Biography
Kimura Shōhachi (木村荘八, 1893-1958) was one of the central figures of the Taishō and early Shōwa Tokyo art world, a yōga (Western-style) painter, printmaker, illustrator, and essayist whose work distilled the texture, light, and disappearing daily life of his native city as it lurched from the Meiji into the modern era. Born in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo on August 21, 1893, the eighth son of the proprietor of a chain of beef-and-sukiyaki restaurants (the Iroha-tei group, a downtown institution that helped popularize Western-style beef cuisine after the Meiji opening), Shōhachi grew up surrounded by the sights, smells, and rhythms of shitamachi life — the merchants, geisha, kabuki crowds, sukiyaki kitchens, festival processions, and bridges of the low-lying eastern wards. That immersion in Edo-into-modern-Tokyo street life shaped the subject matter to which he returned for the rest of his career, even as his stylistic vocabulary moved through Fauvist experiments, German Expressionist influences, sōsaku-hanga community efforts, and finally a mature manner that combined oil-paint richness with the linear vivacity of woodblock illustration.
Kimura's formal training began in 1910 at the Hakuba-kai Western painting research institute under Kuroda Seiki and Fujishima Takeji, where he absorbed the academic plein-air manner that dominated official yōga instruction. He almost immediately broke from it. In 1912, only nineteen years old, he co-founded the short-lived but historically pivotal Fyūzan-kai (ヒュウザン会, sometimes romanized Hyūzan or Fusain), a youthful, anti-academic exhibiting society organized by Kishida Ryūsei, Saitō Yori, Takamura Kōtarō, and Yorozu Tetsugorō, among others. Fyūzan-kai gathered Tokyo's most ambitious yōga modernists for two raucous exhibitions in 1912 and 1913 and is generally considered the moment when Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and German Expressionism arrived in Japan as live working influences rather than reproductions. Kimura's Fyūzan-kai canvases were thickly brushed and high in color, deliberately stripped of academic finish, and brought him into the inner circle of the early-Taishō avant-garde alongside Kishida and Yorozu.
From the same years he was active in the Pan no Kai (パンの会), the literary-artistic salon that met in the cafés along the Sumida River from 1908 through the early 1910s. Pan no Kai brought together poets like Kitahara Hakushū and Kinoshita Mokutarō and painters including Ishii Hakutei, Yamamoto Kanae, and Kimura himself, in self-conscious imitation of Parisian café-bohemia. Kimura's lifelong attachment to the bridges, eel-houses, and gas-lit waterfront of Sumida-gawa Tokyo traces directly to those Pan no Kai years, and his later 1928 painting of the Pan Society reconvening was both an act of memory and a manifesto of the modern Tokyo painter's place at the center of the city's literary life.
In 1914 Kimura joined the Inten (Japan Art Institute Exhibition) Western-painting section organized by Yamamoto Kanae and others, and through Kanae was drawn into the early sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement that emphasized self-design, self-carving, and self-printing as opposed to the divided commercial production of traditional ukiyo-e. Although his primary medium remained oil paint on canvas, Kimura made woodblock prints, designed book covers and frontispieces, and produced illustrations for innumerable books and magazines, becoming one of the most prolific yōga illustrators of the Taishō and early Shōwa decades. He developed a recognizable style of line-and-wash drawing that translated the energy of Tokyo street life onto the printed page.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1893–1958
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Sōsaku-hanga
- Subjects
- Children
- Works Indexed
- 8
Frequently Asked Questions
Kimura Shōhachi (木村荘八, 1893-1958) was one of the central figures of the Taishō and early Shōwa Tokyo art world, a yōga (Western-style) painter, printmaker, illustrator, and essayist whose work distilled the texture, light, and disappearing daily life of his native city as it lurched from the Meiji into the modern era. Born in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo on August 21, 1893, the eighth son of the proprietor of a chain of beef-and-sukiyaki restaurants (the Iroha-tei group, a downtown institution that helped popularize Western-style beef cuisine after the Meiji opening), Shōhachi grew up surrounded by the sights, smells, and rhythms of shitamachi life — the merchants, geisha, kabuki crowds, sukiyaki kitchens, festival processions, and bridges of the low-lying eastern wards. That immersion in Edo-into-modern-Tokyo street life shaped the subject matter to which he returned for the rest of his career, even as his stylistic vocabulary moved through Fauvist experiments, German Expressionist influences, sōsaku-hanga community efforts, and finally a mature manner that combined oil-paint richness with the linear vivacity of woodblock illustration.
Kimura Shōhachi was active from 1893 to 1958. They were associated with the Sōsaku-hanga movement.
Kimura Shōhachi's work was shaped by the Sōsaku-hanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Sōsaku-hanga: ## What is sōsaku-hanga? Sōsaku-hanga (創作版画, "creative prints") was a twentieth-century Japanese print movement defined by a single commitment: the artist must design, carve, and print every work alone.
Kimura Shōhachi's prints frequently feature children.
Original prints by Kimura Shōhachi can be found in collections including Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, Kitano Art Museum, Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, Fukutomi Tarō Collection Materials Room.
