates literally into English as “late flowers,” and is a term sometimes used in reference to blossoms that appear late in their season, as cherries might do after a particularly cold spring. As Banka related to Wakada, however, he chose his name after a thorny flowering plant commonly known as noibara, or more archaically, banka, a wild variety of brier rose. Wadaka, p. 52. Wadaka, p. 33. Wadaka, p. 41. Ono, Tōjitsuchō, p. 143. Taniguchi Kōkyō, “Kōkyō Gadan (ka),” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 16 April 1911. Takeuchi Seihō, “Tōmen no gadan no kanken (ka),” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 9 May 1911. Hanazono Shusai Banka Sakuhinten, quoted in Wadaka, p. 70. “Bijutsu kōgei,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 27 November 1916. Nakai Sōtarō, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no hitobito to Kansai gadan.” Quoted in Wadaka, p. 78. Paul Berry has noted the similarities between the reasons why Nihonga painters were drawn together in collectives like the Kokuga Society and how Nanga artists formed circles based upon a shared appreciation of Chinese literati culture. “Their bond,” writes Berry, “had less to do with fidelity to certain stylistic models than to a sense of romanticized individualism which they expressed through the aesthetic choices they made in their paintings and verse. That members of these literati gadan frequently had little in common stylistically signaled a new form of artistic practice in Japan, one that precluded the establishment of hereditary schools or firmly maintained stylistic allegiances.” Paul Berry, “The Relation of Japanese Literati Painting to Nihonga,” Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions, Michiyo Morioka and

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Paul Berry, eds. (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1999), p. 36 Letter dated April 7, 1917. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 114–115. Letter dated May 29, 1917. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 116–117. Two of these drawings appear as monochrome reproductions in Tsuchida Bakusen: Sono hito to geijutsu (Tokyo: Yamatane Bijutsukan, 1973), p. 69. Letter dated May 12, 1917. Katō Kiichi, “Tsuchida Bakusen no shokan,” Niigata Daigaku Kyōikubu Kiyō, vol. 26, no. 1 (October 1985), p. 162. Letter dated August 17, 1917. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 120–121. Ono Chikkyō, “Kokuten no sōsetsu,” p. 223. Sakakibara, Shihō geijutsukan, p. 143. A photograph taken of Kagaku and his wife in the artist’s studio provides a clue regarding the possible appearance of White-haired Old Man. In the background behind the couple, there appears a compositional study for a large-format exhibition work, possibly for Kagaku’s Bunten submission. The study features a woman dressed in what appears to be Nara-era (710– 794) court dress standing under flowering plum trees, accompanied by an elderly man with a staff. The photograph is reproduced in Murakami Kagaku ten (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 1984), p. 169. Letter dated October 24, 1917. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 122–123. Ibid. Yoshida, p. 199. Murakami Kagaku Garon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan “On-Demand” Reprint Edition, 2004), pp. 427–28. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 178. Ono, Tōjitsuchō, p. 88. Seisaku resembled Shirakaba insofar as its articles primarily focused on European art from the medieval period to the first years of the twentieth century, supplemented with essays on Western aesthetic philosophy and literary criticism. For a journal that was intended to serve as the Kokuga Society’s media organ, it published surprisingly little information or announcements regarding the society and its activities. Takeuchi Itsu characterized Seisaku as “a journal intended to resonate with the group’s efforts, as well as inspire and uplift Japanese artistic culture in general.” Takeuchi Itsu, “Seisaku henshū no koro,” in Tōka ryūsu, p. 64. A total of seventeen monthly issues were printed until publication of Seisaku was suspended in March 1921, when Nakai and Kuroda joined Bakusen and several other Kokuga Society members on a lengthy tour of Europe. For a discussion of the journal Seisaku and its impact in Taishō-era art and aesthetic thought, see Matsuo Yoshiki, “Zasshi

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Seisaku to Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai,” Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku, Geijutsu Shiryōkan Nenpō, no. 1 (1991), pp. 3–26. Tanaka, Nihonga: Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 170. Nakai Sōtarō, “Tomo ni aruita hitori to shite,” Nihon kaigaron, p. 323. Toyota and Inoki, p. 105. Nakai, “Tomo ni aruita hitori to shite,” p. 324.

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Chapter 5 1 “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December 1918), p. 15. 2 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Taitō to hōman no kibun,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December, 1918), p. 12. 3 The Japanese original text of the lyrics reads: Matsu ni naritaya, Arima no matsu ni / fuji ni makarete ne to gozaru / makarete fuji ni, fuji ni makarete / ne to, ne to gozaru, nasake Arima no hana no en. Bakusen supplies the lyrics in his artist statement for Bijutsu Gahō’s December 1918 issue. Bakusen also notes the centrality of this particular hauta song in guiding his vision for this painting in a letter he wrote to Nomura Itsushi on April 1, 1916. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” pp. 84–85. 4 “Kyoto gaka no hanki: Bunten no shinsa ni tai shite,” Osaka Jiji Shinpō, 13 January 1918. 5 We recall from Chapter Three how Seihō argued with Takashima Hokkai in 1911 over the latter’s desire to reject Chikkyō’s Bunten submission that year, causing Seihō to sit on the floor in front of the painting, refusing to budge until Hokkai relented. Hokkai was also at the center of the group of conservative judges responsible for the disastrous splitting of the Bunten’s Nihonga section into two separate sections from 1912 to 1914. 6 Kyotofu hyakunen no shiryō: 8, p. 211. 7 Kanzaki is best known today for an early seminal text on the history of Kyoto painting and the development of Kyoto Nihonga. See Kanzaki Kenichi, Kyoto ni okeru Nihongashi (Kyoto: Kyoto Seiban Insatsusha, 1929). 8 Kagaku diary, entry for January 14, 1918. Kyotofu hyakunen no shiryō: 8, p. 211. This appeal to the press seems to have worked, as neither the Mainichi or Asahi newspapers published articles on their new collective until the aftermath of the press conference. The only other mention in the press appeared in the January 14 issue of the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, in a short piece entitled, “The Chion-in Group Rises into Action: No Faith in the Bunten,” which basically rehashed the information reported in the Osaka Jiji Shinpō. See “Chion-in gumi no kekki: Bunten fushin no kekka,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 14 January 1918. 9 Murakami Kagaku Garon, p. 426. Murakami Jōichi, Kagaku’s son, made his father’s diary available for study at the request of the curators of the Kyoto

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Municipal Museum of Art on the occasion of the Kokuten Retrospective Exhibition held in January 1963. The diary was later published in the museum’s 1963 annual report. An annotated version of the diary appeared in Kyotofu hyakunen no shiryō: 8, pp. 209–218. Kagaku diary, entry for January 16, 1918. Kyotofu hyakunen no shiryō: 8, p. 212. “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Sengensho,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 4, no. 3 (March, 1918), p. 61. Wadaka, p. 110. Nakai Sōtarō, “Kokuten no omoide,” Nihon kaigaron, p. 320. Osaka Jiji Shinpō, 18 January 1918. Takeuchi Seihō, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai to jibun,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 17 January 1918. This recalls a maxim long repeated in the West of modern dwarves (in this instance, Taikan, Kanzan, and other progressive Nihonga painters) who stand on the shoulders of ancient giants (Japan’s premodern kokuga painters), by which means they are able to see all the further. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) expanded on this axiom in a way that Okakura and company might have appreciated: “It is in this manner that we may at the present day adopt different sentiments and new opinions, without despising the ancients and without ingratitude, since the first knowledge which they have given us served as a stepping-stone to our own… because by being raised by their aid to a certain degree, the slightest effort causes us to mount still higher, and with less pain and less glory we find ourselves above them.” Blaise Pascal, “Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum,” Minor Works by Pascal, translated by O.W. Wright. Vol. XLVIII, Part 2. The Harvard Classics (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14); Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/48/3/. Accessed 18 December 2012. Murakami Bunga, “Bunten hankō no shinseiryoku,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 16, 17 January 1918. Kuroda Hōshin, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai dai ikkai tenrankai o miru,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December 1918), p. 8. Ono, Tōjitsuchō, p. 88. The definition offered in the dictionary reads “Kokuga: Nihonga no koto,” and notes its use in an 1898 article in the newspaper Jiji Shinpō on a Nihonga collective associated with the Tokyo School of Art named the Suisho Society (Suishokai). Nihon Kokugo Jiten, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Shogakan, 2000), p. 569. In fact its usage dates much earlier than that, as seen in the essay “Discourse on Kokuga” (Kokugaron) written in the 1780s by Hirazawa Kyokuzan (1733–1791), a Confucian scholar and education reformer. Kyokuzan’s essay is a short, rambling reflection on the “three great lineages” of Japanese painting, namely, the Tosa, Kano and Sesshū schools, and the divergent Yamato-e and Chinese

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sources from which they emerged. No special consideration of the term “kokuga” is offered, however, and it may have been used in the title as a convenient way to group Japan’s three major schools, “Discourse on Kokuga” appeared in General Survey of Discourse on Japanese Painting (Nihon Gadan Taikan), a collection of Edo-era essays published by Sakazaki Shizuka (1887– 1978) in 1917, just a few months before the founding of the Kokuga Society. Sakazaki’s compendium remains an important source to this day, and has undergone multiple revised and reprinted editions in the century since its publication, most recently in 1980. See Sakazaki Shizuka, Nihon kaigaron taikei (Tokyo: Meichōkyūkai, 1980). This understanding of “kokuga” as a strictly historical category of art is reinforced in bijutsu banzuke, “art rankings” that have their origins in the early decades of the Edo period. At that time, publishers compiled lists to serve as popular guides for would-be connoisseurs among the emerging urban middle class, and in addition to banzuke of famous calligraphers and painters there were lists that ranked inns and restaurants, kabuki actors, and even brothels and their prostitutes. In the Meiji and Taishō periods, new kinds of banzuke were introduced, including those devoted to premodern, early modern, and contemporary painters for the benefit of art collectors and aficionados. Of the many artist banzuke produced in the late nineteenth century, only a small fraction used “kokuga” among their sundry lists and rankings, but when they did, the label usually referred to Edo-period painters known for inventing or excelling in styles considered indigenous to Japan, while contemporary Nihonga painters were invariably listed under separate heading. In short, “kokuga” was reserved to describe the oeuvre of great artists of the past, not the work of living painters. “Kokugakai no desoroi,” Asahi Shinbun, 27 June 1904. Satō Dōshin discusses the linguistic aspects of “kokuga” and other Meiji-era art terms in Satō Dōshin, “The Support Structure for Nihonga: ‘Nihon,’ ‘Kokka,’ ‘Kokumin,,’ ‘Taishū,’ and ‘Shimin,’” Nihonga of the 20th Century (Tokyo: The University Art Museum of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, 2000), p. 20. Kitazawa Noriaki, ‘Nihonga’ no ten’i (Tokyo: Brücke, 2003), p. 133. “Kagaku no nikki,” p. 211. Uchiyama Takeo, “Taishōki Kyoto gadan kakushin no kokoromi,” in Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaikoten, p. 10. The quotation is from a letter Chikkyō wrote in 1974 to Uemoto Toshirō, a Tsuchida Kyōson scholar, in response to an inquiry about Kyōson’s authorship of the manifesto. To this point, discussions of the Kokuga

