Hasegawa Toshiyuki

Hasegawa Toshiyuki (長谷川利行, 1891–1940), whose given name is also read 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 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 employment, unable to keep a fixed address, and notorious for trading paintings for drinks and meals at the bars he frequented, he is a canonical example in modern Japanese art of the painter as outsider (autorō, the Japanese transliteration of "outlaw"); Yoshida Kazumasa's 2000 critical biography of him bears the title Autorō to yobareta gaka (アウトローと呼ばれた画家, "The Painter Called an Outlaw"). He died in October 1940 in the Tokyo Metropolitan welfare institution (Yōikuin) at Itabashi, at the age of forty-nine, of stomach cancer. His paintings are now divided among the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Hiroshima Prefectural Museum of Art, the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, and many other public and private collections.

Hasegawa was born on 9 July 1891 in Yamashina, on the eastern side of Kyoto, a son of a Kyoto police officer; sources differ over the details of his family and even his exact birth date. He entered a private middle school — the Taikyū Middle School in Arida district, Wakayama Prefecture — but did not complete it, withdrawing in 1909, and his earliest training in painting was self-directed. He was a poet and writer before he was a painter, and in 1919 he privately printed a collection of his verse (Hasegawa Mokuishū). He moved to Tokyo in 1921, at first supporting himself by writing popular fiction, and he continued to write throughout his life; his surviving notebooks include drafts of poetry in dialogue with the paintings he was making.

Hasegawa learned to paint largely on his own, without a teacher, and he remained outside the academic Bunten and Teiten establishment that defined official yōga in his lifetime — he never enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. His first exhibition success came with Tabata Substation (田端変電所), a small, intense oil of the electrical substation in the working-class Tabata district of north Tokyo, which was selected for the first exhibition of the Shinkō Yōga-kai (Emerging Western Painting Society) in 1920. The painting was the first of a long series of industrial and infrastructural subjects — gas tanks, viaducts, freight yards, and substations — that placed Hasegawa within the broader 1920s 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 he had absorbed from European modernism — 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 began exhibiting with the Nikakai in the mid-1920s, and in 1927 he was awarded its Chōgyū Prize for Beer Hall (麦酒室), painted with the rapid, almost slashing strokes and the bold red, ochre, and viridian palette that became his signature. He continued to show at the Nikakai until 1937, after which he stopped submitting to the juried exhibitions. He also exhibited with the 1930 Association (Senkyūhyaku-sanjū-nen Kyōkai) of younger yōga painters in the late 1920s, where his work was recognized with an encouragement prize, and in 1932 he joined poets and novelists in founding a short-lived artists' group, the Chōchō-kai. But his independence from any formal program was characteristic: he never joined the Surrealist or geometric-abstract circles of the 1930s, and his work remained throughout an intensely observational painting of Tokyo low life 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 other downtown 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, writers, 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 exhibition wall but that have since become some of his most celebrated works. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, for instance, holds his portrait of the dramatist Kishida Kunio, one of many rapid portraits and café and bar interiors that together map the topography of Hasegawa's nocturnal Tokyo.

Hasegawa is strongly associated with Asakusa, the entertainment district north of Ueno that had been a center of Tokyo low culture since the Edo period. The watercolors of his last years, 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 an idiosyncratic linear shorthand. They are the visual equivalent of the poems he went on writing at the same time.

The last years of his life were a slow dissolution. He continued to paint and to write, but he was drinking heavily, eating poorly, and increasingly unable to maintain any stable lodging. In 1940, gravely ill, he collapsed in the street at Mikawashima and was taken as a destitute vagrant to the Tokyo Metropolitan welfare institution at Itabashi, where he died on 12 October 1940 at the age of forty-nine; the cause was stomach cancer. His reputation, contested in his lifetime by critics who could not fit him into the cleaner divisions of academic yōga, Nikakai modernism, or proletarian art, grew steadily after the war, and a large touring retrospective of more than a hundred works traveled to several Japanese museums in 2018. Today he is counted among the significant Japanese yōga painters of the 1920s and 1930s, and his Tokyo paintings have become a defining visual record of the city's downtown in the years before the Pacific War.