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. He is counted among the Four Great Painters of the Bairei School, together with Kikuchi Hōbun (1862–1918), Takeuchi Seihō (1864–1942), and Taniguchi Kōkyō — the leading Bairei pupils whose collective effort defined the Kyoto wing of modern Japanese painting; Yamamoto Shunkyo (1871–1933) belonged to the same circle.

Kakō was born in Kyoto in 1870. In 1880, 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. He remained associated with Bairei's atelier until his teacher's death in 1895, and from about 1899 also undertook Zen study, which informed the more unconventional and individual strain in his later work.

Kakō's career belongs to the generation that came of age inside Kyoto's new art institutions, among them the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyōto Furitsu Gagakkō), founded in 1880 as Japan's first public painting school, where Bairei taught. He was repeatedly awarded at the Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai (Domestic Painting Competition) and the Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exhibition), and from 1907 exhibited at the new government-sponsored salons — the Bunten and, from 1919, the Teiten. He later taught at his own private atelier (juku), at the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting, and at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, training many younger Kyoto painters.

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 applies the close shasei observation taught by Bairei, while his landscapes draw on the atmospheric inheritance of Maruyama painting together with effects of light and weather that suggest his attention to contemporary Japanese-style adaptations of Western pictorial practice. In the late Meiji years he became preoccupied with the study of waves, for a time painting little else; the culminating work of that fascination, Green Waves (c. 1910, now in the Seattle Art Museum), sets a pattern of swelling wave forms in bright mineral pigment against a gold ground, drawing on the older decorative wave tradition while applying thick, visible brushstrokes that convey the motion of light across water.

He also painted Buddhist, Zen, and historical subjects with the seriousness expected of a senior Kyoto nihonga master, his Zen study informing ink treatments of figures such as Bodhidharma (Daruma). Among his most celebrated works is Haniwa, for which he received a special prize at the government salon in 1916; the screen, rendering the Kofun-period clay tomb figures that late-Meiji and Taishō intellectuals had begun to study as evidence of an indigenous Japanese antiquity, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Kakō received institutional recognition appropriate to his standing in Kyoto. He served as a judge at the government salon — the fifth Teiten, in 1924 — became a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1925, and in 1926 was nominated principal of the Kyoto Municipal College of 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 Seattle Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, 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.