Migishi Kōtarō

Migishi Kōtarō (三岸好太郎, 1903-1934) was a Japanese yōga (Western-style) painter whose brief eleven-year career carried him from self-taught beginnings in Sapporo through the post-impressionist and Fauvist experiments of the late Taishō era to the lyrical proto-surrealism of his final months, a body of work that has come to define the romantic, short-lived modernism of the early Shōwa period. Working entirely in oil, almost never in print or watercolor, Migishi belonged to no academy and never graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts; his training was effectively a long autodidactic apprenticeship in the exhibition halls and ateliers of Taishō Tokyo, supplemented by intense friendships with contemporaries who included Hayashi Takeshi, Saeki Yūzō, Hasegawa Toshiyuki, and the Tsuguharu Foujita circle. By the end of his life he was one of the founding members of the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai (Independent Art Association), the central avant-garde society of early Shōwa yōga, and the painter whose 1934 sequence of shells, butterflies, and luminous seascapes had pushed Japanese painting closest to the French surrealism of André Breton and Yves Tanguy. He died of a perforated peptic ulcer in a Nagoya inn on the night of 1 July 1934, aged thirty-one, leaving a catalogue of fewer than two hundred completed oil paintings and a posthumous reputation that has only grown across the following nine decades.

Migishi was born on 18 April 1903 in Sapporo, Hokkaidō, the second son of Migishi Eitarō and Mineji, in a household that had moved north from Honshū as part of the Meiji-period settlement of Hokkaidō. His mother, Mineji, was a painter herself — a rare and significant fact for a Meiji-period household — and his older half-brother Yamada Shintarō (also from his mother's earlier marriage) had become a well-known Sōdosha-era yōga painter associated with Kishida Ryūsei's circle in Tokyo. Kōtarō grew up in Sapporo and attended Sapporo Middle School, where his earliest surviving oils — small portrait studies of family members and views of the Hokkaidō landscape around the city — date from his late teens. In 1921 he traveled to Tokyo and enrolled briefly at the Honjō Tōka Studio and a series of preparatory schools for the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but he never sat the entrance examinations and never matriculated. Instead he attached himself to his half-brother Yamada's Tokyo circle and began exhibiting independently at the Shun'yōkai (Spring Sun Society) and the Nikakai, the two principal non-academic Western-style painting societies of the period.

His first significant exhibition success came in 1924 at the second Shun'yōkai, where he submitted a group of figurative works including the small Elder Brother and his Eldest Daughter — a portrait of Yamada and his daughter — that established him at twenty-one as a painter of unusual psychological subtlety and a Cézannist sense of structure. The Sapporo paintings of 1925-1927, including the Suburban in Sapporo (Hongō Shin Memorial Museum), date from his return visits to Hokkaidō during these years and show him absorbing the post-impressionist palette of contemporary Tokyo yōga while applying it to the cold colors and long horizons of his birthplace. In 1924 he had married Yoshida Setsuko, herself a yōga painter (later known professionally as Migishi Setsuko, 1905-1999), and the two of them maintained a precarious but artistically productive household in Tokyo through the second half of the 1920s, eventually raising three children while both continued to exhibit. Setsuko's own career as a painter of large-scale figural and floral subjects flourished after her husband's death; she lived until 1999 and became one of the central figures of postwar yōga, and her late memoir-paintings of their shared studio years in the late 1920s remain an important source for the documentation of Kōtarō's working method.

The period 1928-1931 was Migishi's first major mature phase, a sequence of densely worked figural compositions on circus, clown, marionette, and acrobat themes that placed him within a broadly European trans-war fascination with masked, performing figures — the painterly territory of Picasso's saltimbanques, Rouault's clowns, and the late Cézanne's harlequins. The Clown Boy of 1929 (Tokyo MoMA), exhibited at the seventh Shun'yōkai, was followed by Marionette (1930, Migishi Kōtarō Museum), A Clown (1931), A Clown and A Horse (1931), and the small but iconic A White Horse and a Clown (1932, Menard Art Museum). These paintings, with their dark-toned grounds, their stiff, marionette-like figures, and their flattened patterned costumes, are among the most distinctive products of late-Taishō and early-Shōwa yōga, and they established the iconographic territory — performance, fantasy, melancholy childhood — that would carry through into the surrealist final period. Through 1930 and 1931 Migishi also exhibited a sequence of dense Nude compositions, including the Nude Standing Posture and Nude B of 1932, that show him working through Tsuguharu Foujita's then-influential Paris-school approach to the female figure.

In November 1930, Migishi was one of the seven founding members of the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai (Independent Art Association, 独立美術協会) along with Hayashi Takeshi, Kojima Zenzaburō, Suda Kunitarō, Itō Renzō, Kawaguchi Kigai, and Fukuzawa Ichirō. The Dokuritsuten — its annual exhibition — became the principal venue for non-academic, anti-Teiten yōga in the 1930s, and Migishi's annual submissions through 1931, 1932, 1933, and 1934 (the last posthumous) document the rapid evolution of his late style. The 1933 paintings, including the Composition (Still Life with a Fireplace) at the Nagoya City Art Museum and the two large Orchestra compositions at the Miyagi Museum of Art, mark a definitive break with the dense, illustrative figural mode of the clown years. The Orchestra paintings, with their unmoored figures, ambiguous interior spaces, and patterned backgrounds, show Migishi reading the André Breton-Yves Tanguy-Salvador Dalí surrealism of the late 1920s that had been arriving in Tokyo through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and the writings of Takiguchi Shūzō, and integrating it with the patterned, Foujita-derived figure construction he had developed earlier.

The final year, 1934, is the period for which Migishi is principally remembered. In late spring he traveled to Tokushima Prefecture to visit the entomologist Ino Genshirō, an old friend, and there he made an extended study of butterflies in flight and at rest, work that produced the entire late series — A Shell and Butterflies (Migishi Kōtarō Museum), Butterflies Crossing the Ocean (location now unknown), Flying Butterfly (Migishi Kōtarō Museum), Butterflies Flying above Clouds (Tokyo MoMA), and the seascapes Sea and Light (Fukuoka Art Museum), Sea and Oblique Light (Nagoya City Art Museum), and Loneliness on Journey. These paintings, executed in a high-keyed palette of azure, white, vermilion, and ochre against luminous open grounds, replace the dark Tokyo-yōga interiors of his earlier work with infinite Tanguy-like horizons populated only by detached natural fragments — shells, butterflies, single figures. They are the most fully realized surrealist paintings produced in Japan to that date and were exhibited at the fourth Dokuritsuten in November 1934, posthumously, as a memorial group. In late June 1934 Migishi traveled to Nagoya for the installation of a large mural project at a café and a series of meetings with Nagoya patrons. On the night of 1 July, at his Nagoya inn, his peptic ulcer perforated and he died in the early morning hours; he was thirty-one. The Sapporo home in which he had grown up, and to which his widow Setsuko returned much of his unsold work, eventually became the foundation of the prefectural museum bearing his name (Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art, Hokkaidō, opened 1967), which holds the largest single concentration of his paintings. Major works are also distributed across the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Nagoya City Art Museum, the Miyagi Museum of Art, the Menard Art Museum, the Fukuoka Art Museum, and the Hongō Shin Memorial Museum of Sculpture in Sapporo.