Yamamura Kōka

Yamamura Kōka (山村耕花, 1885-1942), also active as Yamamura Toyonari (山村豊成) on his woodblock prints, was one of the most original kabuki actor portraitists of the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, an artist who brought a thoroughly modern visual intelligence to the most heavily patterned subject in Japanese popular printmaking. Born in Tokyo on October 25, 1885, he trained within the dominant Tokyo nihonga (Japanese-style painting) network that ran from the late-Edo academic studios into the new state art schools of the Meiji period. His earliest teacher was Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890), although his apprenticeship was cut short by Eitaku's death when the boy was still in elementary school; his next master was Kawabata Gyokushō (1842-1913), one of the founding figures of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō) and a leading exponent of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition.

Kōka entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1903 and graduated in 1907 from the Japanese-painting course, where his principal instructor was Kawai Gyokudō (1873-1957), one of the most respected nihonga landscape painters of the early twentieth century. The curriculum gave him a firm grounding in orthodox nihonga, but the surrounding cultural moment was pulling toward Western pictorial values, and Kōka became fluent in the chiaroscuro and atmospheric perspective of European painting as well as the Japanese tradition. After graduation he exhibited at the Bunten salon through the 1910s while also working as an illustrator.

The decisive turn came in 1916, when the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885-1962) recruited him to design woodblock prints in the new shin-hanga manner. Watanabe's program was to revive the traditional Edo print workshop, with its division of labor between artist, carver, and printer, but to attach it to artists trained in modern academic painting rather than to the Utagawa-school print specialists of the late Edo period. Between 1916 and 1919 Kōka produced four kabuki actor portraits for Watanabe; the surviving prints of this period show him experimenting with the half-length actor portrait that would become his signature subject.

In 1920 a group of Tokyo collectors organized themselves into a Publication Society (Kankōkai) to underwrite a more ambitious self-published series. The result was the canonical untitled portfolio of twelve actor portraits issued between 1920 and 1922, generally referred to as the Twelve Kabuki Actor Prints (Jūni yakusha-e) or Flowers of the Theatrical World (Rien no hana). These prints, which Kōka signed for the first time with his print-art name Toyonari, are among the masterpieces of shin-hanga: actors are shown in role as bust- or half-length figures against solid or mica-impregnated grounds, in deliberate reference to the great mica-ground 'big-head' portraits (ōkubi-e) of Tōshūsai Sharaku (active 1794-95) and Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769-1825). Eight of the twelve sheets are printed with mica, the same costly powdered mineral that gave the Sharaku portraits their silver-grey shimmer; the iconographic structure, with its emphasis on close psychological scrutiny of a single actor in a specific role, is drawn from the Sharaku revival that critics and collectors had pursued since the 1910 rediscovery of the late-Edo master.