Ishii Tsuruzō

Ishii Tsuruzō (石井鶴三, 1887-1973) was a Japanese painter, sculptor, and printmaker who occupies a distinctive position in early-Shōwa art history as both a leader of the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement and a celebrated newspaper illustrator. Born in Tokyo on 5 June 1887, he was the younger brother of the painter, lithographer, and Pan no Kai co-founder Ishii Hakutei (1882-1958), and the son of the painter Ishii Teikō. After his father's death when he was twelve, Tsuruzō was adopted by a relative in Funabashi, returning to Tokyo to begin formal art training in 1905. He studied yōga (Western-style painting) under Koyama Shōtarō (1857-1916) at the Fudōsha private academy and sculpture under Katō Keiun at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), graduating from the sculpture department in 1910.

Ishii's early reputation rested on sculpture and painting rather than prints. In 1912 he won first prize at the fifth Bunten (the Ministry of Education Fine Art Exhibition) for his work Arakawa Bamboo, and through the 1910s he exhibited regularly with the Nihon Suisaiga-kai (Japan Watercolor Society) and the official salon system. His shift toward printmaking came through the orbit of his older brother Hakutei and Yamamoto Kanae (1882-1946), the artist whose Gyofu (Fisherman) of 1904 is traditionally cited as the founding work of the sōsaku-hanga movement. Ishii Tsuruzō exhibited at the inaugural Nihon Sōsaku-Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Creative Print Association) show in 1919 and formally joined the society in 1921, becoming part of the generation that pressed the jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) principle as a counter to the publisher-driven shin-hanga workshops then flourishing under Watanabe Shōzaburō.

Within the sōsaku-hanga movement, Ishii's role was as much organisational as artistic. He was a founding member of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association) when it absorbed the earlier creative-print society in 1931, and he served as its president for nearly three decades beginning in 1939 (some sources give 1944). His tenure spanned the wartime suspension of normal exhibition activity, the post-war reconstitution of the printmaking community under Onchi Kōshirō's leadership of the Ichimokukai discussion group, and the international success of sōsaku-hanga at the São Paulo and Lugano biennials of the 1950s. As president he was responsible for maintaining institutional continuity for an artist-driven medium that had, by the end of his life, become a recognized branch of Japanese modern art. His personal devotion to the movement's origins is most clearly expressed by his preservation of Yamamoto Kanae's original Gyofu woodblock, which he later arranged to have reprinted as a tribute to the movement's founder.

From 1924 Ishii ran annual sculpture workshops at Ueda in Nagano prefecture, a practice he continued, with some wartime interruption, until 1970, and which produced a substantial body of teaching materials and small bronzes alongside his printmaking. In 1944 he was appointed professor of sculpture at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (by then reorganized as the Tōkyō Bijutsu Senmon Gakkō and ultimately the sculpture department of the Tokyo University of the Arts), a chair he held until his retirement in 1959. His sculptural practice — figurative works in bronze and wood, often on Buddhist and historical themes — remained the primary basis of his livelihood and academic standing throughout his career, while his prints circulated in smaller editions through the creative-print exhibition circuit and specialist dealers.