Kondō Kōichirō

Kondō Kōichirō (1884-1962) was a Japanese painter and cartoonist of the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods whose career traced an unusual arc from Western-style oil painting (yōga) through newspaper manga and political cartooning to a mature practice as an ink-landscape painter (suiboku sansui-ga) working within the broad current of modern nihonga. Best known today for the atmospheric monochrome landscapes he produced from the late 1910s onward — washy, light-filled views of misted hills, river gorges, and coastal pines that combine the ink-tone discipline of classical East Asian landscape with effects of light and atmosphere drawn from Western painting — Kondō was also one of the most widely read newspaper cartoonists of late-Meiji and Taishō Tokyo, and the two halves of his career sit together in a way that was unusual even within the eclectic art world of his generation.

He was born in the mountain village of Mutsuai (now part of the town of Nanbu) in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Mount Fuji, in 1884. The Yamanashi landscape — steep wooded mountains, the Fuji River cutting through the valley, sudden mists between the ridges — would supply much of the imagery of his later ink painting. As a young man he traveled to Tokyo and enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, today Tokyo University of the Arts), where he studied in the Western-painting (yōga) department under Kuroda Seiki, the leader of the Hakuba-kai circle that dominated Meiji-period academic Western painting in Japan. He graduated in 1910 with the goal of a yōga career.

The yōga career did not materialize on its own terms. In the years immediately after graduation Kondō found work as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist, drawing for the Yomiuri Shimbun and later the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. Through the 1910s and into the 1920s he was one of the leading editorial cartoonists of the Tokyo daily press, producing political and social caricatures that drew on his Western-painting training but which placed him firmly within the popular print culture of Taishō democracy. His cartoon work appeared in collected volumes and earned him a national readership well outside the fine-art world. The income and the public position the cartoons provided made it possible, in parallel, for him to begin reconstructing his identity as a serious painter.

The turn to ink painting came in the mid-1910s, as Kondō exhibited with the Sango-kai (Coral Society), a group of Japanese-style painters whose participants included Kawabata Ryūshi and Ogawa Usen, and deepened his study of ink landscape. He experimented with monochrome ink landscapes that drew on classical Chinese sansui models — Muqi, the Southern Song masters, and the splash-ink (haboku) tradition — but were filtered through the atmospheric perspective and tonal modulation he had absorbed from Western painting. In 1919 his ink landscapes were first accepted at the exhibition of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin, the Inten), the central exhibition society of early-twentieth-century nihonga; about two years later he was promoted to full membership, completing his shift from yōga and cartooning to ink landscape, although he continued to produce manga in parallel.

Kondō's mature landscapes are distinctive within Taishō and early Shōwa nihonga. Their subjects are most often mountain scenery, gorges, river valleys, coastal rocks and pines, often shrouded in mist or rain, and rendered almost entirely in ink wash with sparing use of color. The compositional logic — high horizons, deep recession through layered mountains, careful management of negative space — descends from East Asian landscape painting; the handling of light, atmospheric haze, and tonal modulation reflects the years he had spent on Western academic painting under Kuroda. He traveled in Japan, China, and Europe in support of this practice, journeying to Europe in 1922 and again to Paris in 1931; the European trips generated paintings of European subjects executed in the same ink idiom. In Paris his work drew the notice of the French novelist André Malraux, who is said to have modeled Kama, the Japanese ink painter in his 1933 novel La Condition humaine (Man's Fate), on Kondō. By around 1930 he was one of a small group of Nihon Bijutsuin painters working primarily in monochrome ink.

Kondō's prints are a smaller but important part of his output. He produced ink-and-light landscape woodblock prints and a body of cartoon prints, among them the Senryū Manga series of woodblock illustrations for the comic senryū verse of the poet Inoue Kenkabō. His prints sit between two traditions of modern Japanese printmaking — the painterly nihonga-derived prints of artists like Tomita Keisen, and the cartoon and illustrative print tradition that ran through the Meiji and Taishō press — and circulate today through specialist Japanese-print collections (the Lavenberg Collection and others document them) and through occasional museum holdings.

In the late 1930s and through the war years Kondō continued to paint, producing some of his most refined ink landscapes during a period when many of his contemporaries were absorbed into war-painting (sensō-ga) commissions. After 1945 he remained productive into his seventies, and collected catalogues and retrospectives of his work appeared. He died in 1962. His birthplace in Yamanashi maintains a memorial museum, the Kondō Kōichirō Memorial Nanbuchō Art Museum, dedicated to his work, and his paintings and prints are held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Mount Penglai, late 1920s, Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection). Among collectors of modern Japanese painting and prints, Kondō is valued for the way his ink landscapes negotiate the boundary between East Asian classical landscape and modern atmospheric naturalism — a synthesis that places him in a small and distinctive corner of the early-twentieth-century nihonga world.