Aoki Shigeru

Aoki Shigeru (青木繁, 1882-1911) was the leading romantic and symbolist painter of the late Meiji yōga (Western-style painting) movement, and despite his death from tuberculosis at twenty-eight he left a small body of work since recognised as one of the most original achievements of early modern Japanese art. Two of his oil paintings — A Gift of the Sea (海の幸, 1904) and Paradise Under the Sea / Wadatsumi no Iroko no Miya (わだつみのいろこの宮, 1907) — are designated Important Cultural Properties of Japan, an honour rarely accorded to twentieth-century yōga, and his name is invariably the first cited when scholars discuss the flowering of literary, mythological and Pre-Raphaelite-inflected painting in Meiji Tokyo.

Aoki was born on 13 July 1882 in Kurume, Fukuoka prefecture, the son of a former samurai of the Arima domain who had become a struggling minor official after the Meiji Restoration. In 1899 he left Kyushu for Tokyo and enrolled in the Fudōsha private art school run by Koyama Shōtarō, the foundational teacher of so many late-Meiji yōga painters. In 1900 he entered the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts), where he studied under Kuroda Seiki, the dominant figure of Meiji oil painting and founder of the Hakubakai (White Horse Society). Kuroda's plein-air, gaiyō (bright-palette) manner, drawn from his Paris training under Raphaël Collin, formed the technical foundation of Aoki's painting, but the younger artist quickly turned against this cool academicism in favour of denser, more literary subjects drawn from Japanese myth, Buddhist iconography and world religion.

While still a student, Aoki read voraciously in the available literature on European Symbolism and the British Pre-Raphaelites — Rossetti, Burne-Jones and G. F. Watts — whose reproductions circulated in Tokyo through magazines such as The Studio. The influence is unmistakable in the fourteen mythological studies he exhibited at the September 1903 Hakubakai. Drawn in coloured pencil, pastel and watercolour on paper, the studies — based on Japanese, Indian and Greek myth and on the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki — included the celebrated Yomotsuhirasaka (Escape from the Land of the Dead, 1903), now at Tokyo University of the Arts. The Hakubakai jury awarded him the Hakuba Prize, and his synthesis of Western symbolist drawing with subjects from the foundational texts of Japanese cosmology was immediately recognised as a new direction in Meiji art.

The following summer Aoki travelled with Sakamoto Hanjirō, Mori Tasuke and his lover Fukuda Tane to the fishing village of Mera on the Bōsō peninsula in Chiba. Two months at Mera produced his intimate canvases of the local coast — Seascape, Mera (1904) — and the monumental frieze A Gift of the Sea, painted on canvas tacked to the wall of the inn. Depicting ten naked fishermen striding along the beach with three sharks on poles, it was the most discussed Meiji painting of its generation at its 1904 Hakubakai showing and remains the single most celebrated work of late-Meiji yōga. He returned that year with Self-Portrait (1904) and the Tenpyō Era (1904), an evocation of the eighth-century Nara court in a hieratic Pre-Raphaelite manner. In 1905 he produced Onamuchi no Mikoto from the Izumo Kojiki cycle, and in 1906 Yamato-takeru (Tokyo National Museum).

The 1907 Tokyo Industrial Exhibition saw Aoki submit his most ambitious mythological canvas, the tall vertical Paradise Under the Sea, depicting Yamasachi-hiko in a tree above the well of the dragon-king's undersea palace, watched by the sea-god's daughter Toyotama-hime. Judged a disappointment and awarded only a third-class prize, it marked a crisis in his career. He left Tokyo, separating from Tane and their infant son Yukihiko (later the jazz musician Fukuda Ran), and wandered Kyushu in growing poverty, painting little and falling ill with the tuberculosis that ran in his family. He died at Munakata Hospital, Fukuoka, on 25 March 1911, three months short of twenty-nine.

Aoki's reputation rests on the tightly compressed period of brilliance between 1903 and 1907 and on the patronage of the Bridgestone magnate Ishibashi Shōjirō (1889-1976), a fellow Kurume native who from the 1930s onward systematically purchased the surviving works for what is now the Ishibashi Foundation Collection. The principal holdings are at the Ishibashi Museum of Art in Kurume and the Artizon Museum in Tokyo (formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art, renamed 2020), with further works at the Tokyo University of the Arts University Art Museum, MOMAT, the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art and the Tokyo National Museum. The 2011 centenary confirmed his place as the painter who first proved that European symbolism could be turned to the service of indigenous Japanese myth without surrendering either tradition.