Biography
Yanase Masamu (柳瀬正夢, 1900-1945), catalogued in some Western reference works and in the Hanga database under the romanisation Yanagase Keisuke, was one of the most restlessly inventive and politically committed Japanese artists of the interwar period. His career moved through Western-style oil painting, Futurist experimentation, Mavo avant-garde construction, proletarian cartooning, magazine design, and finally a chastened return to easel painting before he was killed in a 1945 air raid on Tokyo. Born Yanase Shōroku (柳瀬正六) in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, on 12 January 1900, he spent his childhood in Fukuoka and, at fourteen, left home for Tokyo, changing his given name to Masamu by adopting the kanji for dream (夢). Although he had no formal academic training, his natural talent attracted patrons, and by his late teens he was exhibiting alongside the leading Western-style (Yōga) painters of the day.
The early 1920s were his avant-garde decade. He joined the Miraiha-Bijutsu Kyōkai (Futurist Art Society) and absorbed the formal language of European Cubism and Futurism through imported magazines, then in 1923 became a founding figure in Mavo, the radical multidisciplinary collective led by Murayama Tomoyoshi that treated painting, graphic design, theatre, architecture, and street performance as a single political-aesthetic field. His surviving Mavo-period canvas A Morning in May and Me before Breakfast (1923, Musashino Art University Museum) shows him pushing fragmented Cubo-Futurist planes into a self-portrait freighted with German Expressionist and Russian Constructivist references. A brief stay in Berlin during 1922 had introduced him to George Grosz's caustic Weimar caricatures, and Grosz remained his most important graphic source for the rest of the decade: Yanase's 1924 piece The Face of the Bourgeoise Composed out of (the works of) Grosz was an explicit homage, and his contemporaneous The Length of a Capitalist's Drool transposed Grosz's repertoire of grotesque bourgeois bodies into a Japanese political idiom.
The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 was a turning point. In the police roundups of suspected radicals that followed, Yanase was arrested for the first time, an experience that hardened his political commitment. Over the next several years he announced that easel painting was a bourgeois activity unworthy of revolutionary energy and reoriented his work decisively toward mass communication: posters, manga, political cartoons, magazine layouts, and book design. His social commentary cartoons appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun, where he developed a distinctively heavy black contour line that drew on Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, and the German Expressionist printmakers but adapted their vocabulary to specifically Japanese targets: the militarised state, the zaibatsu industrial conglomerates, the rural landlord class. He designed covers for the principal organs of the Japanese proletarian art movement including Tane maku hito and Senki, and in 1930 he produced the six-volume Proletarian Literature series of magazines, a complete authored project of articles, manga, and drawings.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1900–1945
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Sōsaku-hanga
- Works Indexed
- 2
Frequently Asked Questions
Yanase Masamu (柳瀬正夢, 1900-1945), catalogued in some Western reference works and in the Hanga database under the romanisation Yanagase Keisuke, was one of the most restlessly inventive and politically committed Japanese artists of the interwar period. His career moved through Western-style oil painting, Futurist experimentation, Mavo avant-garde construction, proletarian cartooning, magazine design, and finally a chastened return to easel painting before he was killed in a 1945 air raid on Tokyo. Born Yanase Shōroku (柳瀬正六) in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, on 12 January 1900, he spent his childhood in Fukuoka and, at fourteen, left home for Tokyo, changing his given name to Masamu by adopting the kanji for dream (夢). Although he had no formal academic training, his natural talent attracted patrons, and by his late teens he was exhibiting alongside the leading Western-style (Yōga) painters of the day.
Yanagase Keisuke was active from 1900 to 1945. They were associated with the Sōsaku-hanga movement.
Yanagase Keisuke's work was shaped by the Sōsaku-hanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Sōsaku-hanga: ## What is sōsaku-hanga? Sōsaku-hanga (創作版画, "creative prints") was a twentieth-century Japanese print movement defined by a single commitment: the artist must design, carve, and print every work alone.
Original prints by Yanagase Keisuke can be found in collections including Wikimedia Commons (original lost; documented reproduction), Miyagi Museum of Art (via Wikimedia Commons).
