Saitō Toyosaku

Saitō Toyosaku (斎藤豊作, 1880-1951) was a Japanese yōga (Western-style) painter of the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods whose career bridged the formative years of academic oil painting in Japan and the emergence of a French-trained avant-garde. He is one of the figures whose biographical importance to the history of Japanese modernism is greater than his immediate name-recognition would suggest, in large part because he spent the last three decades of his life living and working in France rather than building a public profile in Tokyo.

Saitō was born in 1880 in Saitama prefecture, in central Honshū. He studied Western-style painting in Tokyo at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts), entering its Western painting division (Seiyō-ga-ka), which had been established in 1896 under Kuroda Seiki — the dominant teacher of the so-called 'purple school' (murasaki-ha) of plein-air, Impressionist-inflected academic painting. Saitō studied under Kuroda and graduated from the school's Western painting course in 1905. The following year, in 1906, he travelled to France, where he studied directly under Raphaël Collin, the French academic painter in whose atelier Kuroda himself had trained. During this first French sojourn Saitō absorbed not only the academic tradition but the newer current of Neo-Impressionism, and he returned to Japan in 1912 as one of the earliest Japanese painters to work seriously in a Divisionist, pointillist manner.

Back in Tokyo, Saitō's strong colour and pointillist-style brushwork drew notice in the exhibition world. In 1912, the year of his return, he exhibited at the inaugural exhibition of the Kō-fū-kai (Light Wind Society), and he showed his Neo-Impressionist-influenced work at the official Bunten salon (established by the Ministry of Education in 1907). Rather than settling into the moderate Kuroda mainstream, however, Saitō aligned himself with the reformers: in 1914 he was a co-founder of the Nikakai (Second Section Society), the landmark secession group formed in opposition to the conservatism of the Bunten, joining Ishii Hakutei, Yamashita Shintarō, Tsuda Seifū and others in launching it and serving as one of its auditors in the early years. His part in introducing Divisionist technique to Japan and in founding the Nikakai places him among the more progressive yōga painters of the Taishō period, not among the conservatives.

At the end of the 1910s Saitō left Japan for France a second time, and on this occasion he settled there permanently. Unlike many of his Tokyo School contemporaries, who made shorter study trips to Paris and returned to teaching positions in Japan, Saitō withdrew from the Tokyo exhibition system altogether and made his home in the French countryside — ultimately at Luché-Pringé, in the Sarthe. He continued to paint rural French landscapes and still lifes, living quietly and largely apart from both the Japanese art world and the public life of the École de Paris. His long absence meant that his work fell out of the Tokyo critical conversation during the 1920s and 1930s, the decades in which the Nikakai he had helped found, the Shun'yō-kai, and the developing independent exhibitions were defining the canon of modern Japanese painting. In this respect his profile resembles that of the small group of Japanese painters — Foujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) foremost among them, though far more publicly — who built their later lives in France.

Saitō remained in France through the Second World War and died on 7 October 1951 at his home at Luché-Pringé, at the age of seventy-one, having spent the greater part of his adult life outside Japan. Because he left a comparatively small body of work and lived abroad, his paintings were slow to re-enter the Japanese record; groups of them are now held by Japanese public collections, including the Saitama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in his native region and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Within the specific history of Japanese woodblock printmaking, Saitō Toyosaku is a marginal figure. He worked in oil on canvas in the European tradition, and there is no substantial evidence of woodblock (hanga) production in his oeuvre; several yōga painters of his generation, among them Yamamoto Kanae and Ishii Hakutei, moved decisively into the creative-print (sōsaku-hanga) movement, but Saitō did not follow that path. For collectors and researchers of Japanese prints he is therefore best understood as a context artist — a Neo-Impressionist pioneer of the Kuroda-to-Nikakai generation whose long French residence is part of the wider story of Japanese modernism — rather than as a printmaker in his own right.