Yasui Sōtarō

Yasui Sōtarō (安井曾太郎, 1888-1955) was one of the two great figures of mature Shōwa-era yōga (Western-style painting), the other being his lifelong friend Umehara Ryūzaburō. Together the pair represented the highest reach of pre-war and early post-war oil painting in Japan, and their parallel careers — both born in 1888, both trained in the Asai Chū circle in Kyoto, both sent to Paris in the late Meiji, both crowned in 1952 with the Order of Culture (文化勲章), Japan's highest civilian honour for artistic and cultural achievement — became the canonical narrative through which Shōwa yōga was taught and collected. Where Umehara embraced the saturated colour and decorative joy of post-Renoir Fauvism, Yasui chose the harder road of Cézanne — structural drawing, severe colour, and the patient construction of the figure in space — and from the late 1920s onward he produced the central body of Japanese realist portraiture against which all later yōga portrait painting was measured.

Yasui was born on 17 May 1888 in the Sanjō Tominokōji quarter of Kyoto, the fourth son of a prosperous wholesale cotton dealer of the Yasui family. He showed an early facility for drawing but was directed by his father into the Kyoto City Commercial School in preparation for the family business. In 1903, at fifteen, he abandoned commerce against family wishes and entered the Shōgoin Yōga Kenkyūjo, the private painting institute founded that year in Kyoto by Asai Chū, the leading Meiji oil painter and a returnee from a long Paris stay under the academic plein-air master Louis-Joseph-Raphaël Collin. Asai's institute, which was reorganised in 1906 as the Kansai Bijutsu-in (Kansai Fine Art Academy), was the formative ground of a remarkable generation: alongside Yasui studied Umehara Ryūzaburō, Tsuda Seifū, Kuroda Jūtarō and Ishii Hakutei. Asai died unexpectedly in late 1907, but in the four years under his teaching Yasui had absorbed both the academic gospel of careful drawing from the figure and the Meiji idea that a young Japanese yōga painter should — if at all possible — finish his training in France.

In April 1907 Yasui, still eighteen, sailed for Marseille with Tsuda Seifū. He settled in Paris and enrolled in the Académie Julian, the open private academy on the rue du Dragon that was for a generation the principal training ground of foreign students in Paris. There he studied under the history painter Jean-Paul Laurens, whose classes had also trained Asai Chū fifteen years earlier and would later train Léopold Survage, Marcel Duchamp and many of the leading European modernists. He worked from the model six mornings a week, exhibited at the academy's monthly competitions (he won the first Julian Prize in 1909), and spent his free time in the Louvre and at the regular exhibitions of the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. The decisive encounter of these years was with Paul Cézanne. Yasui had arrived in Paris a year after the great Cézanne memorial exhibition at the 1907 Salon d'Automne, and in his second and third years he steeped himself in the master's work, copying compositions and learning to build the figure from constructive planes of colour. From Pissarro he took a quieter, more restrained palette than that of his friend Umehara, who arrived in Paris in 1908 and at once fell under the spell of Renoir. The contrast between the two — Yasui the Cézannist, Umehara the Renoir devotee — would frame the rest of their parallel careers.

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 forced Yasui to leave Paris after seven years. He returned to Japan via Marseille and Singapore, arriving in Yokohama in December 1914 with the canvases and works on paper that he had produced in France. In the autumn of 1915 the Nikakai (Second Section Society) — the breakaway anti-Bunten exhibiting body founded the previous year by Ishii Hakutei, Yamashita Shintarō and Arishima Ikuma — gave him a one-man retrospective of forty-four Paris works at the second Nikakai exhibition. The show was a critical sensation: for the first time a Japanese painter had returned from Paris with a fully formed Cézannist manner, and the critics Kojima Kikuo, Ishii Hakutei and the young Mushanokōji Saneatsu wrote at length about the discovery. Yasui was at once elected a sōsai (founding member) of the Nikakai, the position he would occupy until 1936.