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Society Manifesto have typically attributed authorship of that document to Tsuchida Kyōson, who in 1918 was a graduate student at Kyoto Imperial University, studying under famed professor of philosophy Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). The first person to assert Kyōson as the manifesto’s sole crafter was art historian Katō Kazuo, who named him as such in a 1960 study of the Kokuga Society; see Katō Kazuo, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai,” Rekishi no okeru geijutsu to shakai, edited by Nihonshi Kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1960), pp. 335–336. Chikkyō’s response to Uemoto invalidates Katō’s assertion, as do recollections by Nakai Sōtarō, who in an interview with Tanaka Kisaku stated that he, Murakami Kagaku, and Tsuchida Kyōson were the principle contributors to the manifesto text; both Chikkyō’s letter and Nakai’s statement are reproduced in Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 174. Bakusen’s letter is discussed in Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 174. The letter is dated January 13, 1918, which is significant, for it corresponds with the appearance of the offending Jiji Shinpō article, suggesting it must have been shortly after this meeting that Seihō spoke to the press and mentioned the group’s plans to publish a manifesto. The Japan Art Institute’s manifesto is quoted in Saitō Ryūzō, Nihon Bijutsuin shi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1974), 211–12. Specific “facilities” (shisetsu) are not listed, but would later include annual juried exhibitions, the publication of exhibition catalogues, and an affiliated arts journal, the aforementioned Seisaku, edited by Nakai Sōtarō. Asano Tōru, Genshoku gendai Nihon no bijutsu, vol. 8: Zen’ei kaiga (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1978), 117. Mori Ōgai selected the term “sengensho” as the Japanese equivalent of “manifesto” for his translation of Marinetti’s document, and by following suit, the Kokuga Society document appears to have been the first Japaneseauthored art document to consciously select the term “sengensho” for its title. Ōgai’s translation appeared in the May 1909 issue of the literary journal Subaru, and is discussed in Saitō, pp. 208, 211–12. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 115. There is also the question of whether Western manifesto authors, if confronted with the Kokuga Society Manifesto, would have accepted it as such. Perloff points to a letter written by the Futurist movement’s leader to a Swiss colleague, Henry Maassen, who had requested Marinetti’s critique a manifesto of his own composition. Marinetti responded that, while what Maassen had written was certainly interesting, it did not include the necessary elements to make it a

notes to pages 127–130

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manifesto as such. See ibid, p. 66. This anecdote, along with the many differences that exist between Marinetti’s examples and the Kokuga Society’s efforts, suggests that some aspect of the art of manifesto writing may have been lost in the translation of the Futurist prototype. For Perloff’s discussion of the Futurists’ manifesto writing practice in terms of personal myth making, see Ibid, p. 83. Yamamoto Shunkyo, “Bakusen kun nado no shinketsugō,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 18 January 1918. An example of Kyōson’s thought at this time is found in “Nature’s Altar,” published in September 1917 in the journal Kōin, four months prior to the composition of the Kokuga Society Manifesto. In this essay, Kyōson expands on ideas centered on the ideological premise that nature and freedom are one and the same (a reflection, perhaps, on Kant’s proposal in Critique of Judgement that, although nature and freedom are to be distinguished, it is important that a bridge between the two territories be maintained). In order to fully understand nature, he argues, one must cultivate a devotion to it, although the actual form of this devotion will differ with each individual. The only real privilege gifted to humankind by nature, he argues, is “freedom of the will” (ishi no jiyū), while the most important boon granted to artists is “creative spirit” (sōzō no seishin), yet while nature is the source of an artist’s prerogative to create, it is itself the very highest form of art, and to capture beauty exactly as it is experienced in nature is quite beyond human skill. Kyōson concludes his essay by describing Nature as “a great symbol, a profound mystery, a religion,” and characterizes the creation of art based upon nature as a spiritual act of devotion. The second section of the Kokuga Society Manifesto appears to be most strongly influenced by Kyōson’s thought. See Tsuchida Kyōson, “Shizen no seidan,” Kōin, September 1917. Reproduced in Tsuchida Kyōson zenshū, vol. 14, pp. 110–19. Although Nishida’s ideas on subjectivity shifted over the years, his views around the time of the Kokuga Society’s founding are explored in an essay entitled “The Realm of the Subject in Art” (Geijutsu no taishōki) of 1919, a reflection on ideas Nishida encountered in The New Painting (Die neue Maleriei), a book published by the German art historian Ludwig Coellen in 1912. In his article, Nishida characterizes the motivation of European Post-Impressionists as the “purification of objectivity,” yet depending on how thoroughly objectivity is pursued, he argued, such an attempt may in fact result in pure subjective expression, since art only appears and arises through the mediation of the self. The result is the paradox of an artwork in which extreme objectivity and extreme subjectivity manifest simultaneously.

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Nishida’s essay appeared in the second issue of Seisaku, the journal created and edited by Nakai Sōtarō and published as the Kokuga Society’s official media organ. See Nishida Kitarō, “Geijutsu no taishōki,” Seisaku vol. 1, no. 1 (1919), p. 4. For more on Nishida’s influence on art discourse in the early twentieth century, see Iwaki Ken’ichi, “Nishida Kitarō and Art,” Michael F. Marra (ed.), A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 259–84. Nakai Sōtarō later emphasized how crucial the financial contributions of their benefactors were for the management of the Kokuga Society’s exhibitions, noting, “Without our patrons, there would have been no Kokuten.” Nakai, “Tomo ni aruita hitori to shite,” p. 324. Kagaku’s and Shihō’s names appear almost exclusively in the diary’s description of efforts to find financial backers, however it is difficult to imagine Bakusen playing anything other than a central role in fundraising, considering the closeness of his relationships with several of the Kyoto’s wealthiest businessman and known arts patrons. Art historian Kawakita Michiaki provided a possible solution to this puzzle by noting that Kagaku’s diary was partially expurgated some time in the past, and suggests that Kagaku or his family may have redacted sections of the diary out of respect for the privacy of donors. Kawakita Michiaki, Murakami Kagaku (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1978), p. 74. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 178. Kyotofu hyakunen no shiryō: 8, p. 209. Ibid, p. 215. The purchasing power of 1 yen in 1918 was approximately US$25 by today’s standards, a value estimated by comparing a range of commodity prices then and now. Thus Amagasaki’s proposed loan was worth roughly $500,000 in terms of today’s dollar value, and Yoshida’s annually gift worth about $25,000 a year. For prices of commodities in Japan in the 1910s, see Shūkan Asahi Shūhenbu (eds.), Nendanshi nenpyō: Meiji Taishō Shōwa (Asahi Shinbunsha, 1988). Nakai, “Tomo ni aruita hitori to shite,” p. 324. Ibid. Harada Jiro, “Studio Talk – Tokyo,” The Studio, vol. 56, no. 235 (Oct. 1912), p. 335. Murakami Kagaku Garon, p. 214. “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” p. 15. Takehisa Yumeji, “Kokuten jinbutsu no ki,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 4 November 1918. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 191. “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” p. 15. The complete geographic distribution of non-member artists selected for the first Kokuten breaks down as follows: seven from Kyoto, three from Tokyo, two from Osaka, and three from various other regions of Japan.

notes to pages 130–140 51 Quoted in Katō Kazuo, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai,” Rekishi no okeru geijutsu to shakai, pp. 335–336. 52 Nakai Sōtarō, “Kansa ni tachiatte,” Bijutsu Shinpō vol. 1 no. 2 (Nov. 1918), p. 29. 53 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no keika to taido,” in Toshirō Kōno (ed.), Hennentai Taishō bungaku zenshū, 7 (Taishō 7 nen) (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2001), p. 552. Bakusen’s article was originally published in the December 1918 edition of the journal Taiyō. 54 “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” p. 15. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 The Chogyū Prize was named for Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902), an important Meiji-era essayist, art critic, and patron of the arts. After his death, his friends and followers founded the Chogyū Society (Chogyūkai), which published a compendium of the Chogyū’s written lifework. Proceeds were used to establish the memorial Chogyū Prize, the funds for which were distributed to several different non-government exhibition groups such as the Inten, the Second Section Society, and beginning in 1918, the Kokuten, with the expressed intent that they be used to reward and support talented young artists. News of the creation of the Chogyū Prize was reported in “Shūhōgon,” Bijutsu Shūhō, vol. 3, no. 6 (October, 1915), p. 3. 58 Sakakibara Shihō, “Ao’ume ni tsuite.” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December, 1918), p. 14. 59 The question of when “bijinga” came to be adopted as the recognized marker for this painting theme has not been conclusively addressed, although it appears to have entered the language of Japanese art studies as a thematic rubric only in the late nineteenth century. “Bijin,” however, is found in the titles of printed and painted artworks featuring female beauties as early as the mid-17th century, as seen in Hishikawa Moronobu’s (?–1694) illustrated printed book Bijin e-zukushi (‘Collection of Pictures of Beauties’) published circa 1650. 60 Rosina Buckland, Shunga (London: British Museum Press, 2010), p. 49. 61 Haruyama Takematsu, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai hyō (jō),” Asahi Shinbun, 27 November 1918. 62 John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), p. 80. 63 Inaga Shigemi, “‘Shi no tsūyaku wa kanō ka?’ Kin Soun ‘Chōsen shishu’ no yakugyō to Tsuchida Bakusen no fūzokuga o tsunagu mono - shokuminchi kaiga no dokkai no tame ni,” Aida no. 90 (June 2003), p. 9. 64 Tsuchida, “Taitō to hōman no kibun,” p. 12. 65 Takeuchi Seihō, “Kokuten no geijutsuteki shakaiteki igi,” Mainichi Shinbun, 26 November 1918. 66 Saitō Yori, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai tenrankai hyō,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 4, no. 12 (December 1918), p. 32.

67 Haruyama Takematsu, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai hyō (jō),” Asahi Shinbun, 27 November 1918. 68 Kagaku wrote that after the earthquake, he made inquiries to discover the fate of the painting. “In the end I never learned for sure, but there was no evidence it was ever removed from Shinbashi Station, so I can only believe it was burned.” Murakami, Murakami Kagaku Garon, p. 80. 69 Ono Chikkyō, “Kokuten no sōsetsu,” Tōjitsuchō, p. 219. 70 Murakami Kagaku, “Seija no shi,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December, 1918), p. 13. 71 Ibid. 72 Takeuchi Seihō, “Kokuten no geijutsuteki shakaiteki igi.” Mainichi Shinbun (Kyoto-Shiga edition), 26 November 1918. 73 “Some have commented on a resemblance to Giotto, or Fra Angelico in the painting,” Kagaku wrote in his statement, “but these guesses all land wide of the mark. There was no outside influence; the work is entirely my own.” Murakami, “Seija no shi,” p. 13. 74 Murakami Kagaku, “Kigan,” Murakami Kagaku Garon, pp. 18–19. 75 The shasei drawings recorded in Banka’s sketchbook during this part of the trip are dated August 5, 1918. The page also includes the names of the four maiko who served as Banka’s models: Mameroku, Kiminu, Hinawaka and Kichifuku. Wadaka, p. 120. 76 Nonagase Banka, “Chikara o kanzuru shikisai,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December 1918), p. 13. 77 Ibid, p. 12. 78 “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” p. 15. 79 Hamada Masuji, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai o mite,” Bijutsu Shinpō, vol. 1, no. 2 (November 1918), p. 33. 80 Date Nankai, “Kyoto no Bunten to Kokuten,” Mainichi Shinbun (Osaka edition), 30 November 1918. 81 Hamada, p. 33. 82 Nonagase, Bijutsu Gahō, p. 13. 83 Okuda Saburōsuke, “Banka-shi no ‘Shoka no nagare,’” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 4, no. 12 (December 1918), p. 56. 84 Okuda, p. 57. Banka also recognized the weakness in his rendering of light and colors reflecting off water. “There are some areas, such as where the water flows amidst rocks in the river bed between the two women, where I wanted to produce particularly exquisite results. But in the end, I simply was unable to paint these areas in the ways I envisioned them.” Nonagase, p. 13. 85 Okuda, p. 56. 86 Ono Chikkyō, “‘Nakirimura’ ni tsuite,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December 1918), p. 14. It is worth noting that Chikkyō uses the Japanese term jikkei rather than shinkei, both of which can be literally translated in English as “true view,” but these two words carry nuances that prevent them from being synonymous. “Shinkei,”

