Tsuda Seifū

Tsuda Seifū (津田青楓, 1880–1978) was one of the most stylistically restless and biographically eventful Japanese painters of the long twentieth century. His career carried him from late-Meiji Kyoto design workshops, through Belle Époque Paris, into the circle of the novelist Natsume Sōseki, then into the front rank of yōga (Western-style) oil painting as a founder of the breakaway Nikakai, and finally — after a politically traumatic encounter with the wartime state — back to ink painting in the Japanese literati tradition, in a quiet old age that lasted nearly four decades. Born in Kyoto as Nishikawa Kamejirō, into a family connected with the Kyofū-ryū school of flower arrangement, he later took the Tsuda surname and trained from boyhood in the craft traditions of the old capital.

His formal training began at the Kyoto Municipal Textile and Dyeing School, where he learned the full process from pattern design to weaving — the source of the ornamental vocabulary that marks his earliest published work. He also studied Japanese-style painting under Kyoto nihonga teachers before entering the Kansai Art Academy (Kansai Bijutsuin), where he worked under the Western-style painter Asai Chū, a decisive step toward the oils of his later career. Around the turn of the century he produced, for the Kyoto design publishers Unkindō and Unsōdō, a series of woodblock-printed pattern albums (zuan) packed with kimono-textile motifs printed in color with gold and silver pigments — among them Kamon fu (華紋譜, c. 1899–1900), Zuan shu (図案集), and Senshoku zuan (染織図案, 1904). These albums circulated widely in Meiji design schools and survive today in museum and library collections in Japan and abroad, documenting the Art-Nouveau-inflected pattern revolution that swept Kyoto's textile industry.

In 1907 Tsuda travelled to Paris as an overseas trainee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, together with the painter Yasui Sōtarō, and studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens while absorbing the lessons of contemporary French painting. He returned to Japan in 1909 committed to yōga — oil-on-canvas painting in a style that fused a hard-won structural sense with a Japanese sensitivity to line and pattern. Having exhibited at the government Bunten salon, he withdrew from it in 1913 and in 1914 became a founding member of the Nikakai (Second-Section Society), the breakaway yōga group set up as an alternative to the official salon system. Within the Nikakai he showed many of the figure studies, nudes, and still lifes for which he is best known.

The central friendship of his middle life was with the novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). Tsuda taught Sōseki to paint in oils — Sōseki had taken up amateur painting and calligraphy as a respite from chronic illness — and designed the covers of several of the novelist's books, among them Michikusa and Meian. He also designed the cover of the poet Yosano Akiko's deluxe volume Akarumi e (Toward the Light), which carried a frontispiece by the painter Nakazawa Hiromitsu.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Tsuda's politics turned leftward. He associated with the proletarian art movement and painted overtly political oil canvases, the best known of which — The Victim (犠牲者, 1933) — took as its subject the death of the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji, who died under police torture in February 1933. While at work on that picture Tsuda was himself arrested by the police, briefly detained, and released with charges suspended. The experience broke his political nerve: he recanted his leftist views, withdrew from the proletarian movement and from the Nikakai, and over the following years gave up oil painting almost entirely. The renunciation is one of the more painful tenkō (ideological recantation) episodes in modern Japanese cultural history, and Tsuda wrote about it candidly in later essays.

From the mid-1930s onward, and through his long postwar life, Tsuda reinvented himself a second time. He set aside Western oils for the brush, taking up ink painting in a relaxed, calligraphic literati manner and becoming a respected painter-calligrapher; he wrote prolifically — memoirs, essays on Sōseki, reflections on Paris, and studies of the Zen poet-monk Ryōkan — and lived to see postwar prosperity, dying in 1978 at the age of ninety-seven. His paintings are held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among other Japanese public collections, while his early printed design books survive in museum and library holdings in Japan and the West.