The period from 1915 to 1925 was one of personal difficulty. Yasui, whose health had always been fragile, suffered a serious tubercular relapse on his return and spent several years in semi-convalescence in Kyoto and on the Japan Sea coast. He produced relatively few finished paintings in these years, and the work he did show — notably the 1919 landscape Nude in the Trees and a series of Western-style nudes — remained close to the Paris manner of his student years and was found by the critics to lack the urgency of the 1915 debut. By the mid-1920s, however, he had recovered, settled in Tokyo, married, and begun to develop the assured Shōwa style that became his signature: a Cézannist construction of the figure made monumental, the modelling drawn with a hard black contour, the local colour kept low and slightly chalky, and the sitter brought right to the picture plane in a quiet, almost ceremonial frontality. The first masterwork of the new manner, Black-Haired Woman (Kurokami no onna, 1924, BB Plaza Art Museum), was followed by Seated Woman (1929) and the watershed Portrait of a Woman (Fujin-zō, 1930, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto). The 1930 painting was awarded the Imperial Art Academy Prize and confirmed Yasui as the leading portrait painter of his generation.

The 1930s were Yasui's central decade. Roses (1932, Artizon Museum) was the painting through which Cézanne's late still-life manner entered the standard Japanese yōga repertoire. The 1934 Portrait of Tamamushi Sensei (Ishibashi Museum of Art) and Portrait of Chin-Jung (MOMAT) — the latter depicting the Manchurian-born linguist Odagiri Mineko, who spoke five languages and was nicknamed Chin-Jung (金蓉) — established what Japanese critics still call the Yasui-shiki shōzō (the Yasui-type portrait), in which the sitter is brought up to the plane in an almost iconic frontality, the body subtly recomposed from sketches drawn from many angles to suggest the latent possibility of movement. In 1935 Yasui was elected a member of the Imperial Art Academy. The following year he and Arishima Ikuma led the breakaway from the Nikakai that became the Issuikai (一水会, founded 1936), an exhibiting body intended to give a more disciplined, technically rigorous home to Cézannist and post-Cézannist painting, and Yasui directed Issuikai exhibitions for the rest of his life. His landscape Mount Yakedake (1941) and the wartime Portrait of Yokoyama Taikan (1943, painted at the request of the Imperial Household) extended his range; the Yokoyama portrait, in which the venerable nihonga master is shown frontally and at half-length against a plain ground, is the great example of one yōga master taking the measure of the leading nihonga of the age.

In 1944 Yasui was appointed professor of oil painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts), succeeding Fujishima Takeji and becoming the formative teacher of the next generation of Japanese realist painters; he remained in the post until 1952. The post-war years were the period of his greatest public visibility. From 1946 onward his paintings appeared as the cover art of the leading literary monthly Bungei Shunjū for almost a decade, and the magazine's circulation carried his vision of yōga into hundreds of thousands of Japanese households. In 1950 the Granddaughter (Magomusume, Ohara Museum of Art), a tender study of his three-year-old granddaughter Kazuko seated in a child's chair against a Cézannist patchwork of green and rose, became one of the best-loved images in modern Japanese painting. In 1951 he was elected a member of the Japan Art Academy. On 3 November 1952 he received the Order of Culture from the Emperor in the same ceremony as his friend Umehara Ryūzaburō, the violinist Suwa Nejiko, the writer Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, the historian Tsuda Sōkichi and the physicist Nishina Yoshio. Yasui died of acute pneumonia in Tokyo on 14 December 1955 at the age of sixty-seven. He is buried at Shōkaku-ji in his native Kyoto. The major holdings of his work are at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the Artizon Museum, the Ishibashi Museum of Art at Kurume, the Ohara Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art Kamakura, the Tokyo University of the Arts University Art Museum, the Bridgestone-Ishibashi collections, the Mie Prefectural Art Museum and the Yasui Sōtarō Memorial Museum in Kanazawa.