Yūzō Saeki

Saeki Yūzō (佐伯祐三, 1898-1928) was the most original Japanese yōga (Western-style) painter of the École de Paris generation and, despite a career that lasted only six years, one of the founding figures of modern Japanese oil painting. His tight, nervous, almost calligraphic renderings of Parisian shop fronts, kiosks, hoardings and back-street churches — produced in two brief residencies in France between 1924 and his death from tuberculosis in 1928 at the age of thirty — fundamentally reshaped the Taishō and early Shōwa imagination of Europe and gave Japanese modernism a model of painting that was at once cosmopolitan and unmistakably his own. The Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, which holds the city's institutional collection of his work in a long-running deposit, preserves more than sixty paintings, drawings and prints — the densest single holding of any twentieth-century Japanese painter — and recurrent retrospectives at venues from Osaka to Tokyo have steadily expanded his reputation since the 1978 fiftieth-anniversary exhibition first established the modern canon of his work.

Saeki was born on 28 April 1898 in the temple town of Mitsuhime in northern Osaka, the second son of the resident priest of Kōtoku-ji, a temple of the Shinshū Ōtani-ha (East Hongan-ji) branch of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism. The early surroundings of incense, sutra chant, hanging temple lanterns and torii gates would re-emerge — transposed onto the painted hoardings, cinema posters and advertising columns of Paris — as one of the most distinctive features of his mature painting, and the calligraphic rhythm of temple script appears to underlie the bold flourishes of black lettering that became his signature device. He attended Kitano Middle School in Osaka, where his interest in Western painting began with reproductions of Kuroda Seiki's plein-air canvases, and after graduating in 1917 he moved north to Koishikawa in Tokyo to enrol at the private atelier of Fujishima Takeji, the leading Meiji-era yōga master and one of the most cosmopolitan of the painters who had returned from European study. In 1918 he was admitted to the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts), where the academy's plein-air, post-Impressionist orthodoxy was tempered by Fujishima's continuing influence and by the wider Taishō ferment of new movements, magazines and translations. In 1921 he married a fellow art student, Ikeda Yoneko (1903-1972), herself a painter of considerable accomplishment and later the editor of his posthumous correspondence; their daughter Yachiko was born in 1923.

In the summer of 1924, Saeki sailed for France with his wife and infant daughter, taking the long sea route via Hong Kong and Marseille to disembark in Paris in late June. He enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse and quickly absorbed the post-war ferment of the École de Paris — Foujita's circle of Japanese expatriates in particular — while attending the studios of Kuroda, Kuroshima Tarō and other painters of the Japanese émigré community. The defining moment of his first Paris stay came in the late summer of 1924, when the painter Satomi Katsuzō introduced him to Maurice de Vlaminck at the latter's house in Auvers-sur-Oise. Saeki brought one of his recent canvases, a 1924 Self-Portrait with a Palette painted in the smoother, plein-air manner he had inherited from Fujishima and the Tokyo school. Vlaminck's response was famously brutal: the painting was 'académique' — academic — and as long as Saeki painted in that voice he would never be a painter. The verdict, delivered with the brusqueness for which Vlaminck was famed, devastated Saeki on the spot and then liberated him; he returned to Paris determined to abandon the modulated tonal painting of his training and to forge a manner more direct, more linear and more responsive to the immediate physical surface of the world around him. The transformation is visible in his 1924 Self-Portrait, a Standing Posture, painted shortly after the Auvers encounter — looser, more contoured, and palpably more confident than the canvas he had shown Vlaminck.

In 1925 Saeki produced the first cycle of paintings that would define his reputation. Working obsessively in the 14th, 15th and 19th arrondissements — Montparnasse, Vaugirard, around the Rue du Château where the painter Jean Hélion would later live — he painted the back streets, gate posts, shop fronts and small parish churches of working-class Paris with a directness and a denseness of paint that owed something to Vlaminck, something to Maurice Utrillo, something to the late Van Gogh and a great deal to a sensibility that was already, by 1925, recognisably his own. The mid-1925 canvases — Notre-Dame, Cordonnerie (Shoemaker's), Rue Brancion, Footpath of Rue du Château, Gate with Advertisements, Snow Scene in Paris, 15th Arrondissement of Paris — are at once topographically exact and pictorially abstract: walls and signs are flattened into hard, thinly inscribed rectangles, the lettering of shop signs and advertisements is set down with a brush-handed certainty that approaches calligraphy, and the colour is held to a restrained palette of greys, browns, pale ochres and the occasional vermilion or cobalt. Two of these paintings — including a version of Cordonnerie — were accepted at the 1925 Salon d'Automne, a recognition that opened the door to the wider Paris art world.

