Shimizu Toshi

Shimizu Toshi (清水登之, 1887-1945) was a Meiji-Taishō-Shōwa yōga (Western-style) painter whose unusually international career carried him from a Tochigi farming village to Seattle, New York, Paris, Madrid, and Rome before he returned to Tokyo in 1927 as a founding member of the Independent Art Association. Working principally in oil — and only occasionally in woodblock and lithographic media adjacent to the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement with which he is often grouped — he produced one of the most consistent bodies of urban modernist painting by any Japanese artist of his generation, with a corpus of New York street scenes, European travel paintings, and late Tokyo subjects that survives largely in the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Miyagi Museum of Art, the Hiroshima Museum of Art, and a number of private collections in Japan. He died in his Tochigi birthplace on 7 December 1945, four months after the end of the Pacific War and shortly after learning of the death of his eldest son in combat, having spent the war years producing official battle paintings for the Japanese military — a final phase that complicates but does not diminish the importance of his earlier work.

Shimizu was born on 1 January 1887 in Kanuma in Tochigi Prefecture, in the southern Kantō region inland from Tokyo. His early ambition was a military career, and as a young man he sat the entrance examination for the Imperial Japanese Army Academy at Ichigaya. He failed the exam — a setback that, by his own later account, led him to consider artistic study as an alternative. In 1907, at the age of twenty, he sailed for the United States, joining the wave of Japanese emigration to the West Coast that had begun in earnest after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and that would be sharply curtailed by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-08 and the Immigration Act of 1924. He arrived in Seattle and supported himself for several years through the kinds of menial labor (railroad work, domestic service, restaurant work) that defined the immigrant Japanese economy of the Pacific Northwest in the first decade of the twentieth century. During these Seattle years he came into contact with Fokko Tadama (1871-1937), a Dutch-born Indonesian painter of mixed Dutch and Javanese descent who had settled in Seattle in the 1900s and who ran a small painting school out of his studio. Tadama, who is now best known as the teacher of the Issei painters Kenjiro Nomura and Kamekichi Tokita, gave Shimizu his first systematic instruction in Western-style oil painting and helped place him at a local art school. Through Tadama's instruction Shimizu acquired the academic foundation in figure drawing and tonal painting that would underlie his mature work.

In 1916 Shimizu returned briefly to Japan to marry, and the following year he and his wife relocated to New York City — a move that decisively shaped the rest of his American career. He enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under John Sloan (1871-1951), the senior figure of the Ashcan School and one of the most influential teachers of urban realist painting in early-twentieth-century America. Sloan's emphasis on the immediate observation of New York street life — the el platforms, the corner saloons, the tenement courtyards, the ethnic enclaves of the Lower East Side — gave Shimizu both a subject and a method. His New York paintings of 1920-1924, of which Chinatown at Night, Icecream Pavilion, In Front of a Theater (1922), and Subway Station (1924) are the most often reproduced surviving examples, belong recognizably to the Ashcan tradition while also reading as records of New York from the unusual vantage of an Issei observer. In 1921 he won a prize at one of the major painting and sculpture exhibitions of the year, but the prize was rescinded when the jurors learned he was a Japanese national rather than an American citizen — an incident that places his New York career squarely within the larger history of Asian American exclusion and that he himself appears to have absorbed with characteristic stoicism. He continued to exhibit through the Society of Independent Artists, the unjuried New York counterpart to the Paris Salon des Indépendants, which had been founded in 1916 by Marcel Duchamp, Walter Pach, Katherine Dreier, and others, and the Société Anonyme (founded 1920 by Dreier, Duchamp, and Man Ray) was an adjacent institution in the same network of New York modernism within which Shimizu moved during his Art Students League years.