Arishima Ikuma

Arishima Ikuma (有島生馬, 1882-1974) was a Meiji-Shōwa yōga (Western-style) painter, novelist and translator who returned from his years in Europe in 1910 imbued with the lessons of Paul Cézanne, helped found the breakaway Nikakai exhibition society in 1914, and remained for the next sixty years one of the central organising figures of modern Japanese oil painting. He was simultaneously a leading member of the Shirakaba literary circle and the Italian-trained translator who introduced Umberto Boccioni's Futurist manifesto to Japanese readers, and after the war he served as a director of the Nitten national exhibition. In 1964 he was named a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) by the Japanese government, one of the highest national honours for an artist.

He was born Arishima Mibuma on 26 November 1882 in Yokohama, the second son of a former Satsuma samurai who had become a Ministry of Finance customs official; his elder brother was the novelist Arishima Takeo (1878-1923) and his younger brother the novelist Satomi Ton (1888-1983), making the three brothers a central literary family of the Taishō period. He attended the Gakushūin Peers' School from 1895 to 1900, where he became a close friend of the young Shiga Naoya, and after a bout of pleurisy enrolled in 1901 at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages to study Italian. He went on to study Western-style painting under Fujishima Takeji.

In 1906 he sailed for Italy on the introduction of the diplomat Ōyama Tsunasuke, settling first in Rome and then, in February 1907, in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and entered the studio of Raphaël Collin, the Salon painter who had also taught Kuroda Seiki and Fujishima. The decisive event of his European years was the 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, mounted a year after the painter's death, which he visited repeatedly and which converted him into one of the earliest and most articulate Japanese champions of the Aix master. Living among the Japanese artists then in Paris, he produced a small body of European portraits during these years.

He returned to Japan in 1910 and joined his elder brother Takeo, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya and Yanagi Sōetsu among the circle behind Shirakaba (White Birch), the literary magazine that became a principal Taishō organ of humanist liberalism and of the Japanese discovery of post-impressionist painting. Through his essays and translations for Shirakaba he became one of the first Japanese writers to treat Cézanne at length. In 1914, when the official Bunten exhibition refused to create a separate room for the new oil painting, Arishima joined Ishii Hakutei, Tsuda Seifū, Yamashita Shintarō and Saitō Yori in founding the rival Nikakai (Second Section Society), which over the next half-century became the most important non-academic Western-painting society in Japan. The same year he translated Umberto Boccioni's Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture from the Italian, an early introduction of Italian Futurism to the Japanese art world.

From 1920 he made his permanent residence in Kamakura, where he lived for the rest of his life. His elder brother Takeo took his own life in 1923 in a double suicide with the editor Hatano Akiko, leaving three orphaned children, among them the future film actor Mori Masayuki. The 1928 award of the French Legion of Honour confirmed Arishima's standing as a bridge between Japanese and French painting. In 1935 he was appointed to the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin), and from 1937 he belonged to the reorganised Imperial Art Institute (Teikoku Geijutsuin); from 1958 he served as a director of the postwar Nitten national salon. He died on 15 September 1974. His Kamakura house was later relocated to Shinshūshinmachi in Nagano Prefecture, where the Arishima Ikuma Memorial Museum preserves his legacy, and his paintings are held in major Japanese public collections.