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 1922, going on to become 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 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 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 of Kyūshū Imperial University — leaving a comparatively small body of work now held in Japanese public collections, among them the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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. The mining town gave him both his earliest subjects and the social context from which a Meiji-period boy of modest background could reach Tokyo through the new national school system. 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), and his training belonged to the Kuroda Seiki academic-impressionist lineage that defined Tokyo yōga in the 1900s, a tradition he carried forward into the Taishō era.

His first significant work, An Old Miner (老坑夫) — a large, dark-toned figure painting in the manner of late-nineteenth-century European social realism, taking a senior miner as its subject — won a second prize at the Tokyo Industrial Exposition of 1907, marking his professional debut. Around the same period he traveled to Hokkaidō and painted a sustained series of Ainu sitters, work that places him within a small group of late-Meiji yōga painters who treated Ainu subjects as serious portraiture rather than as ethnographic curiosities.

Through the late 1900s and early 1910s Aoyama exhibited 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 — the latter awarded in part for a canvas titled simply Ainu — results that placed him among the most promising members of his generation. In 1913 he set out on a long journey abroad, 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; A Russian Girl (1915) dates from this period and documents his immersion in the visual world of late-Imperial Russia — bearded male sitters in winter clothing, women in headscarves, and tonally restrained urban views. From Russia he moved westward into Europe, reaching Paris, and continued painting through the war and the difficult postwar years, much of the time in poverty. 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). His 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 Kōgen (Highland) and was also honored with an Imperial Art Academy award, and he was subsequently appointed a juror of the Teiten — a position that placed him at the institutional center of the official yōga world. In 1929 he was among the founders of the Daiichi Art Association (Daiichi Bijutsu Kyōkai). The following year, in 1930, he was selected to paint a monumental mural for the Engineering Faculty of Kyūshū Imperial University in Fukuoka, a major public commission that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

The Kyūshū mural occupied Aoyama from 1930 onward and was still unfinished at the time of his death. Among his late works is Casting a Fishing Net (投網), a large figure composition shown at the Teiten in 1932. On 11 December 1932, while traveling home to Ikuno to visit his ailing eldest brother, he died suddenly at the age of forty-six. His works are held today in Japanese public collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, and public museums in his native Hyōgo Prefecture and in Hokkaidō. His reputation 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.