Tamamura Hokuto

Tamamura Hokuto (玉村方久斗, born Tamamura Zennosuke, 1893-1951) was a Kyoto-trained nihonga painter and print designer who occupies an unusual position at the intersection of classical Japanese-style painting and the avant-garde currents — Dada, Constructivism, and the proletarian art movement — that swept through Tokyo in the 1920s. Although thinly documented in Western scholarship, he was recovered for serious art-historical attention by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK) in its 2007 retrospective Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of the Japanese-Style Painting, which gathered his scattered surviving oeuvre and characterized him as one of the most experimental nihonga painters of his generation.

Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that ran a geta (wooden footwear) shop. He studied in the Painting Department of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts (Kyōto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō) and continued at the Kyoto Municipal Painting College (Kyōto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō), where he studied under Kikuchi Hōbun (1862-1918), a leading Kyoto nihonga painter. Upon graduating in 1915 he founded the Mitsuritsu-kai — an exhibition society conceived as a vehicle for younger Kyoto nihonga painters trying to push the medium beyond the academic kachō-e and bijinga repertoire that dominated the Kyoto art scene of the 1910s. He used the name Hokuto for these Japanese-style paintings, and from 1915 to 1923 contributed regularly to the Inten, the prestigious annual exhibition of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) in Tokyo, winning the Chogyū Prize for his Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) painting cycle at the 1918 Inten.

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 proved to be a turning point in his career. In its aftermath he became disenchanted with the conventional nihonga establishment and aligned himself with the avant-garde groups that were redefining Tokyo's art world: Daiichi Sakka Dōmei (Primary Artists' Alliance), Sanka, and Tan'i Sanka (Unit Sanka), all of which combined Dada, Russian Constructivism, and proletarian politics in deliberate opposition to the official juried exhibition system. He began to produce geometrical sculptural objects in a Constructivist idiom, exhibited woodblock prints and lithographs in both sōsaku hanga (creator-print) manner and through traditional collaboration with carvers and printers, and extended his activity into playwriting and typographic design. Among his prints of this period is The Spirit of the Wine (Shuten Dōji), from the Woodblock Print Supplements to the Complete Works of Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu zenshū hanga furoku).

In 1930 Hokuto launched the Hokuto-sha (Hokuto Society) as a vehicle for a renewed engagement with nihonga, now aimed at reconceiving the medium from within rather than abandoning it. He continued to paint and to print through the 1930s and 1940s — works such as the Four Landscapes of 1926, Hōgen monogatari (1928), Insulators and Shower (Phoenix Tree) (1943), and Goldfish Bowl on the Tree (1943) demonstrate the range of his late practice — while remaining outside the state-organized art establishment. Excluded from the 190-member Nihonga Inventory Control Association during the wartime mobilization of the painting world, he adopted the personal seal 'No. 191' (一九一番), a self-designation as the unrecognized 191st member of the official roster.

Tamamura Hokuto died in 1951 with much of his output dispersed or destroyed. Examples of his work are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the still life Peaches) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. He remains a thinly documented but increasingly valued figure for collectors interested in the porous boundary between Taishō- and Shōwa-era nihonga and the Japanese avant-garde of the 1920s.