Murakami Kagaku

Murakami Kagaku (1888-1939) was a Japanese painter whose work occupies a singular position in the history of early twentieth-century nihonga: an artist who turned away from the public stage of the great exhibition halls in mid-career, secluded himself in the suburbs of Kobe, and devoted the last decade and a half of his life to a small body of intensely meditative Buddhist figures and ink landscapes that have come to be recognized as one of the most introspective achievements of modern Japanese painting. Born Murakami Shintarō on July 3, 1888 in Osaka, the son of a draper, Kagaku was raised from infancy by an uncle and aunt in Kyoto, the cultural capital where he would spend his formative years and absorb the long tradition of Buddhist art that would become his lifelong subject. From childhood he showed an exceptional artistic temperament and an early aptitude for drawing, and at fifteen he entered the Kyoto City School of Arts and Crafts (Kyōto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō), graduating in 1909 with the highest honors. He continued directly to the new Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting (Kyōto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō), graduating again at the top of his class in 1911 with the painting In February (Nigatsu no koro), a snow-bound landscape that received an honorable mention at the Fifth Bunten national exhibition and announced his arrival on the Kyoto painting scene.

Kagaku's teachers at the Kyoto schools included the great Maruyama-Shijō painter Takeuchi Seihō and his colleagues — Yamamoto Shunkyo and Takeshima Suiha among them — who together represented the most progressive wing of the Kyoto nihonga establishment, committed to a synthesis of Edo-period naturalism with Western realism and to the high public ambition of the Bunten salons. Among Kagaku's classmates were several painters who would shape modern Kyoto nihonga as a whole — Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, Sakakibara Shihō, and Nonagase Banka — and the bonds he formed with them in school would become the institutional foundation of his mature career. From his early twenties Kagaku also studied independently the religious art of the Buddhist tradition, immersing himself in the sutras, in Pure Land and Zen texts, and in the great canon of Tang-dynasty Chinese Buddhist painting that he was able to study both through the holdings of Kyoto temples and through the new generation of scholarly reproductions then being published. The Buddhist subject would, by his thirties, displace landscape as the central focus of his art.

In 1918, dissatisfied with the increasingly conservative direction of the official Bunten salons (by then known as the Teiten under the Imperial Academy), Kagaku joined with Bakusen, Chikkyō, Shihō, and Banka — his old classmates — to found the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai (National Painting Creation Society), a Kyoto-based breakaway organization whose mission was to liberate nihonga from the rigidly judged conventions of the government salons and to open it to the influence of post-Impressionist European painting, Indian and Central Asian Buddhist art, and the personal expressive ambition that the Tokyo Inten and Shun'yōkai had already brought to nihonga in the east. The Kokuga group held five major exhibitions between 1918 and 1928 — known collectively as the Kokuten — and these exhibitions became the principal venue for Kagaku's emergence as a national figure. His contribution to the first Kokuten in 1918, the diptych Daichi (Great Earth, also known as Mother Earth), and to the second Kokuten in 1919, the landscape Kiyohime at the Hidaka River (the legendary subject of the Dōjōji story), established his reputation; his contribution to the third Kokuten in 1920, the work titled simply Rafu (Nude), provoked an immediate critical sensation and remains the work for which he is most widely known.