Aoyama Kumaji

Aoyama Kumaji (青山熊治, 1886-1932) was a Meiji-Taishō-Shōwa yōga (Western-style) painter whose career carried him from a Hyōgo Prefecture mining town through the Tokyo School of Fine Arts to nearly a decade of travel and study across Russia, Siberia, and Europe, and back to Japan in the mid-1920s as a major figure of the Teiten (Imperial Art Exhibition) establishment. Working in oil, with a palette that ran from the dark earth tones of his early Meiji-period realism to the more saturated colors of his mature work after the European years, Aoyama produced portraits of Ainu sitters, Russian and European subjects observed during his travels, and large-scale figural compositions of laborers, fishermen, and idealized historical scenes. He died in 1932 at the age of forty-six, midway through the most ambitious commission of his career — a monumental mural for the Engineering Faculty building at Kyūshū Imperial University — leaving a body of work that is now distributed across the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Himeji City Museum of Art, and the Tan'yō Shinkin Bank Hall in his birthplace of Asago.

Aoyama was born on 22 May 1886 in Ikuno, in what is now Asago City, Hyōgo Prefecture — a town built around the centuries-old Ikuno Silver Mine, which had been one of the principal sources of silver for the Tokugawa state and which by the Meiji period had become a major industrial mining operation under the Ministry of Industry and later the Mitsubishi conglomerate. The mining town gave him both his earliest subjects (he would return to paint Ikuno miners throughout his career) and the social context from which a Meiji-period boy of modest background could reach Tokyo via the new national school system. After local schooling he moved through the Kansai region and arrived in Tokyo, where in 1903 he entered the Western Painting Section of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, the predecessor of the present Tokyo University of the Arts). His principal teacher was Takagi Haisui (1877-1943), a yōga painter who had trained under Kuroda Seiki and Asai Chū and who taught technique in the academic-impressionist mode that defined Tokyo yōga in the 1900s. Aoyama belonged to the cohort that included other future Bunten and Teiten regulars who carried the Kuroda Seiki lineage forward into the Taishō era.

His first significant work, An Old Miner (老坑夫, 1906), was painted during a return visit to Ikuno while Aoyama was registered for conscription. Using miners from the Ikuno Silver Mine as live models, he produced a large, dark-toned figure painting in the manner of late-nineteenth-century European social realism, focusing on the heavy hands and weathered features of a senior miner against a deeply shadowed ground. The work won a second prize at the Tokyo Industrial Exposition of 1907, marking his professional debut. The following year he traveled to Hokkaidō, where he produced a sustained sequence of paintings of Ainu sitters — among them the small Profile of an Ainu Woman (1907) and the Portrait of Shiratori Kenji (1911), the latter a posthumous likeness of a young Ainu man whom Aoyama had befriended during his graduation-year stay and who had died at twenty-one in 1909. These early Ainu paintings, now in the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, place Aoyama within a small group of late-Meiji yōga painters who treated Ainu subjects as serious portraiture rather than as ethnographic curiosities, and they remain the most important visual record of an Ainu sitter by name from a Tokyo-trained academic painter of the period.

Through the late 1900s and early 1910s Aoyama exhibited consistently at the Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition), the central state-sponsored venue for Western-style painting in Tokyo. He took a third prize at the fourth Bunten in 1910 and a second prize at the fifth Bunten in 1911, results that placed him among the most promising members of his generation and that funded the long journey he made beginning in 1913. Traveling overland from the Manchurian port of Dalian (Dairen) across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he reached European Russia and remained there through the early years of the First World War. The 1914 Portrait of Popov, the 1915 A Russian Girl, and the View in Moscow of the same year date from this Russian period and document his immersion in the visual world of late-Imperial Russia: bearded male sitters in winter clothing, women in headscarves, and tonally restrained urban views of Moscow in winter light. From Russia he moved westward into Europe — France, Germany, and Italy — and continued painting through the war and the early postwar years. He did not return to Japan until 1922, after nearly a decade abroad.

The Japan to which Aoyama returned in 1922 was institutionally different from the one he had left. The Bunten had been reorganized in 1919 as the Teiten under the new Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin), and the leadership of Tokyo yōga had passed from Kuroda Seiki's first generation to a slightly younger cohort that included Wada Eisaku, Ishii Hakutei, and the painters of the Nikakai. Aoyama's return paintings of the mid-1920s, with their European-influenced figure construction and more saturated palette, made an immediate impression. At the seventh Teiten in 1926 he won a special prize (tokusen) for a major figure composition, and on the strength of that result he was appointed a juror of the Teiten exhibition — a position that placed him at the institutional center of the official yōga world. Through the late 1920s he continued to exhibit large figural works and landscapes at the Teiten and to take on private commissions, and in 1930 he was selected to paint a monumental mural for the Engineering Faculty building of Kyūshū Imperial University in Fukuoka, the most prestigious public mural commission then available to a yōga painter. The mural depicted heroic figures of labor and engineering science in a classicizing composition, and the surviving oil studies on paper for the project document his approach to large-scale figural design in the European Beaux-Arts tradition that he had absorbed during his Paris years.

The Kyūshū mural occupied Aoyama from 1930 onward and was not yet finished at the time of his death. The paintings of 1932 — among them Casting a Fishing Net (投網, a 273 cm hanging figure composition of a fisherman at work, now in the Tan'yō Shinkin Bank Hall in Asago) and the Self-Portrait with a Palette (Himeji City Museum of Art), in which the painter shows himself at half-length in a brown studio coat, palette and brushes in hand against a neutral ground — are works of his full maturity. On 11 December 1932, while traveling by train to visit a sick brother, he produced a small oil-on-board view of Mount Fuji from the train window; he died suddenly at his destination on reaching it, and the Mt. Fuji study became known as his last work (zeppitsu). He was buried in Ikuno, and the Tan'yō Shinkin Bank in Asago became the principal local custodian of his work, with major paintings also entering the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Himeji City Museum of Art, and the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art in the decades after his death. His Kyūshū University mural was completed by collaborators and remains in situ. Aoyama's reputation today rests on the early Ainu portraits, the Russian and European paintings of the 1910s, and the large figure compositions of the years immediately preceding his death — a comparatively small but unusually cosmopolitan body of work that documents the international itinerary of Meiji-Taishō yōga at its most adventurous.