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notes to pages 140–150 106 The character of Scarface Otomi is recognized by her distinctive red-striped makeup, representing the horrific wounding she suffers when, in the course of the play, her face and body are slashed with a knife as punishment for an illicit love affair. Kitagawa Hisashi, “Yokogushi seisaku no haikei: Taishō 4 nen sotsugyō seisaku setsu songi.” Miru, no. 271 (1990), p. 7. 107 Kobayashi Chū, “Mikan no bi: Kainoshō Tadaoto zakken,” Kainoshō Tadaoto to Taishōki no gakatachi (Chiba: Chibashi Bijutsukan, 1999), p. 8. 108 From a set of notes entitled “Hitotsu no e no rekishi” written in Tadaoto’s own hand, quoted in Taishō Nihonga no tensai: Ikizuku seinen Kainoshō Tadaoto ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1997), p. 129. It is not known what happened to this first 1915 version of this composition, but another work, dated to 1916, is kept in the collection of the Hiroshima Museum of Art, and is reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Kainoshō Tadaoto to Taishōki no gakatachi (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 1999). The eerie nature of the woman’s expression in Tadaoto’s 1916 version led to its selection as the dust jacket image for the 1999 horror novel Dreadful Fright (Bokke kyōtei) by Iwai Shimako. 109 Kurita, pp. 64–65. 110 Ueda Jūzō, “Kokuten hihyō, sono ichi,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 10 December 1918. 111 For a general history of the Shimabara district, see Ishihara Tetsuo, Kyō Shimabara Tayū (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1991). 112 The photograph is one of several that were found among the notebook, sketchpads and reference materials collected from Shinsō’s belongings after his death. Today these materials are part of the Hoshino Garō collection, Kyoto. 113 “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” p. 16. 114 See Kuroda Hōshin, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai dai ikkai tenrankai o miru,” p. 10. 115 See Fuji Yoshiaki, Otagaki Nakoto (eds.), Kyoto no shiki: Kindai meiga 100 sen (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1995), p. 146 116 Michiyo Morioka, Changing Images of Women: Taishō Period Paintings by Uemura Shōen (1875–1949), Itō Shōha (1877–1968), and Kajiwara Hisako (1896–1988). Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington (2005), pp. 253–54. 117 Tsuchida, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no keika to taidō,” p. 550. 118 Okamoto Ippei, “Kokuten no tachiba,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 4, no. 12 (December 1918), p. 59. 119 In 1918 the Bunten charged fourteen sen per adult, while general admission for the Kokuten was fifteen sen, with discounts for students and group rates. To put prices in perspective, in 1918 a pack of Golden

as found, for example, in the title of the Nanga painting True View of Mt. Asama (Asamayama shinkei-zu) by Ike no Taiga (1723–76), was used in the Edo era for paintings of landscapes rendered in a realistic manner, but to which painters often altered, added or removed features of a known location in order to capture and express the inner truth of the particular place. Despite his affinity for Nanga painting, Chikkyō may have used “jikkei” instead of “shinkei” in relation to Village of Nakiri in order to signify his intention to capture an accurate visual record of the landscape with a minimum of subjective interpretation. 87 Years later Chikkyō remarked that his understanding of Cézanne at the time he executed Village of Nakiri was flawed and incomplete, which confirms the French painter’s influence on this work, even if Chikkyō himself was dissatisfied with the results. Ono Chikkyō, “Kokuten no sōsetsu,” p. 219. 88 Ibid. 89 Sakakibara, Shihō geijutsukan, pp. 144–145. 90 Sakakibara Shihō, “Ao’ume ni tsuite,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December, 1918), p. 14. 91 Sakakibara, “Ao’ume ni tsuite,” p. 14. 92 Fujikake Shizuya, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai tenrankai ni tsuite,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December, 1918), pp. 3–4. 93 Fujikake, p. 4. 94 Yoshida Yoshio, “Irie sensei o shinobu,” in Irie Hakō, Garon. Kyoto: Kitaōji Shobō (1949), p. 199. 95 Fujikake, p. 6. 96 Yumiko Goto, “The Shirakaba Group and Early Reception of Blake’s Art Works in Japan.” Paper delivered at International Blake Conference: Blake in the Orient, Kyoto University, 29 November 2003. 97 The Leonardo da Vinci caricature sketches appeared in vol. 8, no. 6 (June 1917) of Shirakaba. 98 Shimada Yasuhiro, “Kanada Warō no koto,” Kanada Warō kaikoten (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1991), p. 8. 99 Shimada, “Kanada Warō no koto,” p. 9. 100 Fujikake Shizuya, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai tenrankai ni tsuite,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 42, no. 2 (December, 1918), p. 7. 101 Shimada, “Kanada Warō no koto,” p. 8. 102 Saitō, p. 36 103 Date, “Kyoto no Bunten to Kokuten,” Mainichi Shinbun, Osaka edition, 30 November 1918. 104 “Chogyūshō no Kanada Warō shi,” Jinbun, 1 January 1919. Quoted in Kanada Warō kaikoten, p. 39. 105 Teikoku Senbi, no. 54 (August 25, 1915). Quoted in Kitagawa Hisashi, “‘Yokogushi’ seisaku no haikei: Taishō 4 nen sotsugyō seisakusetsu songi,” Miru, No. 271 (January 1, 1990), p. 6.

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notes to pages 150–166 Bat cigarettes cost seven sen. See Nedanshi nenpyō: Meiji Taishō Shōwa, (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1988), 126. 120 Sale prices of paintings at the first Kokuten were published in “Dai ikkai Kokuten ikken,” p. 16. 121 The highest priced painting at the 1918 Bunten was a work entitled Oxen (Ushi) by Golden Bell Society member Hirafuku Hyakusui which sold for ¥4,000. A price list for Bunten paintings sold that year is included in Taishōki bijutsu tenrankai shuppin mokuroku (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 2003), pp. 39–40. 122 Nedanshi nenpyō, 51. 123 Tsuchida, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no keika to taidō,” p. 551.

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Chapter 6 1 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Naizai no bi to iu koto,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 43, no. 2 (December 1919), p. 12. 2 Ishii Hakutei, “Kokuten o hyōsu” in Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 5, no. 12 (December 1919), p. 10. Ishii had previously addressed this issue as early as 1906, when he noted that Nihonga was a worthy medium that was neither superior nor inferior to Yoga, but it had its limits nevertheless, and was incapable of achieving realistic depiction as effectively as oils. For a discussion of this earlier manifestation of the debate over Nihonga, Yōga and the pursuit of Western-style realism, see Mikiko Hirayama, “Ishii Hakutei on the Future of Japanese Painting,” Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 3 (Fall 1996), p. 58. 3 Kawakita Michiaki and Takashina Shūji, Kindai Nihon kaigashi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1978), p. 259. 4 An abridgement of the published regulations is included in Kawakita and Takashina, p. 262. 5 “Teikoku Bijutsuin no shinsetsu ni oite,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 5, no. 10 (Oct. 1919), p. 2. 6 J. Thomas Rimer, “‘Teiten’ and After, 1919–1935,” Nihonga, Transcending the Past, p. 44. 7 For more on the Gold Bell Society, see Taishōki no Nihonga: Kinreisha no gonin ten (Tokyo: Nerima Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1995). 8 A small monochrome photograph of Heihachirō’s Snow is reproduced in Shimada Yasuhiro, “Fukuda Heihachirō,” Fukuda Heihachirō ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 2007), p. 10. 9 Shimada Yasuhiro, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai to sono gakatachi,” Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no zenbō (Kyoto: Kōson Suiko Shoin, 1996), p. 178. 10 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 202. 11 Both this painting and Bakusen’s Song of Spring (1907) were lost in a fire at the Bandai Kankō Hotel in 1969. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 66. 12 In the letter, Bakusen held out hope that he would have the opportunity to complete the painting prior to the opening of the Kyoto leg of the exhibition, although it is not known whether or not he accomplished this. Letter

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dated November 9, 1919. Tanaka, “Bakusen no Nomura Itsushi ate shokan,” p. 138. Takamura Masao, “Dai nikai Kokuten no inshō,” in Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 5, no. 12 (December 1919), p. 24. Tsuchida Bakusen, “Naizai no bi to iu koto,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 43, no 2 (December 1919), p. 12. Tsuchida Bakusen, “Kokuten shokan,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 44, no. 2 (December 1920), p. 6. Ishida Kōtarō, “Kokuten o hyōsu,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1920), p. 14. Nakada Yōnosuke, “Kokuten hyō, sono ka,” Kyoto Yomiuri Shinbun, 11 November 1919. Haruyama Takematsu, “Kokuten hyō (3),” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 6 November 1920. Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, note 32, p. 364. Ono Chikkyō, “Shizen ni tai shite,” Seisaku, special Kokuten edition (November 1919), p. 6. The unsuccessful Bunten submission was a screen painting entitled Gokayama in the Rainy Season (Gokayama no uki), housed today in the Kasaoka Municipal Ono Chikkyō Memorial Museum. Kinoshita Etsuko notes that in 1916 Chikkyō published a travelogue entitled “Clearing the Mountains” (Hietsu sanchū) in the newspaper Asahi Shinbun, in which he discusses the trip. The essay is illustrated with one of the sketches he made on this trip, which served as his source for 1916’s Gokayama in the Rainy Season, and later for 1919’s Gokayama in Summer. Kinoshita Etsuko, Tanjō 110 nen, Botsugo 20 nen kinnenten: Ono Chikkyō (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1999), p. 47. Ono Chikkyō, “Shizen ni tai shite,” Seisaku, special Kokuten edition (November 1919), p. 6. Moriguchi Tari, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai hyō,” p. 16. Op. cit. Ono Chikkyō, “Kyakkan shukan yūgō no kaiga,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 43, no. 2 (December 1919), pp. 14–16. Ono Chikkyō, “Shina to Nihon no sansuiga,” Bijutsu Shashin Gahō, vol. 1, no. 8 (November 1920). Quoted in Ono Chikkyō: Sono hito to geijutsu (Tokyo: Yamatane Bijutsukan, 1995), p. 124. Tsuchida, “Kokuten shokan,” pp. 5–6. Ono Chikkyō, “Kokuten shokan,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 44, no. 2 (December 1920), p. 5. Sakakibara, Shihō geijutsukan, pp. 145–146. Moriguchi, pp. 21–22. Murakami wrote his Kokuten review that year using the penname “Bungasei.” Bungasei, “Kokuten hyō, sono chū,” Hinode Shinbun, 1 December 1919. Sakakibara, Kachōga o egaku hito e (Tokyo: Chūō Bijutsusha, 1924), pp. 165–166. Sakakibara, Shihō geijutsukan, pp. 101–102. Sakakibara Shihō, Kachōga o egaku hito e (Tokyo: Chūō Bijutsusha, 1924), p. 165.

notes to pages 167–180 50 For a different interpretation of Kagaku’s Nude and his concept of the Eternal Woman, see Doris Croissant, “From Madonna to Femme Fatale: Gender Play in Japanese National Painting,” in Croissant, Doris, Mostow, Joshua S. and Yeh, Catherine (eds.), Performing, Nation: Gender Politics in Literature, Theatre and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880–1940 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), pp. 281–282. 51 Haruyama Takematsu, “Kokuten hyō (1),” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 4 November 1920. 52 Okamoto Ippei, “Murakami Kagaku shi saku Rafuzu no rafu to kusushi no shinsashitsu ni okeru taiwa,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 6 no. 12 (December 1920), p. 29. 53 Shohō jissō can be roughly translated as “the principle of eternal and unchanging reality,” while shabasoku jakkō jōdo is the concept that “the corrupt world is in fact the pure land of eternally tranquil light.” Both expressions appear among the writings of Nichiren (1222–1282), a Buddhist priest who taught devotion to the Lotus Sutra. 54 Nonagase Banka, “Kokuten shokan,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 44, no. 2 (December 1920), p. 6. 55 Nonagase Banka, “Ningenmi o motsu sakuhin,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 43, no. 2 (December 1919), p. 12. 56 Ibid. 57 Ishii Hakutei, “Kokuten o hyōsu,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 5, no. 12 (December 1919), p. 13. 58 Takehisa Yumeji, “Kokuten jinbutsu no ki,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 4 November 1919. 59 Nonagase Banka, “Kokuten shokan,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 44, no. 2 (December 1920), p. 6. 60 This account is based on an unidentified newspaper article entitled “Fishermen Returning at Sunset, Nonagase Banka’s Painting for This Year” (“Nonagase Banka kotoshi no sakuhin Yūhi ni kaeru gyofu), quoted in Wadaka, pp. 132–134. 61 Wadaka, p. 135. 62 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 224. 63 Nakada Yōnosuke, “Kokuten hyō,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 9 November 1920. 64 The comment was the cause of Whistler’s the famous libel trial against Ruskin, discussed in Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval, James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), pg. 215. 65 Haruyama Takematsu, “Kokuten hyō (3).” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 6 November 1920. 66 Yamamoto Kanae, “Kokuten no moteifu,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1920), p. 22. 67 The letter is quoted in Wadaka, p. 137. 68 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 221 69 Harada, p. 273–274. 70 Ishii, “Kokuten o hyōsu,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol 5, no. 12 (December 1919), p. 10. 71 Harada, pp. 209–210.

