Yamaguchi Hōshun

Yamaguchi Hōshun (山口蓬春, 1893–1971) was a leading Shōwa-era nihonga painter and designer whose career spanned the most fertile period of twentieth-century Japanese painting — from the late-Taishō revival of yamato-e through the war years and on into the modernist nihonga of the postwar decades — and culminated in one of the highest honours the Japanese state confers on an artist, the Order of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kunshō), in 1965. He was born Yamaguchi Saburō (山口三郎) on 15 October 1893 in Matsumae, Hokkaidō, the historic castle town of the Matsumae domain at the southern tip of the island. He would later take the artist name 'Hōshun' (蓬春) in the conventional nihonga manner, around the time of his shift from Western-style oil painting to Japanese-style work.

After completing his secondary education at Takanawa Middle School in Tokyo, Yamaguchi entered the Western painting (yōga) department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, now Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1915. He first trained under the yōga painter Nagahara Kōtarō, who read the young artist's style as resembling classical yamato-e scroll painting; in 1918 Yamaguchi transferred to the Japanese painting (nihonga) department, an unusual move that anticipated a career as a nihonga modernist trained from inside the yōga curriculum. In the Japanese painting department he studied principally under Matsuoka Eikyū (松岡映丘, 1881–1938), the great Shōwa-era revivalist of yamato-e — classical Japanese narrative painting in the Heian and Kamakura court tradition — and graduated in 1923. In 1924 he joined the Shinkō Yamato-e Kai (New Yamato-e Society) that Matsuoka had established, a group whose project of renewing the long, decorative narrative scrolls and screen formats of the medieval court tradition with modern observational drawing gave Yamaguchi the formal and iconographic foundation on which his mature career would rest.

Recognition came in 1926, when his Mikumano no Nachi no Ōyama (Nachi Mountains in Mikumano; 三熊野の那智の御山), a large landscape of the sacred Nachi range in Kii Province, was awarded a prize of the Imperial Art Academy at the Teiten (Teikoku Bijutsuin Tenrankai) and purchased by the imperial household — the conventional starting point of a senior career in the official salon system. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s he was closely involved in that system, serving as a Teiten examiner from 1929 before resigning the post in 1935 to pursue independent work; in 1930 he co-founded the Rikuchōkai (六潮会), a study group of painters that included Fukuda Heihachirō and Nakamura Gakuryō. Alongside his painting he worked as a print designer, producing woodblock prints in the new-yamato-e idiom of his teacher's circle during the 1920s and 1930s, examples of which entered Western collections such as the Harvard Art Museums.

The defining character of Yamaguchi's mature work lay in his integration of Western modernist principles of composition and colour — grounded in his early training as a yōga painter — with the formal vocabulary of traditional nihonga. This modern reinvention of Japanese-style painting was articulated in his 1951 book Shin Nihonga no Gihō (Techniques of New Japanese Painting), one of the influential practitioner's manuals of the postwar nihonga generation, which argued that Japanese painters had to absorb the spirit, rather than merely the technical means, of Western art if a living modern nihonga was to be sustained.

After the war Yamaguchi held senior positions in Japan's official art establishment. He was appointed a member of the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin) in 1950 and took a succession of leading roles in the Nitten, the reorganized official exhibition — sitting on its operating council, then serving as a director from 1954, an executive director from 1958, and an advisor from 1969. In 1965 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kunshō), the highest honour for an artist in the Japanese system, and named a Person of Cultural Merit in the same year. Among the major commissions of his final years was the large Kaede (Maples) panel for the new Tokyo Imperial Palace — a 2.74-by-2.50-metre work for the east corridor of the Seiden ceremonial hall, completed in 1969 with the assistance of his pupil Hashimoto Meiji; the full-scale preparatory drawing, dated 1967, is held by the Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo. He died on 31 May 1971 at his home in Hayama, on the Miura peninsula south of Tokyo, where he had settled after the war; his seaside house and studio, remodelled and extended for him by the modernist architect Yoshida Isoya, opened to the public as the Yamaguchi Hōshun Memorial Museum in 1991 and remains one of the principal sites in Japan for the study of his work.

Yamaguchi's reputation within twentieth-century Japanese art rests on the completeness with which his work bridges two currents of nihonga: the revivalist yamato-e of Matsuoka Eikyū's circle, in which he trained, and the modernist reinvention of nihonga in dialogue with European art that his postwar painting and writing helped define. His principal works are held by the Yamaguchi Hōshun Memorial Museum (Hayama), the Yamatane Museum of Art (Tokyo), the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama — to which his widow donated works and his library — and the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, while his woodblock prints are represented in Western collections such as the Harvard Art Museums. Because his mature output is predominantly painting on silk and paper rather than print, his presence in non-Japanese open-access museum imagery remains smaller than his domestic standing as a Bunka Kunshō laureate would suggest — a discrepancy that narrows as Japanese museums put more of his oeuvre online.