Tomimoto Kenkichi

Tomimoto Kenkichi (富本憲吉, 1886-1963) was a Japanese ceramic artist and one of the founding figures of the Mingei (folk craft) movement, later designated a Living National Treasure (Ningen Kokuhō) for his work in overglaze enamel porcelain. Although his name appears on rosters of modern Japanese printmaking because of his association with the Mingei circle around Yanagi Sōetsu, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and the English potter Bernard Leach, Tomimoto's primary medium was clay rather than paper, and his catalogued holdings at major Western museums consist almost entirely of porcelain dishes, jars, and brush pots rather than woodblock or other prints.

Born on June 5, 1886 in Ando Village, Nara Prefecture, into a wealthy landowning family, Tomimoto studied architecture and interior design at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), graduating in 1909. He traveled to London in 1908-1910 to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he absorbed the legacy of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement — a formative influence that he carried back to Japan and that helped shape the eventual Mingei doctrine of beauty in everyday useful objects. While in London he met Bernard Leach, and after returning to Japan the two collaborated on Leach's first pottery experiments at Abiko in 1911-1912.

From the late 1910s Tomimoto built his own kilns in Ando and began producing the unglazed and slip-decorated earthenware that established his early reputation, before turning toward white porcelain (hakuji) and ultimately the overglaze enamel work (iro-e jiki) for which he is now best known. He was a founding co-signatory of Yanagi Sōetsu's 1926 Mingei manifesto alongside Hamada, Kawai, and Leach, though he later distanced himself from the strict Mingei insistence on anonymous folk craft, arguing for the value of the individually signed studio piece. In 1955 he was designated a Living National Treasure for iro-e jiki, and from 1950 he served as a professor at the Kyoto City University of Arts.

Tomimoto was awarded Japan's Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) in 1961 and died on June 8, 1963 in Kyoto at the age of seventy-seven. His ceramics are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Tomimoto Kenkichi Memorial Hall in his native Nara. For Hanga's purposes, however, Tomimoto's catalogue lies almost wholly outside the print medium, and his death in 1963 means that any photographic reproduction of his ceramic work remains under copyright in both Japan (through 2034 under life+70) and the United States as a Japan-source work until that copyright clears.