Family concerns and his increasingly precarious health forced Saeki to return to Japan in January 1926, sailing again via the southern sea route. Back in Tokyo, he co-founded the 1930-nen Kyōkai (Society of 1930) with Satomi Katsuzō, Maeda Kanji and other Paris veterans, an exhibition society dedicated to the new École de Paris-influenced yōga; he also won the Nika Prize at the thirteenth Nikaten in the autumn of 1926 and exhibited a small group of Japanese subjects — the Shimotani street scenes, paintings of the Shimoshakujii pond and the cherry trees of his suburban Tokyo neighbourhood — that have come to be known collectively as the Shimoshakujii series. The Japanese paintings are remarkable for what they reveal of the way the Paris cycle had reshaped his eye: even the bamboo groves and pond reflections are rendered with the dry, contoured stroke and the inscribed, almost graphic surface that he had developed on the Rue du Château. Tokyo, however, did not satisfy him. By August 1927, oppressed by the Japanese suburb, separated from the boulevards and the small parish churches that he had come to need, he set out again — this time via the Trans-Siberian railway, passing through Korea, Manchuria and Moscow — and arrived back in Paris in late September 1927.

The second Paris period, from October 1927 to August 1928, is the moment of Saeki's mature, fully personal painting. Cafe Tabac, Gas Lamp and Advertisements, the Café Restaurant series, the Russian Girl portrait, the great Postman bust and the late religious paintings produced in Villiers-sur-Morin and Saint-Germain-sur-Morin during a June-July 1928 country stay — these works combine an almost Japanese economy of contour, an Utrillo-derived sensitivity to plaster and zinc and lettered wall, and a brush-handed bravura that is entirely Saeki's own. The lettering on hoardings, posters, café signs and advertising columns is laid down with the certainty of calligraphy; whole compositions become surfaces of script, the painter who had grown up watching his father inscribe sutra characters with the brush turning a Paris café front into an act of writing. Saeki worked outside in cold and wet weather throughout the winter and spring; the tuberculosis that he had contracted years earlier accelerated, and by March 1928 he was largely bedridden. The progressive illness, combined with the strain of nearly four years of continuous painting at the pitch of his Paris production, brought on an acute psychotic episode in August 1928. He was admitted to the Maison de santé d'Épinay-sur-Seine (often described in the literature simply as the Villejuif hospital, although the institution was at Épinay) and died there on 16 August 1928, less than four months after his thirtieth birthday. He was buried at the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris; his ashes were later returned to Japan.

The posthumous reception of Saeki's painting was almost immediate. Ikeda Yoneko organised the first memorial exhibition of his work at the Asahi Shimbun gallery in Osaka in 1930 and brought back to Japan the canvases that had remained in his Paris studio; she also published the surviving correspondence and edited the catalogue of his oeuvre. The 1930-nen Kyōkai continued to show his work in Tokyo through the 1930s. After the war his reputation was consolidated by the fiftieth-anniversary exhibition at the Asahi Shimbun in 1978, the principal source of the modern catalogue and the basis of the standard chronology used here. From the late 1980s onward, the Ishibashi Foundation — through both the Ishibashi Museum of Art in Kurume (where Aoki Shigeru's work is also concentrated) and the Bridgestone Museum (now Artizon Museum) in Tokyo — has been one of the most important institutional collectors of his canvases. The largest single holding, however, belongs to the city of Osaka through the long-planned and finally opened Nakanoshima Museum of Art, whose collection contains more than sixty works by Saeki and which mounted a major retrospective in 2023 to mark the museum's opening. Outside Japan his paintings are held in modest numbers at major Western collections, but his reputation has begun to travel: the 2023 Nakanoshima exhibition and the steady stream of European retrospectives have brought him to a wider audience as one of the most distinctive figures of the inter-war École de Paris and as the painter who, perhaps more than any other Japanese artist of his generation, turned the streets of Paris into an act of writing.