Yokoyama Taikan

Yokoyama Taikan (横山大観, 1868-1958) was the most influential nihonga painter of the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa periods, the principal disciple of Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), a founder and lifelong sustainer of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Fine Arts Academy), the co-creator with Hishida Shunsō of the controversial mōrōtai ("vague style"), and, in his late career, the foremost national painter of Mount Fuji — a subject he is said to have rendered more than 1,500 times. For sixty years he stood at the institutional center of Japanese-style painting in opposition to yōga (Western oil painting).

He was born Sakai Hidemaro on 2 November 1868 into a samurai family in Mito (Ibaraki Prefecture) that had served the Mito-Tokugawa branch; the family moved to Tokyo in 1878. After early instruction in pencil drawing from Watanabe Fumisaburō, he enrolled in 1889 in the inaugural class of the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts), the first state-chartered art school in Japan, founded by Okakura Kakuzō and Ernest Fenollosa as a deliberate counter-institution to the yōga establishment. There he studied under the Kanō-school master Hashimoto Gahō alongside the classmates with whom his career would be inseparably entwined: Hishida Shunsō and Shimomura Kanzan. He took the art name Taikan ("Great Vision") and, after a brief teaching stint in Kyoto, returned to his alma mater as an assistant professor.

The defining institutional break came in 1898, when Okakura was forced out of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in a bureaucratic struggle over its direction. Taikan, Shunsō, Kanzan, and many leading younger nihonga painters resigned in solidarity and joined him in founding the Nihon Bijutsuin at Yanaka in Tokyo. The first Bijutsuin was a financially fragile experiment that effectively went dormant after relocating to Izura around 1906. During 1903-1905 Taikan and Shunsō traveled to India (where Taikan met Abanindranath Tagore and the wider Bengal renaissance circle), the United States, and Europe, absorbing Western academic painting and late-symbolist European atmosphere. From this travel emerged mōrōtai, a technique that suppressed traditional outline in favor of soft, blended color washes. The Japanese critical establishment savaged it as un-Japanese and structureless — the term itself was originally a slur — but the works of these years (Innocence / Muga, 1897; Selflessness; Towing a Boat, 1901; Waves in Moonlight, 1904-1905) are now read as the foundational works of modern nihonga.

After Okakura's death in 1913, Taikan led the 1914 revival of the Bijutsuin as the Saikō Nihon Bijutsuin ("Reorganized Japan Fine Arts Academy"), centered on its annual jury-free Inten exhibition — still the most important nihonga exhibition society outside the official Bunten/Nitten system. From this platform Taikan presided over Japanese-style painting for four decades. His Inten contributions of the late 1910s and 1920s included Eight Famous Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (1912, Tokyo National Museum, Important Cultural Property), the Mt. Fuji Dyed Ultramarine (Gunjō Fuji) screen pair of about 1917-1918 (Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art), and Metempsychosis (Seisei ruten, 1923, MOMAT, Important Cultural Property) — a hand scroll more than forty meters long, executed entirely in modulated ink on silk, that traces the cycle of water from mountain rivulets through rivers, sea, and vapor back to the mountains.

In the 1930s and 1940s Taikan was elevated to the highest ranks of cultural authority: appointed to the Imperial Arts Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1935 and named one of the first recipients of the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) in 1937. He was widely identified with the cult of Mount Fuji as a national emblem, painted Fuji through the wartime years (including the famous 1940 Fuji marking both the supposed 2,600th anniversary of the founding of Japan and the fiftieth year of his own career), and donated proceeds from painting sales to the wartime government. In the 1950s he produced the late masterpiece A Day in the Pacific Ocean (1952, MOMAT). He died in Tokyo on 26 February 1958, aged eighty-nine, and was posthumously awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun.

Taikan's surviving works are concentrated in the major Japanese museums: the Tokyo National Museum, MOMAT, the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi (one of the most comprehensive Taikan collections in the world), the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, the Hakone Museum of Art, and the Yokoyama Taikan Memorial Museum at his former Ikenohata residence. A smaller body entered Western collections, notably Waves in Moonlight at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (a souvenir of his 1904-1905 American tour). Although Taikan was primarily a painter rather than a printmaker, his role as institutional anchor of nihonga makes him indispensable to any account of modern Japanese pictorial art and its relationship to the parallel histories of shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga printmaking.