Hasegawa Toshiyuki

Hasegawa Toshiyuki (長谷川利行, 1891-1940), often signed Rikō, was a Japanese yōga (Western-style) painter of the Taishō and early Shōwa periods whose short, turbulent career produced one of the most distinctive and influential bodies of work in interwar Tokyo painting. Working almost exclusively in oil and watercolor, with a swift, gestural touch and a saturated, Fauvist-inflected palette that absorbed Matisse, Vlaminck, and Rouault into a thoroughly local idiom, Hasegawa painted the bars, cafés, viaducts, electrical substations, and street life of the Shitamachi (downtown) districts of Tokyo — Asakusa above all — that he inhabited as a chronic vagrant. Refused steady studio employment, unable to keep a fixed address, and notorious for trading paintings for drinks and meals at the bars he frequented, he is the canonical example in modern Japanese art of the painter as outsider (autorō, the Japanese transliteration of "outlaw"), and Yoshida Kazumasa's 2000 biography of him bore the title An Outlaw Painter: A Critical Biography of Hasegawa Toshiyuki (アウトローと呼ばれた画家). He died in October 1940 in the public welfare ward of Itabashi Hospital in Tokyo, at the age of forty-nine, of malnutrition. His paintings are now divided between the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum, the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, the Itabashi Art Museum (which holds the largest single concentration), the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, and a large number of regional and private collections.

Hasegawa was born on 9 July 1891 in Yamashina, a village then on the eastern outskirts of Kyoto, the eldest son of a former samurai household of modest means. His father was a low-ranking police officer; the family moved several times in his childhood, eventually settling in the Kyoto-Osaka region. He attended a local middle school but did not complete it, and his earliest training in painting was self-directed. In his late teens he made his way to Tokyo and supported himself with a succession of casual jobs while reading widely in modern Japanese and European literature — he was a serious poet before he was a painter, and his first publication, the privately printed verse collection Rokugatsu no torakuhaisha (六月の虐羸者, June's Wretched Outcast, 1915), appeared when he was twenty-four. A second volume of poems followed in 1921. Throughout his career he continued to write, and his surviving notebooks include drafts of haiku, tanka, and free verse in dialogue with the paintings he was making.

Hasegawa took up painting seriously in his late twenties, around 1919, working initially without a teacher. He attended evening classes at the Hongō Yōga Kenkyūjo (the Hongō Western Painting Research Institute, the principal independent yōga school in Taishō Tokyo, founded by Okada Saburōsuke), but he was never formally enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and remained outside the academic Bunten and Teiten establishment that defined official yōga in his lifetime. His first major exhibition success came at the 4th Shinkō Yōga (Emerging Western Painting) Exhibition in 1923, where his Tabata Substation — a small, intense oil of the new electrical substation in the working-class Tabata district of north Tokyo, painted in the year of the Great Kantō Earthquake — was selected. The painting was the first of a long series of industrial and infrastructural subjects, including gas tanks, viaducts, freight yards, and substations, that placed Hasegawa within the broader 1920s European tendency (Otto Dix, Charles Sheeler, the early Léger) of treating the new industrial landscape as a serious motif for modern painting. Unlike Sheeler or Léger, however, Hasegawa rendered these subjects with the loose, painterly, color-saturated brushwork that he had absorbed from reproductions of Vlaminck and Soutine — his industrial paintings are nervously alive rather than classicizing.

The central institutional affiliation of Hasegawa's career was the Nikakai (Second Section Society), the most important non-official yōga exhibition society in interwar Tokyo, founded in 1914 by Ishii Hakutei and others in protest against the conservatism of the Bunten. He first showed at the Nikakai in 1927, and his Beer Hall and A Bar of that year (the latter now in the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art) attracted critical attention for the rapid, almost slashing application of paint and the bold red, ochre, and viridian palette that became his signature. He continued to exhibit at the Nikakai through 1936, with his work appearing in many of the most important Nikakai shows of the late 1920s and 1930s. He was associated for a time with the so-called "1930-Nen Kyōkai" (1930 Association) of younger yōga painters, alongside Yorozu Tetsugorō and Maeta Kanji, but his independence from any formal group was characteristic. He never joined the avant-garde Surrealist or geometric-abstract circles of the 1930s, and his work was never fully programmatically modernist — it remained, throughout his career, an intensely observational painting of Tokyo low life, rendered in a Fauvist-Expressionist idiom of his own.

The defining circumstance of Hasegawa's mature career was his economic and social marginality. From the late 1920s onward he was effectively homeless, sleeping in cheap rooming houses or in the back rooms of the Asakusa, Tabata, and Reiganjima bars and restaurants he frequented, and paying for meals and drink with paintings produced on the spot. This practice — painting oil sketches of bar mistresses, café waitresses, restaurant owners, and the rooms themselves in exchange for a meal or a few yen — accounts for the survival of a large number of small, rapid, intensely characterized portraits and interiors that were never intended for the Nikakai exhibition wall but that have since become some of his most celebrated works. The portraits of Aimitsu (1928, of the younger Surrealist painter Aimitsu/Ishimura Nichirō, with whom Hasegawa was briefly close), of the dramatist Kishida Kunio (1930), of the haiku poet Maeda Yūgure (1930), of the writer Yano Fumio (1933), and of the bar owner Master of Restaurant Mansaku (c. 1937) belong to this category, as do the many café and bar interiors — Café Orient, Café Entrance, Café Waitress, Café Noa Noa, Café Sankyō-Tei, Beer Hall — that map the topography of Hasegawa's nocturnal Tokyo.

From 1933 onward Hasegawa increasingly painted in Asakusa, the entertainment and red-light district north of Ueno that had been a center of Tokyo low culture since the Edo period. The Asakusa Townscape watercolors of 1936, the Yasuki-Bushi (Ballad) Dancer of 1935 (a portrait of a performer of the popular Yasuki-bushi folk song-and-dance form then current in the Asakusa music halls), the Lady of Pleasure (1937), and the late watercolor self-portraits all belong to this Asakusa phase. The watercolors of the late 1930s, often executed on small sheets of paper in the back rooms of Asakusa bars and restaurants, are among the most concentrated of his works: rapid, transparent washes of magenta, viridian, and ochre over pencil notation, the figures and rooms held together by Hasegawa's idiosyncratic linear shorthand. They are the visual equivalent of the haiku and tanka he was writing at the same time.

The last years of his life were a slow dissolution. He continued to paint and to write poems, but he was drinking heavily, eating poorly, and increasingly unable to maintain any kind of stable lodging. He was hospitalized in 1938 for tuberculosis but discharged himself and returned to the streets. In the late summer of 1940, severely malnourished and gravely ill, he was committed to the public welfare ward of Itabashi Hospital, where he died on 12 November 1940 at the age of forty-nine. The exact cause of death was recorded as malnutrition. His final works, the small watercolors of 1940 — including the Boys and Girls now in private hands — were executed shortly before his death. His reputation, contested in his lifetime by critics who could not categorize him within the cleaner divisions of academic yōga, Nikakai modernism, or proletarian art, grew steadily after the war. The first major retrospective, organized by the Itabashi Art Museum (which holds the largest single concentration of his work), took place in 1979; the 60th-anniversary memorial exhibition organized by the Tokyo Shimbun in 2000 toured several venues and was the basis for the most-cited modern catalogue of his work. Today he is recognized, alongside Yorozu Tetsugorō and Saeki Yūzō, as one of the three most important Japanese yōga painters of the 1920s and 1930s, and his Asakusa paintings have become a defining visual record of the city in the years immediately before the Pacific War.