Kobayashi Kokei

Kobayashi Kokei (小林古径, 1883-1957) was one of the central figures of twentieth-century nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and a leading voice within the generation of artists who reformed the medium during the late Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras. Born Kobayashi Shigeru in Takada (today part of Jōetsu City), Niigata Prefecture, on 11 February 1883, he was the son of a samurai family that had served the lords of Takada domain; the household's straitened post-Restoration circumstances meant that his early years were spent in modest provincial conditions and that the decision to pursue painting was, for him, both a personal calling and a quiet act of cultural reclamation. Losing his mother as a young child and his father in adolescence, he was raised in part by relatives, and the discipline, reserve, and almost ascetic refinement that contemporaries later identified as the defining qualities of his art were already visible in his earliest training.

In 1899, at the age of sixteen, Kokei went up to Tokyo to study under Kajita Hanko (1870-1917), an established Meiji-period painter whose studio drew heavily on the eclectic late-Edo lineage of Kikuchi Yōsai and Watanabe Seitei and who specialised in historical figure painting and bijin-ga. From Kajita he received a thorough grounding in classical brush technique, in the systematic copying of Tosa-school and Kanō-school models, and in the literary-historical iconography of court tales and military romances that would inform his early breakthrough works. It was Kajita who gave him the artist name 'Kokei,' a name carrying connotations of antiquity and depth that he would use for the rest of his career. He began exhibiting almost immediately, showing at the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) and at the Bunten — the Ministry of Education's annual government salon, founded in 1907 — and quickly attracted notice for the controlled, slightly archaic refinement of his line.

The decisive turn of his career came in 1914, when the Nihon Bijutsuin was reorganised under the leadership of Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958) after the death of its founder Okakura Tenshin. Kokei joined as a charter member of the revived Institute, and from that point onward his exhibition career was tied almost exclusively to the Inten, the Institute's autumn exhibition, rather than to the official Bunten/Teiten salon. Within the reformed Bijutsuin he found himself in the company of three slightly younger painters with whom he would be permanently associated — Maeda Seison (1885-1977), Yasuda Yukihiko (1884-1978), and Imamura Shikō (1880-1916) — and through whom the Institute pursued its programme of restoring the historical and spiritual seriousness of Japanese painting against the pull of academic Western realism. The early Taishō period produced from Kokei a series of grave, archaising figure compositions on historical themes: Kumawakamaru (1907), depicting the boy hero of the Taiheiki who avenged his father by killing the warden Honma Saburō; The Adventures of Ushiwakamaru (Ushiwakamaru no zu); and a number of Buddhist-historical subjects that drew on his study of Heian and Kamakura narrative scrolls. The lines in these works are extraordinarily controlled — described by later critics as 'jewelled' (gyokusen) — and the colour is sparing, with a preference for ground-mineral pigments laid in flat planes and accented with the merest touches of gold and vermillion.

In 1922 the Nihon Bijutsuin sent Kokei and Maeda Seison together to Europe for an extended period of study. Travelling via the Indian Ocean route, the pair spent the better part of two years in London, Paris, Florence, and Rome, examining Renaissance painting, ancient Egyptian and Greek sculpture, and — crucially for Kokei's later development — the Stein Collection of early Chinese paintings at the British Museum, where they were given privileged access to copy Tang-dynasty figure paintings and early Buddhist scrolls. The British Museum copies, made in fine linear brush on silk, marked a permanent deepening of Kokei's commitment to drawing as the foundation of nihonga; from this point onward his line work became, if anything, still more austere and more deeply indebted to the linear traditions of Tang figure painting and of early Yamato-e. The European trip also reinforced his sense that the path of Japanese painting was not to adopt Western chiaroscuro and aerial perspective but to refine its native pictorial language in a self-conscious, scholarly way. He returned to Japan in 1923, narrowly missing the Great Kantō earthquake of 1 September of that year.

The later 1920s and 1930s established Kokei as one of the most respected mature figures of the Inten. Works such as Ideyu (In the Bath, 1918) — a study of a nude woman drying her hair after bathing in a hot spring, painted in the wake of his absorption of Indian Ajantā wall-painting via the British Museum copies and exhibited to considerable public discussion — and a steady output of bird-and-flower compositions on silk gave him a position at the centre of nihonga's mid-century synthesis between historical figural painting and the bird-and-flower (kachō) tradition. His Magnolia Tree (Mokuren, 1919), Crane (Tsuru), Turkey (Shichimenchō), and Eggplants (Nasu, 1930) are characteristic: large hanging-scroll formats in colour on silk, with subjects placed against unbroken, atmospheric grounds and outlined with the same fine, even, unhurried brush he had spent decades refining. The Eggplants of 1930, now in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, became one of the iconic still-life subjects of modern nihonga; its calm, slightly chilly observation of three purple-black fruits against a pale silk ground is regularly cited as a model of the genre.

Kokei's institutional honours accumulated steadily. He was appointed a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (today the Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1944, succeeding Yokoyama Taikan as the leading nihonga teacher in the academy. In 1950 he was elected to the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsu-in), and in 1951 he was named a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) of the Japanese government — one of the highest honours available to a living artist — alongside Yokoyama Taikan, Uemura Shōen, and a handful of others of his generation. He continued to paint and to teach throughout the 1950s, producing late masterpieces of restraint such as the Cherry Blossoms (Ōka) and White Flowers and Small Bird (Hakka to shōkin) compositions for which he was particularly admired in his last years. He died at his home in Tokyo on 3 April 1957, at the age of seventy-four.

The critical literature on Kobayashi Kokei is unanimous in identifying him as the painter who, more than any other of his generation, demonstrated that a fully modern nihonga could be built out of the most classical of Japanese pictorial means. His drawing was treated as exemplary by the post-war academy: Tanaka Ichimatsu, the founding director of the National Museum of Western Art and one of the most influential historians of mid-century Japanese art, repeatedly held up Kokei's line as the standard against which modern nihonga should be measured. His students included a generation of painters who carried the Inten tradition into the second half of the twentieth century. Outside Japan his work is comparatively under-collected — the major holdings remain in the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi (which preserves a particularly important group of his historical-figural works), the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo (which holds key Taishō-era pieces), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (MOMAT), the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, and the collection of the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, near his birthplace. For the audience of a print-focused project such as Hanga, Kokei's interest lies not in original block-printing — he did not practice woodblock in the publisher-led manner of his shin-hanga contemporaries — but in the intimate dialogue between his nihonga line and the older woodblock tradition of careful linear drawing on which both his historical figures and his late kachō compositions ultimately rest.