35 Murakami Bunga, “Kokuten hyō, sono yon,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 30 November 1920. 36 Ishida, pp. 7–8. 37 The 1919 Kokuten catalogue and all contemporaneous reviews refer to this painting as Hidaka River (Hidakagawa). The box in which the work is stored at the Tokyo National Museum, however, is inscribed Kiyohime at Hidaka River (Hidakagawa Kiyohime zu) in Kagaku’s own hand, which suggests the longer title was used by the artist. 38 The story appears in three setsuwa compilations, the Dai Nihonkoku hokenki, (abbreviated as Hokke genki), dated to around 1040, the Konjaku monogatari shū, from around 1120, and Genkō shakuho from 1332. For an English translation of the Kokke genki version, which differs in some ways from later theatrical dramatizations of the tale, see Yoshiko Dykstra (trans.), Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra from Ancient Japan: The Dainihonkoku hokekyōkenki of Priest Chingen (Hirakata: Kansai University of Foreign Studies, 1983), pp. 145–46. 39 For a more detailed account and analysis of the Noh play “Dōjōji,” see Susan Blakeley Klein, “When the Moon Strikes the Bell: Desire and Enlightenment in the Noh Play Dojoji,” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1991), pp. 291–322. 40 Three Dōjōji-related programs were dramatized for Bunraku, “Modern Version of Dōjōji, Scales of the Snake” (Dōjōji Genzai Uroko, 1742), “The Beloved Wife’s Multicolored Bridle” (Koi nyōbō somewake tazuna, 1751), and “Sunset Cherry Blossoms on the Hidaka River” (Hidakagawa iriai zakura, 1759). 41 Bungasei, “Kokuten hyō, sono chū,” Hinode Shinbun, 1 December 1919. 42 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Hidakagawa, Akamatsu nado,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 5, no. 12 (December 1919), p. 26. 43 Today Eikyū’s 1917 Bunten painting, entitled Dōjōji, is part of the Himeji City Museum of Art collection. Akutagawa's comparison was particularly provocative since Eikyū served on the first Teiten jury that same year. 44 Ono Chikkyō, Tōjitsucho, p. 182. 45 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 212. 46 This essay, written in 1920, is reproduced in Murakami Kagaku, “Kuon no josei,” Garon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 2004), pp. 51–52. 47 Murakami Kagaku, “Kuon no josei,” p. 51. 48 Grace Tiffany, Erotic Beasts & Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny (Baltimore: University of Delaware, 1995), pp. 23–24. 49 Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–2. At the heart of Nead’s book, however, is a critique of this ideal, which she argues is established only through the containment of female sexuality.

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notes to pages 180–193 72 Tsuchida, “Kokuten o miru hito ni,” Osaka Mainichi Shinbun, Kyoto-Shiga supplement, 18 December 1920. 73 Yamamoto Kanae, “Kokuten no moteifu,” Chūō Bijutsu vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1920), p. 21. 74 Tsuchida, “Kokuten o miru hito ni.” Osaka Mainichi Shinbun, Kyoto-Shiga supplement, 18 December 1920. 75 Yamamoto, p. 21. 76 This section of Shinsō’s diary is quoted in Hoshino Keizō, “‘Kyō no maiko’ o megutte,” Bijutsu Kyoto, no. 26 (March 2001), pp. 48–49. 77 Hoshino, p. 50. 78 Shinsō’s maiko appear to be engaged in the lesserknown version of the game called Kitsune-ken (“Fox Fists”), in which players make gestures representing a fox (two hands held up to represent fox ears), a hunter (hands poised as if holding a rifle), or a village headman (two hands placed open on the lap, to receive the fox’s dead body from the hunter): fox beats headman, hunter beats fox, headman beats hunter. 79 Hoshino, p. 52. 80 A photograph of the 1923 version of Three Maiko Playing Ken, now lost, is reproduced in the Teiten exhibition catalogue of the same year. 81 Kinoshita Nobuo, Nedanshi nenpyō: Meiji Taishō Shōwa (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1988), p. 67. 82 Nonagase Banka, “Omotta mama,” Seisaku, vol. 1, no. 11 (November 1919), p. 23. 83 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Kokuten o miru hito ni,” Osaka Mainichi Shinbun, Kyoto-Shiga supplement, 18 December 1920. 84 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Kansa no shokan: Seimei o tsukanda e,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1920), p. 25. 85 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Kokuten kaisai ni tai shite.” Kyoto Yomiuri Shinbun, 31 October 1920. 86 Tanaka Hisao, Nihon Bijtsu no enshutsusha: Patoron no keifu (Kyoto: Shinshindō Shuppan Kabushiki Kaisha, 1981), p. 345. 87 Ono, Tōjitsuchō, pp. 223–224.

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17 Chapter 7 1 The previous year Bakusen exhibited two works at the Japan Art Exhibition, consisting of a small-scale Nihonga study entitled Summer Maiko (Natsu no maiko), lost today, and a work in tempera entitled Women of Paris (Pari no onna). This exhibition and the latter painting are discussed in this chapter. 2 Kosugi Misei, “Kokuten no dai yon kai o hyōsu, sono jō,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 3 December 1924. 3 Ishii Hakutei, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no shosaku o hyōsu,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 11 no. 1 (January 1925). 4 Bakusen mailed a picture postcard dated February 2, 1922 to his wife, which features Cimabue’s famous mural portrait of Saint Francis from Assisi’s Basilica di

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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San Francesco. In Bakusen’s message on the card, he describes his delight at discovering Cimabue, who was little known in Japan at the time. This postcard, along with many others Bakusen sent from Europe, were donated by his wife to the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, where they are kept today. Ono Chikkyō, “Bakusen-kei o omou,” Bakusen kisaku shu (Kyoto: Geibundō, 1940), p. 5. Kanzaki, pp. 206–207. “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai geijutsu kōenkai,” Osaka Asahi Shinbun, 27 January 1921. Ono, Tōjitsuchō, pp. 223–224. Nonagase Banka, “Nihongaka no gaiyū,” Osaka Yomiuri Shinbun, 7 March 1921. Segi Shin’ichi, Kakarezaru bijutsu (Tokyo: Geijutsu Shinbunsha, 1984), p. 234. Wadaka, p. 140. Segi, p. 236. In 1923, the year after his return to Japan, Kuroda compiled and published these essays and sketches in a compendium entitled European Art Pilgrimage Travelogue. Kuroda Jūtarō, Ōshū geijutsu junrei kikō (Osaka: Jūjikan, 1923). The journey is summarized in Kuroda in Ōshū geijutsu junrei kikō. Ibid, pp. 1–49. Many of these letters and postcards have been collected and published with annotations by Tanaka Hisao. See Tanaka Hisao (ed.), “Tsuchida Bakusen no Yōroppa kara no shokan,” Bigaku bijutsushi ronshū (Seijō Daigaku Daigakuin Bungaku Kenkyūka), no. 6 (July 1987) and no. 7 (October 1988). Letter dated November 23, 1921. Reproduced in Tanaka (ed.), “Tsuchida Bakusen no yōroppa kara no shokan,” p. 45. For the yen-franc exchange rate for 1921, see Lawrence H. Officer, “Exchange Rates Between the United States Dollar and Forty-one Currencies.” 2011. MeasuringWorth.com. Accessed 27 December 2012. URL. Letter dated November 25, 1921. Tanaka (ed.), “Tsuchida Bakusen no yōroppa kara no shokan,” pp. 45–46. Letter dated March 25, 1922. Tanaka (ed.), “Tsuchida Bakusen no yōroppa kara no shokan,” p. 112. Segi Shin’ichi, Kakarezaru bijutsu (Tokyo: Geijutsu Shinbunsha, 1984), p. 244. Ibid, p. 234. Ibid. Wadaka, p. 142. Ono, Tōjitsuchō, p. 57. Bakusen wrote that he simply could not sympathize with Turner’s paintings, although he agreed that Turner was probably the most important artist that England ever produced. As for Blake’s “spiritual art,” he wrote, “I prefer Redon.” Quoted in Kashiwagi Kayoko,

notes to pages 193–198

25 26

27 28 29

30 31

32

33

34

35

Kakitsubata: Tsuchida Bakusen no ai to geijutsu (Osaka: Osaka Daigaku Shuppan Kai, 2003), p. 47. For a detailed discussion of Bakusen’s period in Vétheuil, see Kashiwagi, pp. 64–72. Kashiwagi, p. 47. Keigetsu’s and Hakō’s expenses were covered by three-month education grants from Kyoto Prefecture, offered to them in their capacities as teachers at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting and the Kyoto School of Fine Arts and Crafts, respectively. Yoshida Yoshio, “Irie sensei o shinobu,” in Irie Hakō, Garon (Kyoto: Kitaōji Shobō, 1949), p. 200. Kashiwagi, p. 134. Quoted in Kanai Tokuko, “Tsuchida Bakusen no tai’ō seikatsu to sore igō,” Hikaku Bunka, no. 5 (1960), p. 39. “Bijutsukai shōsoku,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1922), p. 155. Kagaku’s contribution, a work entitled Cintamanicakra (Nyoirin Kannon) is no longer extant, but a photograph of the painting is reproduced in Murakami Kagaku ten (1995), p. 285. Murakami Kagaku ten (1984), p. 171. Chūsei died shortly after this exhibition closed. For more information on Inagaki Chūsei and Moritani Nanjinshi, see Harada Heisaku, Shimada Yasuhiro, Uezono Shirō (eds.), Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no zenbō (Kyoto: Kōson Suiko Shoin, 1996), pp. 212, 320–321. By comparison, the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake, which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, was larger than the Great Kantō Earthquake but less deadly, resulting in extensive damage or destruction to 125,000 buildings and 15,694 deaths. The 2011 quake was centered 130 km offshore of the city of Sendai, Miyagi prefecture, thus most of the extensive devastation and loss of life were the results of tsunami events in the aftermath. “Heisei 23 nen (2011 nen) Tōhoku Chihō Taiheiyō Oki Jishin no higai jōkyō to keisatsu sochi.” 2012. Japanese National Police Agency. URL Accessed 27 December 2012. J. Charles Schencking, “The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan.” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2008), p. 296. Sonia Ryang, “The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan’s Modern National Sovereignty,” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 4 (Fall 2003), p. 732. The Amakasu Incident involved the murder of prominent anarchist Osugi Sakae (1885–1923), the feminist writer Itō Noe (1895–1923), and Osugi’s six-year-old nephew as ordered by military police Lieutenant Amakasu Masahiko (1891–1945). In the Kameido Incident, police in the Kameido district of Tokyo arrested and summarily executed several prominent union leaders and social activists. Andrew Gordon, Labor and

