Standing Women

Standing Women (Tachi onna, 立女) is a 1924 painting by Kikuchi Keigetsu, completed in the year he was appointed head of the Japanese-painting department at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting and now held by the Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum (Nagano Kenritsu Shinano Bijutsukan), the institution that holds the largest single collection of his work. The composition is a pair of full-length female figures in classical Heian or Kamakura dress, standing in the spare arrangement that became Keigetsu's hallmark in the mid-1920s after his European travels of 1922-1923. The handling — precise line, sparing colour, restrained psychological observation — represents the fully mature Keigetsu idiom: a Kyoto nihonga that has absorbed the European interwar discipline of figural clarity without abandoning the soft Maruyama-Shijō line he had inherited from Kikuchi Hōbun. The work belongs to the sequence of Heian historical-female paintings through which Keigetsu, in the 1920s and 1930s, redefined the classical voice of Kyoto painting; the Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum's holdings of his work, of which this is a principal example, form the most important single archive of his career.