Tsuji Kakō

Tsuji Kakō (都路華香, 1870-1931) was a Meiji- and Taishō-period nihonga painter of Kyoto, a senior pupil of Kōno Bairei (1844-1895), and one of the central figures in the generation of Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō painters who carried the tradition out of the late Edo period into the modernizing institutional structures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His career intersected throughout with those of Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942), Kikuchi Hōbun (1862-1918), and Yamamoto Shunkyo (1871-1933), the other principal Bairei pupils whose collective effort defined the Kyoto wing of modern Japanese painting against the rising Tokyo-centered nihonga establishment.

Kakō was born in Kyoto in 1870 with the personal name Shinjirō, the son of a local merchant family of the city's Shimogyō district. At the age of ten he entered the studio of Kōno Bairei, then the leading nihonga painter in Kyoto and a central exponent of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition descended from Maruyama Ōkyo and Matsumura Goshun. Under Bairei he absorbed the shasei (sketching-from-life) discipline that the Shijō school had developed across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, training that emphasized close observation of birds, flowering plants, animals, and figures, together with the soft outline, graduated washes (bokashi), and asymmetric placement against generous negative space that characterized the school. The art name Kakō (華香, "flower fragrance") was given to him by Bairei. He remained in Bairei's atelier until his teacher's death in 1895 and from the late 1880s exhibited regularly in the painting competitions sponsored by Kyoto's emerging modern art institutions.

In 1880 the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyōto Furitsu Gagakkō) had been founded as the first municipally chartered painting school in Japan, and Kakō's career belongs to the generation that came of age inside this new institutional framework. He studied at the school under Bairei, Imao Keinen (1845-1924), Mochizuki Gyokusen, and other senior Kyoto painters, and over the following decades exhibited at the Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai (Domestic Painting Competition), the Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exhibition), the Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai (Japan Art Association), and ultimately the Bunten and Teiten government-sponsored salons established in 1907 and 1919. He became a founding member of the Kyoto-based Kyoto Seinen Kaiga Kenkyūkai (Kyoto Young Painters' Study Group) and participated in the wider Bairei pupil network that helped shape the institutional life of Kyoto nihonga.

Kakō's mature painting is distinguished by an unusual breadth of subject within the Shijō repertoire and by a willingness to combine the school's naturalist observation with bolder formal experiments than most of his peers. His kachō-e (bird-and-flower) work — including the Banana Tree and Sparrow now in the Musée Cernuschi, Paris, and many small studies of insects, sparrows, and seasonal plants — applies the close shasei observation taught by Bairei. His landscapes, including the well-known Bright Moon Night of 1912 and White Clouds and Trees in Autumn of about 1914, draw on the atmospheric inheritance of Maruyama landscape painting while incorporating effects of light and weather that suggest his attention to contemporary Japanese-style adaptations of Western pictorial practice. The 1910 pair of six-panel screens Green Waves (now Seattle Art Museum) is one of his most ambitious decorative works: a sweeping pattern of stylized wave forms across gold-toned ground, drawing simultaneously on Rinpa wave designs (notably those of Ogata Kōrin and the Edo wave-screen tradition), on Maruyama atmospheric color, and on the late-Meiji and Taishō taste for decorative nihonga at architectural scale.

Kakō also painted Buddhist and historical subjects with the seriousness expected of a senior Kyoto nihonga master. His Daruma scrolls — including the example at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2013.29.1134, c. 1917) — descend from the long tradition of ink-painted Bodhidharma portraits stretching back through Hakuin Ekaku and beyond, but render the patriarch with the kind of soft chromatic finish and observational portraiture that distinguishes Kyoto nihonga from earlier Zen ink painting. The 1916 Haniwa screens reflect his engagement with the Kofun-period clay figures that late Meiji and Taishō intellectuals had begun to study as evidence of an indigenous Japanese antiquity, and the 1919 Himeji Castle scroll belongs to a recognizable group of Kakō works on Japanese historical architecture. The triptych Bōkū Katsu (棒空喝, "the staff and the empty shout") of 1902 connects his work to the Zen-painting tradition of figural roughness as a vehicle for sudden enlightenment.

Kakō also participated in collaborative decorative-arts projects of the kind that defined late-Meiji Kyoto. The set of five painted lacquer-on-wood plates of about 1910 in the Honolulu Museum of Art (2001-03-011), produced together with Taniguchi Kōkyō, Kikuchi Hōbun, and Yamamoto Shunkyo, is a direct surviving record of the social and professional network that ran through the Bairei pupils. The Honolulu Museum of Art also holds his celebrated six-panel screen Cranes (Tsuru zu) of about 1908, a virtuoso treatment of one of the standard auspicious motifs of Japanese painting.

Kakō received institutional recognition appropriate to his standing in Kyoto. He served as juror at the Bunten salon and as a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in its Kyoto activities, and was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure (Zuihōshō), sixth class, for his contributions to Japanese painting. He continued to paint until shortly before his death in Kyoto in 1931. Among contemporary Kyoto nihonga painters his closest peer was Takeuchi Seihō; the two represent complementary strands of the post-Bairei generation, with Seihō reshaping the Shijō tradition toward a more international, plein-air-inflected modernism, and Kakō holding closer to the literary, atmospheric, and decorative possibilities of the school. His work is held today by the Honolulu Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée Cernuschi, and many Japanese institutional and private collections, where it occupies a respected place in the continuous Kyoto nihonga lineage that runs from Ōkyo and Goshun through Bairei and forward into the twentieth century.