京都市立芸術大学ギャラリー@KCUA

Introduction

These three artworks were painted between 1905 and 1907 as final projects by graduating students at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, which was then a middle school (in the prewar Japanese education system). They were painted when the artists were roughly the same age as graduating high schoolers today. The School of Arts and Crafts was a kind of vocational college that gave students technical training, though its curriculum also stressed more general enrichment and refinement. As such, compared to when the school’s predecessor, the Kyoto Prefectural School of Painting, was established in 1880, the time spent on learning technical skills had greatly decreased. The education that took place at the School of Arts and Crafts was fundamentally little changed from the various forms of painting education ongoing since the Edo period (1603–1868). Even after the start of the Meiji period in 1868, the Kyoto art world was still dominated by the Edo-era Maruyama and Shijo painting schools. The painters of these three works—Hako Irie, Yohei Watanabe, and Kagaku Murakami—were taught by Seiho Takeuchi, Shunkyo Yamamoto, and Hobun Kikuchi, all artists who very much belonged to the Maruyama and the Shijo schools. These two art schools are regarded as having placed importance on what was called shasei: somewhat different from what we would call realism in Western painting (such as the use of shading to make something appear three-dimensional), this refers to a true-to-life style that emphasizes replicating the vivid vitality and spirit of the subject matter in the picture.
As opposed to the Maruyama school’s constant and faithful pursuit of that kind of naturalistic expression of shasei, the Shijo school valued painting a picture directly from the actual subject matter with the aim of a pictorial expression possessing a high affinity with poetry and the literary world, as such frequently incorporating that poetic sentiment into the work. A representative example of this is the tsuketate brush technique that, when painting a single line, mixes ink to water to apply shading, resulting in a line that retains the dark and faint parts of the ink. By skillfully varying the dark and faint parts, a single line is rendered with a sense of volume. Through the shading of each brushstroke, a kind of abstraction effect comes into play when a brushstroke is omitted. The object of the painters’ interest then focused on the extent to which they could express the essence of the subject of the painting in as few brushstrokes as possible. Hako Irie, Yohei Watanabe, and Kagaku Murakami’s painting teacher Seiho Takeuchi pursued the extent to which he could incorporate minimized brushstrokes and abbreviation into a picture, attempting to compose paintings with only what was necessary and omitting what was not. An easy comparison with tsuketate is the style of the Kano school, dominant in the Tokyo art world, with its emphasis on brushstrokes. Employing outlines, the expression thus becomes firmer and creates a stronger impression. Among the graduation works at the School of Arts and Crafts were pieces painted very consciously with outlines, but these three works make deft use of tsuketate through soft strokes without outlines.
While a member of the faculty, Seiho Takeuchi viewed various Western artworks in Europe and, upon his return to Japan, taught students about the beauty of Western art as well as, through comparison, the merits of Japanese art or painting. During this, an understanding of space apparently emerged as a particularly major theme. A challenge he bestowed upon them was how to conjure up a space within a single sheet of paper or a single piece of silk when painting with a brush. Each of these three works shows the proficient forethought the artist gave to that question. At the time, it was not a period like the Meiji Restoration (1868), when the country wanted to expel Western influences under a mindset of simplistic nationalism, but perhaps rather a period when, as Japanese people began to gain a nebulous sense of their nation’s place within the world following the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, the art of the West more firmly entered their field of view. Against this backdrop, there emerged works like Yohei Watanabe’s Foxes, a nihonga (Japanese painting) that seems almost like yoga (Western painting), and Kagaku Murakami’s Brown Bear, in which the artist deploys tricks to achieve balance within the painting, placing in the foreground tree branches rendered with bold Kano-style outlines while also adopting Western pictorial styles in layering fine lines to express the face.