In the Bath (Ideyu)

In the Bath (Ideyu, 1918) was Kokei's first major nude and was painted very shortly after he and Maeda Seison had begun studying photographs of the Ajantā cave wall-paintings that had recently been reproduced for Western audiences; the soft, plump fall of the female body and the unbroken outline of the hip and back show his absorption of that earlier Asian linear-figural tradition. The young woman, naked except for the long fall of her hair, stands at the edge of a hot-spring tub and twists a towel over her head; the bath itself is suggested only by a curving wooden rim and a few areas of paler colour. The picture caused considerable discussion when it was first exhibited at the Inten of 1918, both for the directness of its nudity and for the way Kokei had absorbed a foreign source into an otherwise unmistakably Japanese pictorial language. The work survives most widely through reproduction postcards published by the Bijutsuin and is held in private hands.