Kayama Matazō

Kayama Matazō (加山又造, 1927-2004) was one of the most inventive nihonga painters and printmakers of the postwar era, a Kyoto-born artist who fused the decorative traditions of the Rinpa school with cubism, futurism, and a sharp graphic modernism to produce work that felt simultaneously ancient and unmistakably twentieth-century. Across a six-decade career he moved fluently between monumental folding screens, intimate ink paintings, woodblock and lithographic prints, textile and kimono design, and large-scale temple decoration — a breadth of practice that placed him alongside Higashiyama Kaii and Hirayama Ikuo as one of the defining nihonga masters of the Shōwa and Heisei eras.

Born on 24 September 1927 in Kyoto, Kayama grew up in the workshop of his father, a Nishijin textile designer who produced luxurious obi, absorbing the rhythms of pattern-making and the decorative logic of Japanese craft from earliest childhood. That early immersion in surface, motif, and stylized nature would mark his mature work decisively. At thirteen he entered the painting course at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts before moving to Tokyo to enroll at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, now the Tokyo University of the Arts); his studies were interrupted by wartime military service, and he graduated from its Japanese-painting department in 1949, becoming a pupil of the nihonga painter Yamamoto Kyūjin.

Kayama's early postwar work broke sharply with the gentle lyricism that dominated nihonga in the late 1940s. From around 1950 he began producing animal paintings — deer, horses, sheep, birds — in which the subjects were reduced to faceted geometric planes and arranged in agitated, cubist-inflected compositions clearly indebted to Picasso, Braque, and the Italian futurists. These works, which he showed with the Sōzō Bijutsu group from its 1950 exhibitions, won him a reputation as one of the most radical young nihonga painters of his generation and earned him the Asahi Newspaper Young Painters Prize in 1957. By the early 1960s he had begun to look backward as well as forward, rediscovering the Rinpa masters Sōtatsu and Kōrin and the classical decorative tradition; from this point his work increasingly combined modernist construction with gold and silver leaf, mineral pigments, and the flattened, ornamental space of the classical screen.

He traveled and exhibited abroad from around 1960, holding a solo exhibition in New York in 1961 and later seeing his work included in group exhibitions of modern Japanese painting at the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Major late paintings — sweeping snow landscapes, moonlit cranes, leaping deer, and tigers rendered in liquid sumi — translated Edo-period decorative grammar into a strikingly contemporary idiom. Among his most celebrated commissions is the vast Cloud Dragon he painted for the ceiling of the Dharma Hall (Hattō) at Tenryū-ji in Kyoto, completed in 1997 to mark the 650th anniversary of the death of the temple's founder. Alongside these monumental works Kayama maintained a serious and prolific printmaking practice from the 1960s onward, producing woodblock prints, lithographs, etchings, and silkscreens that distilled the imagery of his paintings into editioned form. His prints of nudes, cats, horses, cherry blossoms, and the moon became some of the most recognizable nihonga-derived graphic images of the late twentieth century.

Kayama taught for nearly three decades, serving as professor at Tama Art University from 1966 to 1973 and again from 1977 to 1988, then as professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts from 1988 to 1995, where he trained a generation of younger nihonga painters. Honors accumulated steadily: the Japan Art Grand Prize in 1973, the Minister of Education's Art Encouragement Prize in 1980, designation as a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) in 1997, and the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) — Japan's highest artistic distinction — in 2003. He died of pneumonia on 6 April 2004 at the age of seventy-six. His prints continue to be actively collected through Japanese print specialists.