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40 41 42 43 44

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Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 178–180. Takeda Michitarō, Taishō no Nihonga: Gendaibi no genryū o saguru (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1977), pp. 189, 190. For a comprehensive study of the Great Kantō Earthquake and the cultural responses it triggered, see Gennifer Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 11 January 1923. Wadaka, p. 156. We recall that Kagaku recommended Tadaoto’s Comb Aslant for the Chogyū Prize at the first Kokuten, and Tadaoto later acknowledged Kagaku lent him important support throughout his period of association with the Kokuga Society. Kainoshō Tadaoto, “Suisō: Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no koro,” Sansai, no. 346 (June 1976), pp. 17–18. Shimada, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai to sono gakatachi,” p. 179. “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai Shunkiten,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 5 May 1925. Ibid. Yomiuri Shinbun, 31 July 1925. Quoted in Wadaka, p. 162. There are several sources to which readers may turn if they are interested in learning more about the history of oil painting and other media at the Kokuten, although these are somewhat limited. Shimada Yasuhiro discusses aspects of Umehara Ryūzaburō’s early training and career, including brief mention of his role in organizing the Kokuten’s oil painting section, in Shimada Yasuhiro, Asai Chū to Kyoto Yōgadan (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1995). Harada Heisaku wrote about print artists who participated in the later Kokuten exhibitions in Harada Heisaku, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai ga teiki suru shomondai,” Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no zenbō, pp. 188–194. I have not come across any discussions of the fine craft artists included at the seventh Kokuten, but Hida Toyojirō discusses the ceramics artist Tomimoto Kenkichi, his interest in the Mingei movement, and how these aspects influenced his efforts to develop Japanese ceramics in the early twentieth century, in Hida Toyojirō, Kōgei ni wa seikatsu kanjō ga fūin sarete iru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 2003). Even less information is available concerning sculpture at the Kokuten or the art of Kaneko Kuheiji, who contributed several works to the exhibition. For a general survey of Japanese sculpture of the Meiji era onwards, readers can turn to Sakai Tadayasu, Kindai no chōkoku (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1994). For readers interested in learning more about Kaneko Kuheiji, he published a book of essays in 1932, although the text makes no mention of his activities as a Kokuten participant. See Kaneko

notes to pages 198–207

45 46

47

48

49 50

51 52

53 54

55

Kuheiji, Shinchōso no tsukurikata (Tokyo: Shunyōdō, 1932). Takeda, p. 189. Wadaka Nobuji notes that until the Kokuten set this precedent, no government- or non-government juried exhibitions had ever charged exhibition fees to artists after selecting their submissions for inclusion. Wadaka, pp. 167–168. Kawashima Yūichirō, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no ichiin to shite,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 12, no. 1 (January 1926). That year, the new Kokuga Scholarship Award (Kokuga shōgakkin) of ¥1000 was divided into six awards, divided across the two painting sections, with winners Komatsu Hitoshi and Tamaki Suekazu representing the Nihonga Section. Komatsu suggests that Bakusen invented the phrase “pan no e” after encountering an equivalent expression during his stay in France. See Komatsu Hitoshi, “Naiki Seibei-san no koto,” Asahi Gyarari, no. 26 (Autumn 1976). Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 307. Information for this chart taken from Taishōki bijutsu tenrankai shuppin mokuroku (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 2003), pp. 333–342. Tsuchida Bakusen, “Kokuten no gaikan,” Osaka Asahi Shinbun, 4 June 1928. This identification of Tenjuan as the shasei source for the garden landscape in Maiko in a Garden was made by Chikkyō in an essay for the journal Tōei, July 1936, quoted in Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 274. Although Tenjuan’s garden looks rather different today than it appears in Bakusen’s painting, in 1995 Shiosawa Daitei, the chief abbot of Nanzenji, recalled how the garden appeared when he arrived at the temple in 1928, around the time Bakusen would have made his sketches. At that time, the trees, though large today, had just been planted, and thus were then smaller and more widely spaced, as reflected in Bakusen’s painting. Kyōraku no shiki: Kindai meiga 100 sen (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1995), p. 148. Kyōraku no shiki: Kindai meiga 100 sen, p. 148. Inaga Shigemi, “Hassan to shūshuku, ‘Sezanu shugi: Chichi to yobareru gaka e no reisan’ Yokoyama Bijutsukan hoka,” Aida 156 (January 2009), 13–20. Bakusen’s study for Maiko in a Garden is kept today at the Musée Nationale des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet in Paris. Salmon and Sardines (Shake to iwashi) and the figure study for Women of Ōhara are both in the collection of the Adachi Museum of Art, Tokyo. Poppies (Keshi) is owned by the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Art. All four of these works are reproduced in the retrospective Kokuten exhibition catalogue Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaikoten (Kyoto: National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 1993).

56 Shimada Yasuhiro, Tsuchida Bakusen ten (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1997), p. 108. An example of this kind of treatment might be Fra Angelico’s Entombment from circa 1440, owned by the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. 57 Inaga Shigemi, “‘Shi no tsūyaku wa kanō ka?’ p. 9. 58 Croissant, Icons of Femininity, p. 130. 59 Luncheon on the Grass was one of the paintings donated to the Musée du Louvre in 1906 by Étienne MoreauNélaton (1859–1927). Today it is part of the Musée d’Orsay collection. 60 Émile Zola, “A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet,” Review du XX Siècle, January 1867. Quoted in Art in Theory, 1815–1900, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.) (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), p. 561. 61 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Naizai no bi to iu koto,” Bijutsu Gahō, vol. 43, no. 2 (December 1919), p. 12. Bakusen was mocked for this statement, and for the results of his experiment with complete objectivity by critics; for example, Takehisa Yumeji referred to Bakusen’s Three Maiko as “Yōgajo (“oil painting ladies”) nicely arranged like apples all in a line” Takehisa Yumeji, “Kokuten jinbutsu no ki,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 4 November 1919. 62 In his study of Sakakibara Shihō, Fujii Masaharu describes a letter addressed to Shihō from Bakusen, dated June 1924. Bakusen’s letter relates a conversation he had recently shared with Kagaku, in which Kagaku noted his desire to seclude himself from worldly affairs, to which Bakusen responded by guaranteeing he would not make trouble for him if Kagaku truly desired to leave the group. In the same envelope is another letter, this one from Kagaku, in which he explains that his extremely poor health precludes him from being too active, and that the best he could do would be to contribute small works. Fuji Masaharu, Sakakibara Shihō (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1985), pp. 138–145. 63 Of the four paintings Kagaku exhibited at the 1924 Kokuten, Bodhisattva (Bosatsu) is lost today, with no surviving photograph, nor is it illustrated in the Kokuten catalogue, which suggests it was a late addition. Buddha Preaching (Seppō no zu) is extant today in a private collection, as are Double-flowered camellia (Yae tsubaki) and Pumpkin and Eggplant in Lingering Summer Heat (Kaka zangyō). Each of these surviving works is less than 50 centimeters (20 inches) on its longest side. They are reproduced in Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaikōten, pp. 74–75. 64 Kagaku, “Yama,” Murakami Kagaku Garon, p. 183. 65 Kawaji Ryūkō, “Kokuten no sakuhin o hyōsu, sono yon,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 14 March 1926. 66 Murakami Jōichirō, “Kaidai to shiryō: Kagaku nikki ni tsuite,” Murakami Kagaku Garon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 2004), pp. 436–438.

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notes to pages 207–216 86 Ono Chikkyō, “Shunkō ni tsuite,” Shōbi, special Kokuten edition (January 1925). Quoted in Wadaka, p. 158. 87 Nakamura Gakuryō, “Kokuten o miru,” Atorie, vol. 3, no. 4 (April 1926), pp. 41–42. 88 Blue Sea and Billows are in the collection of the Kasaoka Municipal Chikkyō Art Museum, and are reproduced in Tanjō 110 nen botsugo 20 nen kinen ten: Ono Chikkyō (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1999), pp. 54–55. 89 Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 21 May 1929. Quoted in Wadaka, p. 179. 90 Wadaka, p. 180. 91 Kawano Tōkoku, “Kokuten sungen,” Bi no kuni, vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1928). Quoted in Wadaka, p. 179. 92 Uchiyama Takeo, “Tsuchida Bakusen: Seiga naru risōbi no sekai,” p. 16. 93 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 277. 94 Kawaji Ryūkō, “Kokuten gaihyō,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 14, no. 6 (June 1928), p. 44. 95 Sakakibara, Shiho Geijutsukan, p. 105. 96 Sesshū’s Screen of Birds of Four Seasons is reproduced in Sesshū: Botsugo 500 nen tokubetsuten (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2002), p. 145. 97 Ono Chikkyō, “Umi no bi,” Atorie, vol. 4, no. 8 (August 1927). Quoted in Ono, Tōjitsuchō, p. 17. 98 Uezono Shirō makes this parallel between Chikkyō and Bashō in Uezono Shirō, “Tōjitsuchō,” Tanjō 110 nen, botsugo 20 nen kinenten: Ono Chikkyō, p. 57. Chikkyō was a life-long practitioner of haiku, the modern equivalent of haikai, and later in life produced a number of paintings that interpreted Bashō’s verse, including the series illustrating his famous Narrow Road to the Distant North in the 1970s. Chikkyō discussed this series and his admiration for Bashō in Ono Chikkyō, “Oku no hosomichi kushō-e,” Sansai, no. 348 (August 1976), reproduced in Ono, Tōjitsuchō, pp. 74–77. 99 Kawaji, “Kokuten gaihyō,” p. 39. 100 Tsuchida, “Kokuten no Nihonga.” Osaka Yomiuri Shinbun, 7 May 1928. 101 Tsuchida, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no keika to taido,” p. 552. 102 “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaisan,” Kyoto Hinode Shinbun, 19 July 1928. 103 “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaisan happyō,” Osaka Asahi Shinbun, 31 July 1928. 104 See Appendix I for the full text of the dissolution notice. 105 Today the Kokuga Society consists of five sections dedicated to oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, fine crafts, and photography. 2013 marked the opening of the 87th Kokuten, where works by a total of 808 participants were exhibited. “Dai 87 Kokuten nyūsensha

67 Murakami Kagaku ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2005), p. 293. 68 The letters exist in draft form only, and it is not known if Kagaku ever sent them to Nakai. The drafts are reproduced in Murakami Kagaku Garon, pp. 432–433. 69 The resulting volume was Sakakibara Shihō Gashū (Osaka: Takashimaya, 1924). 70 Sakakibara Shihō, Kachōga o egaku hito e (Tokyo: Chūō Bijutsusha, 1924). 71 White Herons on Snowy Willow is owned today by the Shimane Art Museum. Lotuses is in a private collection. Both are reproduced in Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaikōten, pp. 69, 86. 72 Kosugi Misei, “Kokuten no dai yon kai o hyōsu, sono jō,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 3 December 1924. 73 “Tenkai sen to suru bijutsu no aki: Teiten no mae ni shite, Kokuten no mae ni shite,” Daimai Bijutsu, vol. 3, no. 10 (October 1924), p. 49. 74 Sakakibara, Shihō Geijutsukan, p. 103. 75 Ibid, pp. 102–3. Shihō expresses further admiration for the “classical majesty” of Assyrian lion reliefs, in an essay he illustrates with several of his own shasei sketches of zoo lions, in Sakakibara, Kachōga o egaku hito e, pp. 45–49. 76 Ishii Hakutei, “Shunyōkai to Kokuten,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 13, no. 6 (June 1927), p. 70. 77 The monochrome photograph of Four Children, taken from the 1924 Japan Art Exhibit catalogue, is reproduced in Yume miru gaka: Nonagase Banka (Kasaoka: Kasaoka Shiritsu Chikkyō Bijutsukan, 2002), p. 90. 78 Wadaka, p. 158. 79 Ishii Hakutei, “Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no shosakuhin o hyōsu,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 11, no. 1 (January 1925). Quoted in Wadaka, p. 158. 80 Kawabata Ryūshi, “Kokuten o miru,” Shōbi, special Kokuten edition (January 1925). Quoted in Wadaka, p. 158. 81 Nonagase Banka, “Egakaite mitai ga ni tsuite,” Mizue, no. 255 (May 1926). Quoted in Wadaka, p. 170. 82 Uezono Shirō, “Banka no gagyō,” Yume miru gaka: Nonagase Banka (Kasaoka: Kasaoka Shiritsu Chikkyō Bijutsukan, 2002), p. 77. Banka completed Women Fetching Water sometime after the dissolution of the Kokuga Society in 1928. Today it is part of the Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art’s collection, and is reproduced in its finished state in Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaikoten, p. 92. 83 Nakamura Gakuryō, “Kokuten o miru,” Atorie, vol. 3, no. 4 (April 1926), p. 42. 84 Wadaka, p. 173. 85 Ishii Hakutei, “Shunyōkai to Kokuten,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 12, no. 6 (June 1927), p. 70.

