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, ceramics, kimono design, temple murals, and even early experiments with digital painting — 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 kimono designer, where he absorbed the rhythms of textile pattern-making and the decorative logic of Japanese craft from earliest childhood. He watched his father and his father's disciples sketch, paint, and translate designs onto silk, and that early immersion in surface, motif, and stylized nature would mark his mature work decisively. At thirteen he entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Painting (Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō), the lineage institution that had trained generations of Kyoto nihonga painters, before moving to Tokyo in 1944 to enroll at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, now the Tokyo University of the Arts). He graduated from its Japanese painting department in 1949, studying under Yamamoto Kyūjin and absorbing the legacy of Yokoyama Taikan and the Nihon Bijutsuin tradition.

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, exhibited with the Sōzō Bijutsu group he joined in 1951, 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 late-Heian 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 abroad extensively from around 1960, holding exhibitions in New York, Moscow, and at the Hermitage in Leningrad, and his international reputation grew alongside large public commissions including murals for Japanese embassies abroad and decorative programs for Buddhist temples. 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. 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 over Mount Fuji became some of the most recognizable nihonga-derived graphic images of the late twentieth century and circulated widely through Japanese and international print publishers.

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 Award 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. From the late 1990s, already in his seventies, he began experimenting with digital painting on the computer, characteristic of an artist who treated every medium as a fresh problem to be solved. He died of pneumonia in Tokyo on 6 April 2004 at the age of seventy-six. His estate remains in copyright, and his prints continue to be actively collected through Japanese print specialists and at international auction.