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 studios, through Belle Époque Paris, into the inner circle of the novelist Natsume Sōseki, then into the Bunten-Teiten exhibition system as a leading yōga (Western-style) oil painter, and finally — after a politically traumatic encounter with the wartime state — back to nanga-style ink painting in a quiet old age that lasted nearly four decades. Born in Kyoto as the second son of garden designer Nishikawa Kakichi, he was adopted into the Tsuda family and trained from boyhood in the craft traditions of the old capital.

His formal artistic education began at the Kyoto School of Painting (Kyōto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō, the predecessor of today's Kyoto City University of Arts), where he studied in the orbit of late-Meiji Kyoto nihonga teachers and absorbed the ornamental vocabulary that would mark his earliest published work. In 1900-1901 he produced for the Kyoto publisher Honda Ichijirō a remarkable eight-volume series of pattern-design albums, Zuan shu (図案集), each packed with kimono-textile motifs printed in color woodblock with gold and silver pigments. The Zuan shu albums circulated widely in Meiji design schools and are now held by the Rijksmuseum and the Art Institute of Chicago, documenting the Art-Nouveau-inflected pattern revolution that swept Kyoto's textile industry. He produced related compendia such as Kamon fu (1900) and Senshoku zuan (1904) in the same publishing context.

In 1908 Tsuda travelled to Paris, where he studied for roughly two years at the Académie Julian and other private ateliers, immersing himself in the post-Impressionist Paris of Cézanne, Renoir, and the early Fauves. He returned to Japan in 1910 transformed: thereafter he committed his exhibition career to yōga, oil-on-canvas painting in a style that fused Cézanne's structural lessons with a Japanese sensitivity to line and pattern. He became a steady exhibitor at the Bunten and its successor the Teiten, and a founding member of the Nikakai (Second-Section Society), the breakaway yōga group founded in 1914 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 today.

The central friendship of his middle life was with the novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916). The two met in the early 1910s through the literary magazine Hototogisu, for which Tsuda designed several covers, and grew quickly close. Tsuda taught Sōseki to draw and paint with oils — Sōseki had taken up amateur painting as a respite from chronic stomach illness — and the two corresponded constantly about Cézanne and brushwork. Tsuda was at Sōseki's bedside during the novelist's final illness and produced a celebrated death portrait, fixing him in Japanese literary memory as the painter-companion of one of the country's greatest modern writers. In 1916 the two collaborated with the poet Yosano Akiko and designer Nakazawa Hiromitsu on the deluxe poetry book Akarumi e (Toward the Light), with cover and ornament designed by Tsuda.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Tsuda's politics turned leftward. He associated with the proletarian art movement, contributed illustrations to socialist journals, and painted overtly political oil canvases — the best known of which depicts the body of the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji after his death under torture in February 1933. That picture and his visibility on the political left brought him to the attention of the Tokkō (Special Higher Police) of the militarising Japanese state. He was arrested later in 1933 and held briefly, and the experience broke his political nerve: he publicly renounced his leftist views, withdrew from the proletarian movement, 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 returned to brush and ink, took up nanga-style literati painting in a relaxed calligraphic manner descended from Chinese scholar-painting traditions, and became a respected figure in the mid-twentieth-century nanga revival. He wrote extensively — memoirs, essays on Sōseki, reflections on Paris and Cézanne, observations on his own arrest — and lived to see postwar prosperity, dying in 1978 at age ninety-seven. His work is held at the Rijksmuseum (the largest concentration of his early printed design work outside Japan), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, and the Seifūsō villa in Kyoto, the Tsuda family residence and now a National Important Cultural Property.