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notes to pages 216–227 ichiran.” 2013. Kokugakai. Accessed 31 July 2013. URL . 106 Fujimoto Shōzō, “Tsuchida Bakusen sensei,” Sansai, no. 169 (January 1964), p. 20. 107 Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, pp. 301–302, 307. 108 Kurita Isamu discusses the “filthy painting affair” in his study of Tadaoto. Kurita Isamu, Nyonin sanka: Kainoshō Tadaoto no shōgai (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1987), pp. 86. 109 According to Kurita Isamu, Woman with Balloon was destroyed by fire. Kurita, p. 91. 110 Kainoshō Tadaoto, “Suisō: Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no koro,” Sansai, no. 346 (June 1976), pp. 21–22. 111 Ibid. 112 Senba Ken, “Tsuchida Bakusen to Sannanjuku,” Sansai, no. 294 (August 1972). Quoted in Tanaka, Ryōran no kisetsu, p. 306. 113 Sakakibara, Shihō Geijutsukan, p. 39. 114 Sakakibara Shihō, “Deshi o toranai riyū,” Kachōga o egaku hito e (Tokyo: Chūō Bijutsusha, 1924), pp. 5–6. 115 “Bijutsushi jō kūzen no sōkyo: Meiji Taishō Meisakuten hirakaru,” Asahi Shinbun, 4 June 1927. 116 Toyoda Yutaka, “Wareta garasu: Kokuten o nageku,” Bi no kuni, vol. 4, no. 9 (September 1928), pp. 36–37. 117 Ibid.

6 7

8

Conclusion 1 Furukawa Osamu, “Bakusen ron: Hihyōka no mita Bakusen,” Chūō Bijutsu, vol. 3, no. 12 (December, 1917), pp. 78, 79. 2 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Joki to Ryoki no kachōga,” Bijutsu Shashin Gahō, vol. 1, no. 6 (July 1920). 3 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Sō Gen mandan,” Daimai Bijutsu, vol. 8, no. 8 (Aug. 1929). 4 Tsuchida Bakusen, “Hana no shasei,” Atorie, vol. 9, no. 8 (Aug. 1932). 5 In 1926 the Kyoto City Specialized Painting School was moved from its Okazaki facilities to a new campus at Imakumano in the Higashiyama district. Two decades later, the school expanded to include sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, and other media, and was renamed the Kyoto City Specialized School of Art (Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Senmon Gakkō). The school was reorganized into a university in 1950, at which time its designation changed to the Kyoto City College of Fine Art (Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Daigaku), and again in 1969 when the college added a Music Department and was rechristened the Kyoto City University of the Arts (Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku). The university moved to its present location at Kutsukake in western Kyoto in 1980. Among Shihō’s colleagues there was Nakai Sōtarō, who became director of the school in 1942, and Irie Hakō, who also taught at the university.

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“Nenpu,” Sakakibara Shihō ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1983), pp. 125–135. The activities of avid Kagaku collectors, including the Kagaku-kai, as well as other aspects of Kagaku’s later life and practice are discussed in Shimada Yasuhiro, “Shinchi to naru hi”, Murakami Kagaku (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997), pp. 83–85. Another example of an avid Kagaku collector is Kajikawa Yoshitomo (b. 1941), art dealer and director of the Kahitsukan Kyoto Museum of Art. Kajikawa recalls his fervor for Kagaku’s work began in 1963, when he encountered Prince Siddhartha Meditating under a Tree (Taishi juka zenna, 1938) at a retrospective of the artist’s work at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Over the next eighteen years, Kajikawa collected Kagaku’s works compulsively ( “I must have appeared to be slightly out of my mind,” he recalls) until he had accumulated more than 220 paintings. These became the cornerstone of the Kahitsukan collection, and a selection of Kagaku works remains on permanent display in the museum’s “Kagaku Room.” “Kaikan kinen Murakami Kagaku ten,” Kajikawa Yoshitomo. Kahitsukan Kyoto Gendai Bijutsukan. URL. Accessed 1 January 2013. Nonagase Banka, Kita Mankoku kyōsen o egaku (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1936). For a discussion of Banka’s travels in Manchuria, see Wadaka, pp. 198–208. “Ryaku nenpu,” Nonagase Banka ten (Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture: Tanabe Shiritsu Bijutsukan, 2008), pp. 132–135. Tanaka Atsushi, “Introduction,” ‘Kaiga’ no seijuku: 1930 nendai no Nihonga to Yōga (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1994), p. 22. Mushanokōji Saneatsu, “Seikōkai o mite,” Atorie, vol. 10, no. 5 (May 1933), p. 71. Bakusen participated in two Pure Light Society exhibitions, in 1933 and 1935, showing two small works at each. The Pure Light Society carried on for more than a decade after Bakusen’s death, holding nineteen exhibitions in the span of twenty-one years, and was discontinued only when organizer Gotō passed away in 1954. Aida Yuen Wong, Visualizing Beauty: Gender and Ideology in Modern East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), p. 109. A selection of Bakusen’s sketches from the 1935 trip, housed at the Kyoto City University of Arts Museum collection, and the preparatory shita-e for Gisaeng House are reproduced in Tsuchida Bakusen: Kindai Nihonga no risō o motomete (Niigata: Niigata Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2009), pp. 160–161. Matsuda Genji, an outspoken nativist, was troubled by the predominance of Western-inspired styles of art at the government salon, and believed the Teiten had moved too far from its cultural mission of promoting

notes to pages 227–231 Japan’s own artistic traditions. For this reason, Matsuda orchestrated the cancelation of the Teiten in 1935 in order to carry out a restructuring of the selection jury. Matsuda died in 1936 before the reforms could be entirely implemented, but his measures still managed to temporarily throw the Japanese art world into chaos. The management of the government salon was temporarily returned to the Ministry of Education, and for 1936 the government salon was simply called the “Juried Exhibition” (Kansaten). Reforms were finally negotiated and put in place, afterwhich the New Bunten (Shin Bunten) ran continuously from 1937 to 1948, with the exception of the 1940 show, named the “Commemorative Exhibition” (Hōshukuten) in honor of the 2600th year of the Imperial calendar. A general overview of the Teiten’s history is given in Matsuura Akiko, “Teiten Nihonga no fūsaku,” Teitenki no Nihongaten: Tokyo sakka no kattō to mosaku (Tokyo: Nerima Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1992), pp. 7–11. 16 In a letter dated March 16, 1936 Bakusen expressed dismay that he was forced to oppose his former mentor Takeuchi Seihō with regard to their respective positions on Teiten reform. However, Bakusen’s name appears along with those of fellow Imperial Art Academy members Nishimura Goun and Nishiyama Suishō on a jointly written letter dated May 24, 1936 addressed to the Minister of Education regarding the proposed reorganization of the Teiten, in which they voice their support of the recent proposal tendered by Takeuchi Seihō, suggesting either he or Seihō had a change of heart over the intervening months. Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai kaikoten, p. 187. 17 Uchiyama Takeo, “Tsuchida Bakusen: Seiga naru risōbi no sekai,” p. 18. It was a time of multiple losses for the

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Japanese art world; Tokyo-based Nihonga painter Hayami Gyoshū (1894–1935) had passed away the previous year, while Kyoto painter Tomita Keisen, who nearly joined Bakusen in the mid-1910s in founding an anti-Bunten group, died less than a month after Bakusen. Toyota Yutaka and Inoki Takuji, Tsuchida Bakusen no geijutsu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Ōraisha, 1937), pp. 153–162. This calls to mind the “van Gogh effect” described by anthropologist Natalie Heinich, an expression she coined to describe the mythic posthumous reimaging of Vincent van Gogh, who in life was seen as a difficult individual of questionable painterly talent, only to be transformed after death into a sensitive genius and painter-saint who was tragically taken from the world before his time. Natalie Heinich, The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 141. Shimada Yasuhiro, “Taishōki geijutsu shichō no naka no Bakusen,” Tsuchida Bakusen ten (1997), p. 31. Tsuchida Bakusen, “Zakkan,” Bakusen gashū (Tokyo: Yamamoto Gasendō, 1921), p. 162. Ibid. Kinbara Seigo, “Teiten no Nihonga,” Atorie, vol. 7, no. 11 (November, 1930). Matthew Larking, “The Pan Real Art Association’s Revolt Against the ‘Beauties of Nature,’” in Minh Nguyen (ed.), New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013). The Pan Real Manifesto is reproduced in the Pan Real Art Association’s website. Pan Real Bijutsu Kyōkai. “Pan Real Sengen.” Accessed 3 January 2013. URL .

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Index NOTE: bold numbers refer to pages with relevant illustrations reorganization as Le Masque 45–46 See also Tanaka Kisaku, Le Masque Chat Noir (Parisian cabaret) 42–43 Chavannes, Pierre Puvis de 135, 175, 176, 195 Chigusa Sōun 22, 67, 68, 257 Chikujōkai (painting juku) 20–22, 22, 27, 30, 47, 81, 91, 178, 186, 248, 253 See also Takeuchi Seihō Chion-in, Kyoto (Buddhist temple) 40 Chion-in School (Chion-in ha) 91, 263 See also Sūtai-in, Higashiyama painters Chishakuin, Kyoto (Buddhist temple) 13, 79, 81 Chogyū prize (Chogyūsho) 130, 143–144, 157, 266, 271 See also Takayama Chogyū Conservative faction (kyūha) 2, 6, 17, 59–61, 156, 231, 246, 263 See also Progressive faction Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille 24, 25 Courbet, Gustave 192, 195 introduction to Japan 34, 251

A Abalone divers (ama) as a theme in art 69–70, 153 painting by Chigusa Sōun 67–68, 68 painting by Tsuchida Bakusen 56, 57–58, 66–73, 72–73, 77, 79, 111, 139, 221, 232, 257, 258 Académie Julian 41, 198 Aihara Gosaburō 13–14, 16, 19, 32 Ama, See abalone divers Amakasu Incident 195, 271 Arai Akio 54 Arai Kinya 43, 45, 66, 253 Araki Jippō 121 Arima 67, 84, 89, 119–120, 263 Arishima Ikuma 51–52, 254, 256 Art discussion societies (ikenkai) 41–42, 92, 217, 253 See also Nameless Society, Chat Noir Asai Chū 3, 40–41, 253 B Bathhouse attendants (yuna) 84 as pictorial theme 84, 85 painting by Bakusen 84–85, 118, 119, 120, 131–133, 151, 153, 159, 185, 189, 193, 218, 221 Blake, William 100, 103–105, 135, 143, 193, 261, 270 Bunten (exhibition) 1, 5, 6, 11, 43, 47, 98, 100, 109, 117, 119, 120, 123, 150–151, 218, 233, 251, 254, 261, 267 founding of 16, 38–39, 93 1912–13 division of the Nihonga Section 58–62, 256, 263 reconstitution as the Teiten 154–155 dissatisfaction with 1, 2, 7, 72, 77–79, 88–89, 92, 99, 106, 112, 115, 116, 121–122, 126, 234 selection practices 83, 129

D Da Vinci, Leonardo 135, 143, 170, 182–183, 184, 195, 267 Degas, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar 46, 49–50, 50, 195 Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition (Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) 14 Domestic Industrial Exposition (Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai) 14, 260 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 34, 251 Dürer, Albrecht 195 E Exhibition of Meiji and Taishō Era Masterpieces (Meiji Taishō Meisaku Tenrankai) 218–219, 219 Exhibition of Old and New Artworks, See Shinkoten

