Yasuda Yukihiko

Yasuda Yukihiko (1884-1978) was one of the founding figures of twentieth-century nihonga, the principal heir to the Yamato-e revival pioneered by Okakura Kakuzō and Yokoyama Taikan, and the leading historical-subject painter of the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Across a career that spanned more than seventy years he produced a body of work dedicated almost entirely to scenes drawn from Japanese and East Asian history and classical literature — Prince Shōtoku at the Hall of Dreams, Yamato Takeru, Empress Suiko, the warriors of the Heike, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang at Hong Men, Toyotomi Hideyoshi in his Fushimi tea room, the poetess Nukada Ōkimi in Asuka — rendered in a refined linear style, calibrated palette, and psychologically attentive figure drawing that drew authority both from the ancient Yamato-e mural tradition he had studied at Hōryū-ji and from his exhaustive antiquarian knowledge of Japanese costume, ritual, and place.

Yasuda was born Yasuda Shinzaburō on 16 February 1884 in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, the fourth son of a long-established Tokyo restaurant family. He showed early gifts for drawing and entered the studio of Kobori Tomoto (1864-1931), a Tosa-school nihonga painter of the Meiji art establishment, in 1898. He briefly enrolled in the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts), which Okakura Kakuzō had built into the institutional center of Meiji nihonga, but left without graduating after disagreements with the school's reorganization. In 1901, still in his teens, he joined a small study group called Shikōkai (later renamed Kōjikai) with a cohort of young painters that included Imamura Shikō, with the explicit aim of reviving the classical Yamato-e narrative-painting tradition for the modern era. The Kōjikai painters rejected what they saw as the routinized academicism of late Meiji nihonga and looked instead to the medieval emakimono (illustrated handscrolls), the temple mural tradition, and the historical-subject paintings of the Tosa and Sumiyoshi schools as their models. This commitment to a renewed Yamato-e idiom defined Yasuda's painting for the rest of his life.

Okakura Kakuzō, who by then had founded the Japan Fine Arts Academy (Nihon Bijutsuin) in 1898 and was leading the broader nihonga renewal from Izura on the Ibaraki coast, recognized Yasuda's talent early. Through Okakura's patronage Yasuda was sent to Nara to study the ancient Buddhist murals of Hōryū-ji and the early Yamato-e holdings of the Nara temples and the Shōsōin, an experience that became the foundational visual reference for his mature style. His 1912 painting Yumedono (Hall of Dreams), which depicts Prince Shōtoku in meditation in the seventh-century octagonal hall at Hōryū-ji, was the breakthrough work of his early career — entered in the Sixth Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition) of that year, it announced both his signature subject matter (ancient and classical Japanese history seen through the lens of Yamato-e) and his characteristic visual idiom (clean linear contour, restrained color, careful disposition of figures against architectural and natural space). The painting is now held by the Tokyo National Museum (accession A-10538).

In 1914, when Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, and others re-founded the Japan Fine Arts Academy in Tokyo after Okakura's death the previous year, Yasuda was among its founding regular members, alongside Imamura Shikō, Kosugi Misei, Kimura Buzan, and a small group of painters who would shape the Inten (the Academy's annual exhibition) for the next half-century. The same year he completed Praying for the Empress's Safe Delivery (Goshussan Inori), depicting Empress Suiko's prayers at the time of imperial childbirth — a hanging scroll now in the Tokyo National Museum that defined his approach to imperial-historical subject matter. Through the late Taishō and early Shōwa years Yasuda built up the historical-painting cycle for which he is best known: Xiang Yu (Kōu, 1916), Solar Eclipse (Nisshoku, 1925), the Sakuradamon plate from his Famous Views in Tokyo series (1925), Yamato Takeru (Injured Yamatotakeru at the Spring, 1928, MOMAT), the screen pair Wind God and Thunder God (Fūjin Raijin, 1929), Arranging Flowers (1932), the screen The Six Poetic Geniuses (Rokkasen, 1933), and Poet Yamabe no Akahito (1938). These works typically isolate a single moment of historical or literary importance, frame it within an architectural or landscape setting precisely reconstructed from his antiquarian studies, and present the figures in costumes carefully calibrated to the period depicted — all rendered in the chastened color and confident linear drawing that became his signature.

The most consequential and most contested work of Yasuda's career is The Arrival of Yoshitsune / Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no Jin), a pair of six-panel screens of 1940-1941 that depicts a moment in 1180 from the Heike civil wars when Minamoto no Yoritomo and his half-brother Minamoto no Yoshitsune meet for the first time at the Genji encampment by the Kise River. The painting was commissioned in connection with the 2600th anniversary celebrations of the founding of Japan (kigen nisen roppyaku-nen), and it is now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); it was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2011. Its production at the height of the Pacific War, and its readability as a wartime allegory of brotherly alliance and martial purpose, has made it a focal point in the modern art-historical literature on nihonga's relationship to Japanese fascism and the wartime art apparatus. Yasuda himself, like most senior nihonga painters of his generation, produced a small number of openly war-related works in the early 1940s — notably the four hanging scrolls Warrior (1942), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1944), The Goddess of Cereals (1944), and Portrait of Kusunoki Masatsura (1944), all in MOMAT — before turning back, after the war, to the historical and literary subjects that had defined his pre-war practice.

In 1944 Yasuda was appointed professor at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (the present Tokyo University of the Arts), a position he held until 1951. After the war he resumed his Inten exhibitions, taking up themes from classical Chinese as well as Japanese history (Meeting at Hong Men, 1955, MOMAT, depicting the famous banquet between Liu Bang and Xiang Yu; Toyotomi Hideyoshi in His Tearoom in Fushimi, 1956, MOMAT) and producing two of his most admired late portraits, Master Yokoyama Taikan (1950, 1959) — tributes to the senior nihonga painter who had been his close colleague at the Japan Fine Arts Academy for more than four decades. He also took part with Maeda Seison and others in the postwar mural-restoration program for Hōryū-ji, returning him as an elder statesman to the temple that had shaped his early practice. His late career produced Spring in Asuka with Nukada Ōkimi (1964, Museum of Modern Art Shiga), depicting the seventh-century Man'yōshū poetess in the imperial capital — a subject chosen by the Japanese postal authority for a 1981 commemorative stamp.

Yasuda received the Asahi Shimbun Cultural Award (1941), the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō, 1948), and was elected to the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin) in the same year. Three of his works were eventually selected for Japanese commemorative postage stamps — Spring in Asuka with Nukada Ōkimi (1981), Mount Fuji (1986, marking the Tokyo Summit), and Window (1996, Philatelic Week) — a level of national honor accorded to only a handful of twentieth-century painters. He died in Ōiso, Kanagawa, on 29 April 1978 at the age of 94, and was succeeded as the leading figure of Yamato-e-revivalist nihonga by his student Yuki Ogura (1895-2000) and by the next generation of Japan Fine Arts Academy painters. Among print collectors he is significant less for individual prints than as the standard-bearer of a major painting tradition that ran parallel to the print revival movements (shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga) of the same decades — a reminder that twentieth-century Japanese art included a robust strand of historically minded painting alongside the better-known print currents.