Kawabata Ryūshi

Kawabata Ryūshi (川端龍子, 1885-1966) was one of the most ambitious and controversial nihonga painters of the twentieth century — a Taishō- and Shōwa-period artist who broke from the chamber-scale conventions of modern Japanese painting to produce wall-sized, theatrically lit compositions intended to be seen at a distance and to compete in scale and emotional address with European mural painting. Born Kawabata Shōtarō in Wakayama in 1885, he came of age in Tokyo and trained first as a Western-style (yōga) painter, working as a newspaper and magazine illustrator to support himself while producing oils in the European academic manner of the early Meiji yōga circle. He took the art name Ryūshi (literally 'dragon-child') and had work accepted at the early Bunten salons while still painting in the Western style.

The turning point of his career came in 1913, when he traveled to the United States to deepen his study of Western painting. On the trip he visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where the Asian art galleries assembled by Ernest Fenollosa, Edward Sylvester Morse, and Okakura Kakuzō held one of the world's most concentrated collections of Japanese painting — Heian and Kamakura Buddhist scrolls, Muromachi ink painting, Momoyama screens, and the great Edo lineages of Rinpa, Maruyama-Shijō, and Kanō. Confronted with these works, Ryūshi underwent a personal reorientation that he afterward described as a decisive abandonment of yōga in favor of nihonga. He returned to Japan and repositioned himself as a nihonga painter, becoming a member of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) under Yokoyama Taikan in 1917 and exhibiting at its annual Inten exhibition through the 1920s.

Ryūshi's mature work emerged in the second half of the 1920s and is defined by a deliberate enlargement of the nihonga format. While his Inten contemporaries continued to paint scrolls, screens, and album leaves at conventional intimate scale for collectors' alcoves, Ryūshi developed what he called kaijō geijutsu — 'exhibition-hall art' — designed for the new museum spaces and large public exhibition halls of Taishō and Shōwa Tokyo. He pushed the dimensions of single panels and two-panel screens to the limits of available silk and paper, treated his pigments as opaque mineral coloring to be seen at twenty paces rather than at arm's length, and chose subjects with overt narrative or dramatic content. Naruto (1929), a large two-panel image of the whirlpools of the Naruto Strait off Shikoku, made his reputation. Ryūshi had left the Inten in 1928, and he founded his own exhibition society, the Seiryūsha (青龍社, 'Blue Dragon Society'), whose first annual exhibition opened in 1929; he led the society for the rest of his life, and it became one of the principal alternative venues for ambitious nihonga in the Shōwa period.

Through the 1930s the Seiryūsha annual exhibitions hosted Ryūshi's signature mature works — among them Tatsumaki (Tornado, 1933) and Aizen (Passion, 1934) — grand decorative compositions in mineral pigment that mixed Rinpa-derived gold-ground decoration with the sharp tonal modelling of his early yōga training and a frankly modern theatrical sensibility. His subjects ranged across Buddhist iconography (the flame deity Aizen Myōō), the natural world at full force (whirlpools, lightning, storms), and Japanese landscape on a panoramic scale. The flower-and-bird and animal motifs central to most nihonga of his generation appear in his work, but Ryūshi treated them with a brashness and scale unusual in the genre. Critics inside the Inten establishment sometimes derided this as vulgar showmanship, while admirers saw in it the long-overdue arrival in Japanese painting of the public-mural ambition that European art had taken for granted since the Renaissance.

The war years drew Ryūshi into the orbit of official war painting (sensōga), as they did most senior nihonga figures; he was dispatched to the Asian mainland several times as a military painter between 1937 and 1940 and to the southern front in 1942. Works such as Bakudan Sange (Bomb Blast, 1945) belong to the body of nihonga-format war pictures that postwar critics have debated continuously — at once ambitious works of pigment and brush and politically compromised products of the wartime cultural apparatus. After the war he resumed the Seiryūsha exhibitions and continued to produce large-scale paintings into his eighties, including Kinkakuji Enjō (1950), his response to the arson of Kyoto's Golden Pavilion.

In 1959 Ryūshi was awarded the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō), among the highest honors of the Japanese state for cultural achievement, in recognition of a half-century of nihonga production. In 1963 he established the Ryūshi Memorial Museum (Ryūshi Kinenkan) in the Ōmori area of Ōta, Tokyo, on the site of his studio and residence; now operated by Ōta Ward, it houses the largest single concentration of his work. He died in Tokyo on April 10, 1966. With Yokoyama Taikan and Kawai Gyokudō, he is remembered as one of the 'three great figures' (sankyoshō) of Shōwa nihonga, and his work remains a key reference for any account of how modern Japanese painting absorbed the demands — and the scale — of twentieth-century public exhibition culture.