C Casal, Pau 166 Cézanne, Paul introduction to Japan 254–255 works in Japanese collections 192, 196, 216 influence on Nihonga painters 44, 51–53, 87, 95, 140, 189, 202–204, 267 Characterism (jinkakushugi) 52, 255 See also personality theory, Julius Meier-Graefe Chat Noir (Sha Noāru, Japanese exhibition collective) 3, 6, 37–38, 44, 93, 109, 203, 256 founding of 40, 42–44, 253

F Fellowship of the True Way (Seiha Dōshikai) 123 Fra Angelico 135, 205, 266, 272 Fudō Shigeya, See Pan Real Art Association Fujii Keihō 17, 246 Fujii Shinsui, See Fujii Keihō Fukuda Heihachirō 157, 231–232, 232, 268 Fukuhara Ryōjirō 60 Fukumoto Koyō 43, 253

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painting circles Ishizaki Kōyō 20, 21, 22 Itō Hakudai 198, 257 Itō Sōhaku 178–179, 180, 186, 195, 196, 217, 237 See also Society of Nine (Kyūmeikai)

Futurism 82–83, 127, 259, 264–265 See also F.T. Marinetti G Ganryō mondai, See pigment problem Gauguin, Paul 63–64, 69, 131, 256 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 24, 249 Giotto di Bondone 134–135, 189, 203, 211, 266 Gold Bell Society (Kinreisha) 156, 268 Gotō Shintarō, See Pure Light Society Goya, Francisco José de 131–132, 132, 193 Great Kantō Earthquake 7, 133, 190, 195–196, 221, 271, 266 Guérin, Charles Francois Prosper 194

J Japan Art Academy (Nihon Bijtsu Gakuin) 156 Japan Art Association (Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai) 59, 248 Japan Art Exhibition (Nihon Bijutsu Tenrankai) 196, 233, 270 Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) 62, 77, 78–79, 93–94, 98, 116, 123, 155, 196, 261 reorganization under Yokoyama Taikan 62, 256 manifesto 62 rivalry with Kokuga Society 123, 126, 127 See also Inten Japan Painting Association Juried Exhibition (Nihon Kaiga Kyōkai Kaiga Kyōshinkai) 14 Jinkakushugi, See Characterism Jinseiha, See Humanist School

H Hachijōjima 62–64, 66 Hada Teruo 43, 109, 253 Hamada Shigemitsu 66, 257 Hamada Shōji 216 Hasegawa Kyūzō 79, 81 Hashimoto Gahō 13, 23, 219, 245 Hashimoto Kansetsu 2, 20, 89, 156 Hashimoto Kōei 91 See also Gold Bell Society Higashiyama group 6–7, 40, 91–93, 98, 100, 112, 115–116, 217 Higashiyama-ren, See Higashiyama group Hirafuku Hyakusui 156, 226, 268 Hirai Baisen 83, 89, 253 Hiratsuka Un’ichi 216 Hishida Shunsō 44, 58, 59, 143, 162, 253 Hishikawa Moronobu 266 Hokusai, See Katsushika Hokusai Hōryūji murals 66, 71, 75, 102, 261 Humanist School (Jinseiha) 34, 148, 251

K Kaburagi Kiyokata 156, 185, 226 Kainoshō Tadaoto 143, 144–146, 145, 151, 157, 182, 196, 198, 217–218, 267, 271 “filthy painting affair” 217, 274 Kamisaka Shōtō 257 Kanada Warō 130, 143, 144, 267 Kaneko Kuheiji 198, 216, 271 Kangakai, See Painting Appreciation Society Kano Hōgai 30, 105, 107, 163, 186, 205, 219 Kano Sanraku 44, 82, 119, 214, 261 Kanokogi Takeshirō 257 Kansai Art Institute (Kansai Bijutsuin) 3, 40, 41, 178, 198, 253 Kansai Bijutsuin, See Kansai Art Institute Kanzaki Ken’ichi 25, 190, 263 Kashino Nanyō 43, 91, 116, 253 Kawabata Gyokushō 3, 13, 38 Kawabata Ryūshi 209 Kawaji Ryūkō 198, 199, 207, 214, 215 Kawamura Manshū 83, 89, 156 Kawase Hasui 257 Kawashima Ri’ichirō 41, 198, 199, 215 Kayukawa Shinji 196, 197, 198, 217 Kikuchi Hōbun 17, 23, 38–39, 39, 40, 96, 122, 246 Kikuchi Keigetsu 17–19, 19, 43, 83, 89, 191, 194, 226, 246, 247, 271 Kimura Buzan 256 Kinoshita Mokutarō 41–42 Kinreisha, See Gold Bell Society Kishi Chikudō 13, 14 Kishida Ryūsei 52, 117, 255

I Idani Kenzō 257 Ike Taiga 214, 267 Ikenkai, See art discussion societies Imamura Shiko 62, 256 Imao Keinen 14, 156, 246 Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) 155, 156, 215, 216, 226, 227, 275 Inten (exhibition) 57, 62, 77, 79, 94, 115, 116, 120, 126, 127–129, 150, 162, 196, 219, 221, 233 See also Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) 156, 185 Irie Hakō 39, 66, 101, 116, 191, 194, 252, 257, 261, 271, 274 at inaugural Kokuten 130, 141–143, 142, 158 Ishii Hakutei 43, 218, 256, 268 critique of Kokuten paintings 154, 176, 179, 189, 208–210

286

index Kyoto City Arts and Fine Craft Exhibition (Kyotoshi Bijutsu Kōgeihin ten) 22 Kyoto Exposition (Kyoto Hakurankai) 14, 16, 245–246, 261 Kyoto Hakurankai, See Kyoto Exposition Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts (Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō) 38–40, 42, 96, 97, 100, 116, 141, 143, 251–254, 257, 260, 271 Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting (Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō) 5, 37, 39, 40–42, 47, 51, 60, 71, 93, 100, 125, 180, 252–254, 257, 271 founding 38–40 curriculum 40 association with Kokuga Society 141, 144, 146, 186, 218 Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyotofu Gagakkō) 37, 246, 251 Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō, See Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō, See Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting Kyotofu Gagakkō, See Kyoto Prefectural Painting School Kyūha, See conservative faction Kyūmeikai, See Society of Nine

Kitagawa Utamaro 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 70, 258 Kitano Tsunetomi 47, 54, 116 neo-Ukiyo-e 47, 254 Kobayashi Kokei 116, 226, 227 Kobayashi Wasaku 67, 100, 257 Kobori Tomoto 38, 156 Kokugakai 124, 216, 273–274 Kokuga Gyokuseikai, See Kokuga Perfection Society Kokuga Perfection Society (Kokuga Gyokuseikai) 123, 124 Kokuga Society (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai) membership recruitment efforts 116–117 founding 117 interactions with news press 120–121, 123 significance of name 124, 264 manifesto 1, 7, 120, 121, 124–127, 129, 130, 149, 153, 173, 231, 234–235 Statement of purpose 7, 120, 122, 124–125, 234 expansion of membership and evolving policies 196– 199 oil painting section 198–200, 216 dissolution 215–219, 237 See also Kokuten Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai, See Kokuga Society Kokuten (exhibition) 1–8, 129–131, 149–151, 156–157, 184–186, 196–200, 212, 215 judging practices 129 financial management 127–129, 186–187, 198–199, 215–216 regulations and protocols 126, 183, 235–237 development of a “Kokuten style” 149, 153, 185, 229 Spring Kokuten of 1925 197, 200, 206 decline of popularity 199–200 dissolution 7, 156, 179, 206, 212, 215–217, 237 Komatsu Hitoshi 128, 198, 217, 218, 272 Komuro Sui’un 123, 156 Kōno Bairei 14, 19, 22, 27, 106, 247, 248; 29 memorial exhibition for 19–20, 26 Konoshima Ōkoku 17, 61, 83, 84, 246 Kosugi Hōan 51, 140, 256 Kosugi Misei, See Kosugi Hōan Kubota Beisen 14 Kudō Risaburō 73–74, 76, 258 Kudō Seika, See Kudō Risaburō Kuroda Jūtarō 41, 44, 55, 62, 191, 203, 204, 253, 270 at Chat Noir and Le Masque 42, 43, 45 editor of journal Seisaku 116–117 Kuroda Seiki 156 Kyoto Art Association (Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai) 16, 25, 225, 246, 250, 261 Kyoto Bijutsu Kōgeihinten, See Kyoto City Arts and Fine Craft Exhibition Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai, See Kyoto Art Society

L Laurens, Jean-Paul 198 Le Masque (Ru Masuku) 3, 5, 6, 37–38, 40, 45–47, 51, 53, 55, 57, 62, 66, 93, 116, 117, 120, 191, 203, 254, 257 See also Chat Noir, Tanaka Kisaku Leach, Bernard 216 M Maeda Kanji 192 Maeda Seison 116, 226 Mantegna, Andrea 211 Maruyama-ha, See Maruyama school Maruyama Ōkyo 3, 27, 29, 218 Maruyama school (Maruyama-ha) 3 Masaki Naohiko 38, 122 Mashizu Junnan 59, 123 Matisse, Henri 69, 70, 111 Matsubayashi Keigetsu 258 Matsumiya Hōnen 39, 252, 253 Matsumoto Fūko 156 Matsumoto Matatarō 39, 60, 61, 71, 83, 258 Matsumura Keibun 23 Matsuo Bashō 215, 273 Matsuoka Eikyū 88–89, 131, 156, 169, 269 Mavo 1, 244 Meier-Graefe, Julius 52–53, 57, 135, 244, 255 See also Characterism, personality theory Meiji Taishō Meisaku Tenrankai, See Exhibition of Meiji and Taishō Era Masterpieces

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painting circles and avant-gardism 2, 138, 176, 231–232, 244 See also pigment problem Nika Society (Nikakai) 61, 62, 115, 155, 196, 244, 256, 257, 266 Nikaten (exhibition) 196, 198, 244 Nishida Kitarō 127, 264, 265 Nishihonganji, Kyoto (Buddhist temple) 214, 245 Nishimura Go’un 20, 254, 275 Nishiyama Suishō 17, 20, 32, 246, 275; 39 Nojima Yasuzō 198, 216 Nomura Itsushi 58, 64, 72, 77, 78, 89, 92, 93, 113, 256 Nonagase Banka 7, 8, 91, 92, 92–93, 106–112, 115, 116, 129, 131, 154, 185, 197, 198, 212, 215, 252, 258, 262, 266 experimentation with mineral pigments 108, 109, 110, 110–112, 111, 137, 138, 162, 174, 177, 209–210, 231 reception of Kokuten works 136–138, 148, 173–178, 174, 177, 178, 181, 208–210, 209, 210 trip to Europe 190–191, 191, 193, 221 post-Kokuten activities 221, 224–225, 225, 226 Nueha, See Nue-school Nue-school 23, 43

