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 (川端昇太郎) in Wakayama in 1885, he came of age in Tokyo and trained first as a Western-style (yōga) painter, contributing illustrations to the literary magazine Shinjin-sha and producing oils in the European academic manner of the early Meiji yōga circle. He took the art name Ryūshi (literally 'dragon-child') and exhibited at the early Bunten salons in the yōga section.

The turning point of his career came in 1913, when he traveled to the United States to deepen his study of Western painting. The trip lasted only a few months — funds ran short — but on the way back through Boston he spent time at the Museum of Fine Arts, where the Asian art galleries assembled by Ernest Fenollosa, Edward Sylvester Morse, and Okakura Kakuzō contained one of the world's most concentrated holdings of Japanese painting. Confronted with Heian and Kamakura Buddhist scrolls, Muromachi ink painting, Momoyama screens, and the great Edo painters of the Rinpa, Maruyama-Shijō, and Kanō lineages, Ryūshi underwent a personal reorientation that he afterwards described as a decisive abandonment of yōga in favor of nihonga. He returned to Tokyo and within a few years had repositioned himself as a nihonga painter, joining the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) under Yokoyama Taikan and others in 1917 and exhibiting at its annual Inten exhibition through the early 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. The 1929 painting Naruto, an enormous two-panel image of the whirlpools off Shikoku rendered in deep ultramarine and silver-grey, made his reputation. The same year he formally broke with the Inten and founded his own exhibition society, the Seiryūsha (青龍社, 'Blue Dragon Society'), which he led for the rest of his life and which became one of the principal alternative venues for ambitious nihonga in the Showa period.

Through the 1930s the Seiryūsha annual exhibitions hosted Ryūshi's signature mature works — Tatsumaki (Tornado, 1933), Aizen (Passion, 1934), Kōrohō, and a continuing series of 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. Subjects ranged across Japanese myth and Buddhist iconography (the Aizen Myōō flame deity), classical literature (Komachi's Residence, 1918, now in the Metropolitan Museum's Mary and Cheney Cowles collection), 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; admirers, including the painters who clustered around the Seiryūsha through the 1930s and 1940s, 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. His 1944 Suiraijin (Thunder God of the Sea) and the 1945 Bakudan Sange (Sacrifice in the Bomb Blast) 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. The Cleveland Museum of Art's 2015 lecture programming around Rakuyō kōryaku (The Capture of Luoyang) reopened scholarly attention to this strand of Ryūshi's output. 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; Ikada Nagashi (Rafting, 1959); and Hatataku (1960).

In 1959 Ryūshi was awarded the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō), the highest honor of the Japanese state for cultural achievement, in recognition of a half-century of nihonga production. In 1963 he opened the Ryūshi Memorial Museum (Ryūshi Kinenkan) in Ōmori, Tokyo, on the site of his studio and residence; the museum is now operated by Ōta Ward and 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 pillars' (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.