Arishima Ikuma

Arishima Ikuma (有島生馬, 1882-1974) was a Meiji-Shōwa yōga (Western-style) painter, novelist and translator who returned from a five-year European apprenticeship 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, the Italian-trained translator who introduced the futurist manifestoes of Boccioni and the Cézanne literature of Vollard and Bernard to Japanese readers, and after the war the executive director of the Nitten national exhibition. In 1964 he was named a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) by the Japanese government, the next-to-highest national honour for artists.

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 (Yamanouchi Hideo, 1888-1983), making the three brothers the central literary family of the Taishō period. He attended the Gakushūin Peers' School from 1895 to 1900, where he formed the literary group Bokuyū-kai with the young Shiga Naoya, and after a bout of pleurisy enrolled in 1901 at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages to study Italian. After graduating in 1904 he spent a year studying yōga under Fujishima Takeji at the latter's atelier and at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

In June 1906 he sailed for Italy on the introduction of the diplomat Ōyama Tsugasuke, 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 Arishima visited repeatedly with the sculptor Takamura Kōtarō and which converted him into the earliest and most articulate Japanese champion of the Aix master. Living among the loose Japanese colony in Paris that also included Fujita Tsuguharu and Ishii Hakutei, he produced the small body of European portraits — Woman in a Straw Hat (1909), Woman in Blue, Woman in Chinese Dress, Portrait of a Finnish Woman — that would be reproduced two decades later in his 1932 Atelier-sha portrait album.

He returned to Japan in March 1910 and immediately joined his elder brother Takeo, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya and Yanagi Sōetsu in the launch of Shirakaba (White Birch), the literary magazine that became the principal Taishō organ of humanist liberalism and of the Japanese discovery of post-impressionist painting. The Cézanne issue of Shirakaba (1912), edited around Arishima's essays and translations, was the first sustained treatment of the painter in any East Asian language. In 1914, when the official Bunten exhibition refused to create a separate room for the new oil painting, Arishima joined Ishii Hakutei, Tsuda Seifu, 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 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture from the Italian, the first introduction of Italian futurism to Japan.