Study for the Mural in Kyūshū University

Study for the Mural in Kyūshū University (九州帝国大学壁画下絵) is an oil-on-paper preparatory drawing for the monumental mural that Aoyama Kumaji was commissioned to paint for the Engineering Faculty building of Kyūshū Imperial University in Fukuoka in 1930. The mural commission was the most prestigious public-art project then available to a Japanese yōga painter, and Aoyama was selected on the strength of his 1926 Teiten special prize and his subsequent appointment as a Teiten juror. The full mural depicted heroic figures of labor and engineering science arranged in a classicizing horizontal frieze, in a composition that drew on the Beaux-Arts mural tradition Aoyama had encountered in Paris during the late 1910s. This study sheet records his approach to the large-scale figural composition: idealized male figures in dynamic poses, painted in oil on paper with the rapid, tonal brushwork characteristic of his preparatory work. The Kyūshū mural project occupied him from 1930 onward and was not yet finished when he died of sudden illness in December 1932; the surviving mural at Kyūshū University was completed by collaborators on the basis of his designs. The preparatory studies, of which this is one, are distributed across private collections in Japan and document the most ambitious public-art project of late-Taishō and early-Shōwa yōga.