Yamaguchi Hōshun

Yamaguchi Hōshun (山口蓬春, 1893-1971) was a leading Shōwa-era nihonga painter and designer whose career spans 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 ends with one of the highest civilian honours the Japanese state confers on an artist, the Order of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kunshō, 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, into a family of modest means; he would later take the artist name 'Hōshun' (蓬春, literally 'mugwort spring') in the conventional nihonga manner, marking his transition from Western-style oil painting to Japanese-style work in the early 1920s.

After his secondary education in Hokkaidō, Yamaguchi moved to Tokyo and in 1915 entered the Western painting (yōga) department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, now Tokyo University of the Arts), the alma mater of nearly every important early twentieth-century Japanese artist working in either medium. In 1918, on the recommendation of his teacher, he transferred to the Japanese painting (nihonga) department — a relatively unusual move that anticipated a generation-defining 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-style narrative painting in the Heian and Kamakura court tradition), whose Shinkō Yamato-e Kai (New Yamato-e Society) Yamaguchi joined as a founding member in 1922. The Shinkō Yamato-e Kai's project — to renew the long, decorative narrative scrolls and screen formats of the medieval court tradition with modern observational drawing and twentieth-century technical sensibility — gave Yamaguchi the formal and iconographic foundation on which his mature career would rest.

The long-form recognition began in 1926, when his Mikumano no Nachi no Ōyama (Nachi Mountains in Mikumano), a large and densely worked landscape of the sacred Nachi range in Kii Province, was awarded a special prize at the Imperial Art Academy Exhibition (Teikoku Bijutsuin Tenrankai, Teiten) and purchased by the imperial household — the conventional starting point of a senior career in the official salon system. Through the late 1920s and 1930s he became a fixture of the Teiten and Bunten exhibition cycles, painting nihonga landscape and figural compositions in the elongated, formally balanced manner of the new yamato-e and increasingly experimenting with the modernist colour and design vocabulary that he would soon articulate in print. In 1934 he completed the panel Iwakura taishi Ōbei haken (The Iwakura Mission to America and Europe) for installation in the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) in the Outer Garden of the Meiji Shrine — one of the eighty official narrative panels by leading nihonga and yōga painters commissioned through the late 1920s and 1930s to record the great public events of the Meiji emperor's reign — and his mural remains a centrepiece of that gallery today. Around the same period he was one of the senior designers contributing to the Shin Yamato-e Moku-Hanga Kankōkai (New Yamato-e Woodblock Print Association), the print-publishing project initiated by Matsuoka Eikyū's circle in 1928, for which Yamaguchi designed the print Beppu Onsen for the Yamato Prints: Eight Views of Japan series and the better-known Tōrō ni Yuki (Lantern in Snow) print, now in the Carpenter Collection at Harvard Art Museums.

The defining shift of Yamaguchi's career came in the 1930s when, under the influence of his close friendship with the Tokyo collector and Bridgestone magnate Ishibashi Shōjirō (whose Bridgestone Museum of Art, now the Artizon Museum, would become an important holder of his work) and through a sustained programme of personal study, Yamaguchi began to integrate Western modernist principles of composition and colour with the formal vocabulary of traditional nihonga. The resulting manner — sometimes described as 'Hōshun modernism' or 'new nihonga' — was articulated in his 1951 book Shin Nihonga no Gihō (Techniques of New Japanese Painting), which became one of the most influential practitioner's manuals of the postwar nihonga generation. Its core argument was that the spirit of Western art, not its technical means, had to be absorbed by Japanese painters if a living modern nihonga tradition was to be sustained, and the book's exercises and exemplary plates demonstrated how compositional principles drawn from Matisse, Bonnard, and modern French still-life painting could be reconciled with the line, ground, and pictorial economy of medieval yamato-e and Kanō-school painting.

In 1948 Yamaguchi was instrumental in founding the Sōzō Bijutsu Kyōkai (Creative Painting Association), a postwar nihonga exhibition group that opposed the old Teiten/Nitten official salon orthodoxy and committed itself to a forward-looking, individually authored nihonga; he later moved on from that group as it consolidated into the Shinseisaku Kyōkai. He served as a councillor (sansa) of the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin) from 1950, and in 1965 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kunshō) — the highest honour for an artist in the Japanese honours system — in recognition of his lifetime contribution to the renewal of nihonga. In his final years he received the major imperial commission of his career, the large painting Kaede (Maples, 1967), a 2.74-by-2.50-metre cedar-door panel installed in the east corridor of the Seiden ceremonial hall of the new Tokyo Imperial Palace; the full-scale preparatory drawing 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 since 1948 he had lived and worked in the seaside house and studio designed for him by the modernist architect Yoshida Isoya. The house, with its garden, library, and adjoining studio, was opened to the public as the Yamaguchi Hōshun Memorial Museum in 1991 and is today administered by the JR East Cultural Foundation as one of the principal sites in Japan for the study of postwar nihonga.

Yamaguchi's reputation within twentieth-century Japanese art rests on the unusual completeness with which his work bridges the two great currents of pre-war and postwar nihonga: the revivalist yamato-e of Matsuoka Eikyū's circle, in which he was trained, and the modernist reinvention of nihonga in dialogue with European modernism that his postwar writings and paintings 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 (which mounted a major retrospective in 2006), the Bridgestone/Artizon Foundation, the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, and the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery; his print designs from the Shin Yamato-e Moku-Hanga Kankōkai project surface in Western collections through the Harvard Art Museums Carpenter Collection and through the Shōwa-period print holdings of dealer-fed aggregator databases. In Western museum print rooms his work remains comparatively scarce, in part because of the relatively short Western post-war collecting window for living nihonga painters and in part because his mature output is predominantly painting on silk or paper rather than print. As a result, despite his standing as a Bunka Kunshō laureate and one of the most influential nihonga theorists of the postwar period, his presence in non-Japanese open-access museum imagery is much smaller than his domestic reputation would suggest, a discrepancy that is gradually narrowing as Japanese museums put more of his oeuvre online.