Hashimoto Meiji

Hashimoto Meiji (橋本明治, 1904-1991) was one of the leading Shōwa-period nihonga painters of his generation, a senior figure at the Nitten exhibition system, a designated Person of Cultural Merit, and from 1974 a recipient of the Order of Culture, Japan's highest civilian honour for contributions to the arts. He is remembered for a postwar pictorial style of unusual graphic clarity — strong, deliberate outlines drawn in sumi ink, flat planes of saturated mineral pigment, and decorative subjects drawn from the world of geisha and maiko, classical dance, cranes and other auspicious birds, and the architectural ornament of imperial and religious sites. Within twentieth-century nihonga his work occupies a position between the academic refinement of his teachers and the more graphic, design-conscious manner that would dominate official painting in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hashimoto was born on 5 August 1904 in Hamada-machi, Naka District, Shimane Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast, the eldest son of Hashimoto Taiichirō and his wife Tome. His childhood environment was a literate one: his paternal grandfather Ichitarō was an amateur painter and haikai poet whose tastes seem to have shaped Meiji's early interest in art. After finishing local schooling he made his way to Tokyo and in 1926 entered the Nihonga department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, today the Tokyo University of the Arts). He graduated in 1931 with the school's highest honour for his graduation work, a portrait of his fellow student, and was almost immediately admitted to the studio of Matsuoka Eikyū (1881-1938), a yamato-e-inspired nihonga master whose meticulous historical and figural compositions provided Meiji's foundation in classical Japanese pictorial method.

Under Matsuoka's guidance Hashimoto submitted to the Teiten (the Ministry of Education's Fine Art Exhibition) and its successor the Shin-Bunten, becoming one of the standout young painters of the late 1930s. The defining experience of his middle years, however, was not the salon system but a vast collective copying project: from 1941 until its completion in 1950, he was a member of the team commissioned to make full-scale facsimiles of the wall paintings of the Hōryū-ji Golden Hall (Kondō), the seventh- and early-eighth-century Buddhist murals long regarded as the foundation of Japanese painting. The original murals were severely damaged by fire on 26 January 1949, so the copies, made in collaboration with painters such as Hashimoto Eikyū, Maeda Seison, and Iribe Yoshitsugu under chief supervisor Naiki Seibei, became the principal record of the lost works. Hashimoto's years on the Hōryū-ji project gave him an intimate working knowledge of the line-and-mineral-pigment idiom of early Japanese Buddhist painting that would mark his postwar style.

From the late 1940s onward Hashimoto reorganised his practice around the Nitten, the postwar successor to the official salon system. He became a Nitten judge in 1948 and was appointed a councillor of the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin) in 1955. He served as professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts from 1959 until his retirement in 1969 and exerted considerable influence on younger nihonga painters through teaching as well as through Nitten's selection processes. Through these years his pictures grew progressively more graphic: dancers, maiko, and standing female figures in kimono were rendered with broad black contour lines and large unmodulated areas of vermillion, indigo, white, and gold, an aesthetic close in spirit to the design vocabulary of contemporary kimono and lacquerware. The 1960 painting Maiko, the 1966 Dance now in the Yamatane Museum of Art, and a series of crane subjects from the 1960s and 1970s are among the works that established this idiom in postwar Japanese painting.

Hashimoto received the Japan Art Academy Prize in 1953, was elected a full member of the Academy in 1957, and was named a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) in 1968. In 1974 the government awarded him the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō), placing him in the small circle of postwar nihonga painters — alongside Yokoyama Taikan, Kawai Gyokudō, and his contemporaries Higashiyama Kaii and Hirayama Ikuo — who received the country's highest artistic distinction. He also undertook a number of important public commissions: most prominently a large painting, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), measuring approximately 2.74 by 2.5 metres, for the New Tokyo Imperial Palace (Shinkyū) completed in 1968, as well as ceiling and screen paintings for major Buddhist temples and a portrait of the Shōwa Emperor for an official residence.

Though Hashimoto worked primarily in painted media — silk, paper, and the multi-panel folding screen and sliding-door formats characteristic of nihonga — his graphic sensibility translated readily into reproductive prints, and a number of his postwar compositions, especially the maiko and crane subjects, were issued as collotype or limited-edition reproductions by Japanese art publishers during his lifetime. These are the works most likely to surface in print-collecting contexts. The originals, however, remain almost exclusively in Japanese collections: the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT) holds the most substantial public group, the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo owns several of his signature postwar dance and figure compositions, and the Hamada City Museum of Art in his Shimane birthplace maintains a memorial collection. He died on 25 March 1991 at the age of eighty-six, his works remaining in copyright in Japan until the end of 2061 under the country's 70-year post-mortem term.