Mikami Makoto 231–232; 232 See also Pan Real Art Association Mine Yoshikichi 14, 247 Mitsutani Kunishirō 34, 35, 257 Mochizuki Kinpō 59, 123 Monet, Claude 137, 193 Mori Ōgai 82–83, 127, 156, 259, 264 Mumeikai, See Nameless Society Munakata Shikō 216 Murakami Kagaku 7, 39, 40, 83, 88, 92, 99–106, 101, 103, 104, 105, 114, 121–122, 124, 125, 128, 129, 143, 146, 185, 191, 195–198, 218, 223–224, 224, 253, 261, 262, 264–266, 272, 274 interest in Buddhist themes 133–135 Dōjōji engi themed paintings 167–169 recruitment to Kokuga Society 91–93, 116 reception of Kokuten works 133–135, 134, 167–173, 167, 169, 170, 171, 206–207, 206, 269 discontent with Kokuten 207, 212, 215, 216, 273 N Naiki Seibei 116, 128 Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai, See Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai, See Domestic Industrial Exposition Nakagawa Shimei 41 Nakamura Fusetsu 156 Nakazawa Iwata 26, 250 Nakai Sōtarō 39, 41, 42, 63, 91, 92, 110, 112, 122, 191, 194, 207, 231, 253, 262, 264, 265, 274 lectures at the Nameless Society 63, 251 as teacher at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting 97, 100 as Kokuga Society advisor 116, 117, 125–130, 144, 148, 151, 183–184, Nameless Society (Mumeikai) 3, 6, 37, 40–42, 54, 63, 91, 92, 96, 98, 110, 148, 252, 253, 256 Nihon Bijutsu Gakuin, See Japan Art Academy Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai, See Japan Art Association Nihon Bijutsuin, See Japan Art Institute Nihon Bijutsuten, See Japan Art Exhibition Nihon Kaiga Kyōkai Kaiga Kyōshinkai, See Japan Painting Association Juried Exhibition Nihonga definitions 2, 43, 173 relation to Kokuga 124 suitability as a modernist art form 5–6, 33, 43, 50, 57, 88, 185–186 and pictorial realism 16, 25, 34, 45, 149, 154, 162–164, 179, 181, 211 decorative aspects 7, 133, 189, 206, 222, 229 relationship with pre-Meiji painting 3, 50, 78, 139

O Okajima Kazuo 54 Okakura Tenshin 61–62, 155, 263 as director of Tokyo School of Art 3, 38, 244 as founder of the Kokuga Perfection Society 123 on East-West hybridity in Nihonga 250 Okamoto Ippei 74, 149–150, 151, 172, 172–173 Okamoto Shinsō 143, 144, 146–147, 147, 148, 152, 181–184, 183, 195, 229, 267, 270 Okamura Utarō 180–181, 181, 196, 198, 217 Ono Chikkyō 7, 8, 34–35, 38, 39, 55, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 107, 113, 129, 131, 133, 143, 155, 170, 174, 185, 186, 189, 198, 199, 201, 231, 248, 255, 261, 267, 268, 272, 273 friendship with Bakusen 21–22, 30, 78–79, 180 study under Seihō 20–22, 22, 27, 252, 263 at Chat Noir and Le Masque 38, 40, 43, 45, 50–52, 51, 54, 253, 254 interest in Cézanne 51–53, 138 at the Bunten 58–59, 71–72, 83, 88, 93–96, 94, 95, 96, 98–99, 114, 115 and the founding of the Kokuten 91, 116, 121, 124–125, 258, 264 reception of Kokuten works 138–141, 154, 161–164, 197, 210–212, 212, 213, 214–215 Chikkyō School (Chikkyō-ha) 178 travels in Europe 190–191, 193, 200, 221 post-Kokuten actitivies 225–226, 226 Ono Chikutō 21, 248

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index Seiha Dōshikai, See Fellowship of the True Way Sesshū Tōyō 23, 37, 214, 245, 263, 273 Seven String Society (Shichigenkai) 226 Sha Noāru, See Chat Noir Shen Nanpin 14 Shiba Kōkan 19, 219 Shichigenkai, See Seven String Society Shiga Shigetaka 249 Shijō-ha, See Shijō school Shijō school (Shijō-ha) 23, 27, 82, 140 Shimomura Kanzan 38, 61, 62, 123, 156, 218, 256, 263 Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai, See Shinkoten exhibition Shinkoten (exhibition) 5, 6, 27, 30, 33, 44, 97, 100, 107, 191, 205, 250, 260 origins 16, 246 1904 Shinkoten 16–17, 19, 246, 247 termination 17, 25, 93, 246 Shinpa, See progressive faction Shirakaba (journal) 5, 6, 34, 52, 53, 63, 66, 69, 70, 87, 104, 111, 143, 196, 198, 216, 251, 257, 261, 262, 267 and introduction of Cézanne to Japan 87, 140, 255 Society of Nine (Kyūmeikai) 195 Society of Saintly Bunglers (Seisetsusha) 207 Subaru (journal) 41, 43, 83, 156, 264, Sugiura Kōhō 43, 253 Suita Sōboku 178–180, 179, 186, 191, 194, 196, 198, 217 Suzuki Harunobu 47, 50, 102 Suzuki Hyakunen 14, 245 Suzuki Kiitsu 81, 82 Suzuki school (Suzuki-ha) 14–15, 17, 27, 245 Suzuki Shōnen 6, 11, 13, 14–16, 15, 19, 20, 27, 30, 81, 247–248 Suzuki-ha, See Suzuki school

Otake Chikuha 89, 124 Otake Kokkan 83, 124 P Pacific Oil Painting Institute (Taiheiyō Gakai Kenkyūjo) 257 Painting Appreciation Society (Kangakai) 250 Pan no Kai, See Pan Society Pan Real Art Association (Pan Riaru Bijutsu Kyōkai) 231, 275 Pan Riaru Bijutsu Kyōkai, See Pan Real Art Association Pan Society 41–42 See also art discussion societies Peach Blossom Society (Tōkakai) 42, 253 Personality theory (Persönlichkeits-theorie) 52–53, 57, 127, 135, 159, 244 See also Characterism, Julius Meier-Graefe Pigment problem (ganryō mondai) 5–6, 57, 67, 78, 154, 162, 222 Progressive faction (Shinpa) 6, 16–17, 19, 43, 60, 123, 156, 246 See also conservative faction Pure Light Society (Seikōkai) 226–227, 274 R Renoir, Pierre-August 41, 44, 49, 107, 174, 191–192, 196, 252 Ru Masuku, See Le Masque Ruskin, John 23–24, 26, 27, 41, 97, 110, 177, 255, 269 S Saiko Nihon Bijutsuin, See Japan Art Institute Saiko Nihon Bijutsuin Tenrankai, See Inten Saint Francis Basilica, Assisi 203, 270 Sakakibara Shihō 7, 8, 91–93, 92, 96, 100, 143, 148, 157, 185, 191, 195–199, 199, 200, 212, 215, 216–217, 225, 226, 231, 260–261, 272 study at Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting 39, 39–40, 252, 253 interest in Western music 97–98, 166 at the Bunten 97, 97–99, 114, 114–115, 155 and formation of Kokuga Society 116, 121, 128, 265 reception of Kokuten works 131, 138, 140–141, 164, 164–167, 165, 207–208, 208, 212–214, 214 publications 207, 218, 273 post-Kokuten activities 223, 223–224, 231, 274 Sakakibara Uson 39, 252, 253, 260 Sakamoto Hanjirō 226, 227, 256 Sakuma Tetsuen 59, 123 Seikōkai, See Pure Light Society Seisaku (journal) 117, 161, 163, 252, 262, 264, 265 Seisetsusha, See Society of Saintly Bunglers Seki Shinjirō 79, 113, 259

T Taiheiyō Gakai Kenkyūjo, See Pacific Oil Painting Institute Takamura Kōtarō 43, 63, 226, 227 essay Green Sun 43, 45, 173, 256 and Characterism 52 Takashima Hokkai 58–60, 121, 123, 156, 263 Takayama Chogyū 266 See also Chogyū Prize Takayama Seika 91, 116 Takehisa Yumeji 109, 129, 176, 272 Takeuchi Itsu 117, 125, 262 Takeuchi Seihō 3, 6, 11, 17, 20, 20–21, 32–33, 33, 43, 47–48, 48, 58–59, 67, 77, 107, 108–109, 133, 144, 156, 196, 218, 275 early life and art practice 22–23, 248 trip to Europe 24, 26, 27, 193, 249 Lions from 1901 Shinkoten 25, 25–27, 250, 208, 250 as teacher 19, 20–21, 53, 81, 93, 96–97, 178, 179, 246, 248, 253

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painting circles reception of Kokuten paintings 119–120, 120, 131–133, 132, 151, 154, 158, 158–161, 159, 160, 189–190, 200–206, 201, 202, 204, 213, 213–214, 272 trip to Europe 190–195, 194, 270 interest in analytical formalism 153, 189, 205–206, 221, 228–229 as a teacher 217–218 at Seven String Society 226 at Pure Light Society 226–227, 274 travel to Korea 227 at Teiten 222, 226–227, 228, 230 death and posthumous reputation 227–228, 232–233, 275 See also “Bathhouse attendants” Tsuchida Kyōson 12–13, 125, 127, 245, 264, 265 Tsuda Seifū 41, 43, 45, 52, 72, 253, 256 Turner, J.M. William 24, 25, 193, 270

at the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting 38–40, 39 as advisor to Kokuga Society 91, 117, 120–123, 125, 126, 134, 198, 264 Tanaka Kisaku 37–38, 40–41, 55, 57, 62, 66, 117, 198, 264 lectures to the Nameless Society 42, 63, 98, 253, 256 founding of Chat Noir and Le Masque 6, 42–45, 109 promotion of Characterism 52 as advisor to the Kokuga Society Oil Painting section 198, 199 Tanaka Zennosuke 43, 62, 66, 253 Taniguchi Kōkyō 17, 23, 106, 107 Tawaraya Sōtatsu 82, 219 Teikoku Bijutsuin, See Imperial Art Academy Teikoku Bijutsuin Tenrankai, See Teiten Teiten (exhibition) 154–156, 157, 162, 184–186, 190, 195, 196, 200, 216, 222, 224, 225–227, 229, 248, 250, 269, 274–275 Terasaki Kōgyō 38, 155, 218 Tintoretto, Jacopo 195 Tōkakai, See Peach Blossom Society Tokumi Ōkokudō 41, 42, 54, 93 Tokunaga Kakusen 23, 27, 41, 92, 110, 111 Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō, See Tokyo School of Art Tokyo School of Art 3, 102, 122, 261, 263 Tomimoto Kenkichi 216 Tomioka Tessai 51, 52, 156 Tomita Keisen 78–79, 93, 259, 275 Torii Kiyonaga 47, 147 Tōshūsai Sharaku 44, 47, 50, 70, 192 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 49, 54 Tsuchida Bakusen Sado origins 11–13, 12, 244, 245 at Shōnen’s juku 14–16, 247 studies under Seihō 19–22, 22, 248 rural genre painting 30–34, 250 at the Shinkoten 16–17, 27, 28, 33–34, 34, 246 at Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting 38, 39, 47, 252, 254 at Chat Noir and Le Masque 40, 44–48, 46, 253 at the Bunten 30, 31, 54, 57–58, 64, 65, 71–72, 72, 76, 77–78, 80, 81–82, 86, 87–88, 92, 112–114, 113, 251, 254 at Hachijōjima 62–64, 66, 256 at Nakiri 66–71, 69, 257 interest in Ukiyo-e 47–50, 49, 52, 69 experimentation with mineral pigments 70–71 discontent with Bunten 72–73, 77–79, 92–93, 115 founding of Kokuga Society 91–93, 92, 116–117, 120–123, 259, 263, 265

U Ueda Bin 62, 146 Uemura Shōen 20, 74, 83, 89 Umehara Ryūzaburō 41, 198, 199, 215, 226, 227, 256, 257, 271 V Van Dyck, Anthony 195 Van Rijn, Rembrandt 195, 255 Vétheuil, France 193–194, 197, 205 W Wada Eisaku 156 Watanabe Kazan 218 Whistler, Jame McNeil 98, 177, 253, 269 Wirgman, Charles 3 Y Yamaguchi Kayō 27, 125 Yamamoto Kanae 177, 180, 181 Yamamoto Shunkyo 3, 39, 40, 122, 127, 156, 250 Yamazaki Takashi, See Pan Real Art Association Yasuda Yukihiko 62, 226, 256, 259 Yasui Sōtarō 41, 117, 226, 227, 255 Yokoyama Taikan 61–62, 78, 79, 94, 98, 123, 126, 127, 155, 156, 162, 185, 196, 218, 256, 260, 261, 263 and mōrōtai style 44, 253 Yoshida Chūsaburō 85, 86, 128 Yoshikawa Reika 156 Yūki Somei 43, 156, 253 Yuna, See bathhouse attendants

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