Iwami Furusawa

Furusawa Iwami (古沢岩美, 1912-2000) was a Japanese yōga (Western-style) painter and printmaker whose long career, beginning in the inter-war Tokyo avant-garde and ending only with his death at the end of the twentieth century, traced a distinctive arc from pre-war urban modernism through the trauma of wartime mobilization and POW captivity to a sustained, surrealist-inflected post-war practice centred on the witness of war. He is held today by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT, artist record AFU024, nineteen works), the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the Itabashi Art Museum (which mounted a major 2007 retrospective titled Wild Dance of Color and Lines), Saga Prefectural Art Museum, and the Furusawa Iwami Art Museum founded in his honour in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1975. Although the dealer literature occasionally records his birth as 1902, the established Japanese institutional record consistently dates him to 5 February 1912.

He was born in Karatsu in Saga Prefecture on the northern coast of Kyushu, into a region whose ceramic traditions and proximity to the Korea Strait had given it a distinctive cultural orientation since the early Edo period. He moved to Tokyo to begin formal art training in 1928 at the Hongō Institute (本郷絵画研究所), an academic-style drawing studio founded in 1912 by Okada Saburōsuke and Fujishima Takeji that had become one of the principal training grounds for yōga painters of the Taishō and early Shōwa generations. The Hongō Institute curriculum combined rigorous figure drawing in the European academic mode with exposure to the Post-Impressionist and Fauve currents that Japanese painters were absorbing through translated French publications and the periodic exhibitions of works brought back by returning students. Furusawa's early training therefore placed him within the broadly humanist yōga lineage that ran from Kuroda Seiki through Okada and into the painters of the Hongō circle.

During the 1930s he became a member of the Ikebukuro Montparnasse (池袋モンパルナス), the loose community of painters, sculptors, and writers who had settled in the cheap rental ateliers of the Ikebukuro district of north-west Tokyo from the mid-1920s onward. Named with self-conscious echo of the Paris artists' quarter, Ikebukuro Montparnasse housed at various times Matsumoto Shunsuke, Aimitsu, Tsuruoka Masao, Inō Mizuho, and dozens of other yōga painters whose work fused European modernist vocabularies with distinctly Japanese subject and feeling. Furusawa's pre-war work emerged from this milieu, exploring surrealism as one of several avant-garde currents available to Tokyo painters of his generation; he exhibited at the avant-garde society Bijutsu Bunka Kyōkai (Art Culture Association) alongside other surrealist-oriented figures including Fukuzawa Ichirō and the painters who had brought Bretonian and post-De Chirico image-making into Japanese practice.

From 1943 to 1945 he was mobilized into the Imperial Japanese Army and served in northern China during the closing phase of the Second Sino-Japanese War. At the war's end he was captured and held in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, returning to Japan only in 1946. The fourteen-month gap between his country's surrender and his repatriation, the conditions of the camp, and his direct witness of war's violence in China became the central organizing material of his post-war practice. Few Japanese painters of his generation responded to the war with the sustained iconographic intensity that Furusawa brought to bear over the following five decades; his surviving 1949-1993 corpus at MOMAT documents a more or less continuous return to the subjects of mass death, hunger, mutilation, and the spectral aftermath of military violence, treated within a personal surrealist vocabulary that owed equally to Bosch and Goya and to the Buddhist iconography of the Six Realms of Rebirth (rokudō).