Yanagase Keisuke

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 commercial illustration 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 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) shows him pushing fragmented Cubo-Futurist planes into a self-portrait freighted with German Expressionist and Russian Constructivist references. He absorbed George Grosz's caustic Weimar caricatures through imported publications, 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 that 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 joined the newspaper's manga club and 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 for the principal organs of the Japanese proletarian arts movement, and in 1930–31 he produced all six covers of the magazine Senki (Battle Flag), a run of proletarian issues filled with articles, manga, and drawings.

In 1931 Yanase joined the then-illegal Japanese Communist Party. The 1925 Peace Preservation Law had been used through the late 1920s to detain anyone associated with the Communist or socialist movements, and in 1932 the Special Higher Police (Tokkō) arrested Yanase in a wider sweep of left-wing artists and writers. He was held, interrogated, and tortured, and his overt political work ceased after his release. Over the next decade he withdrew from public political activity, supporting himself through commercial illustration and design.

The end came on 25 May 1945. During the Yamanote Air Raid, a United States Army Air Forces firebombing strike on the central Tokyo districts of Shinjuku, Kōjimachi, Akasaka, and Aoyama, Yanase was killed at the west exit of Shinjuku Station along with hundreds of other civilians caught in the inferno. He was forty-five years old. Much of his studio material was destroyed in the raid or in the wider conflagration that consumed central Tokyo through the spring of 1945. What survives is fragmentary: a handful of oil paintings and designs in Japanese public collections, his proletarian cartoons preserved in surviving runs of Senki and other left magazines, and a significant holding of his cartoon and manga work at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University.

A major retrospective, Yanase Masamu: A Retrospective 1900–1945, mounted in 2013–2014, re-established him as one of the most important transnational figures in interwar Japanese art — a Japanese counterpart to Grosz and Heartfield whose career exposed the costs of political commitment under the militarist regime more sharply than any of his peers. Although he produced relatively few woodblock prints in the conventional sōsaku-hanga sense, his energies going into reproducible offset-printed magazine graphics rather than the artisanal print, his place within the broader story of modern Japanese printmaking has been increasingly recognised. The romanisation Yanagase Keisuke, used here as the Hanga slug, reflects an alternative reading of 柳瀬正夢 that persists in some Anglophone reference works; the artist himself published under Yanase Masamu throughout his lifetime.