Fifty years after his death, Zenzaburo Kojima is once again the center of attention not only in Japan, but also in Asian countries. What kind of artist was Zenzaburo, who appeals to so many people regardless of time and borders. We will trace his life guided by his autobiography, letters, and other materials.
1. Training Years: Fukuoka Period, Somei/Itabashi Period,
Yoyogi Period 1913–1925
Yoyogi Period 1913–1925
Zenzaburo was born on February 13, 1893 as the eldest son of a paper wholesaler in Fukuoka. In 1913, he went to Tokyo aspiring to be a painter against his father’s wishes. He lived in Somei, Komagome and worked assiduously while arguing nightly with young progressive painters who hoped to create art of a new age. He went to a private school of western- style painting in order to prepare for the highest institution of art, Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko (the predecessor of Tokyo University of Arts), but failed the examination. From this time on, he resorted to self-instruction in oil painting. During these years he produced landscapes influenced by Cezanne and began to draw nudes as he was able to sketch models in painting classes.
However, two years after arriving in Tokyo, he was forced to go back to Fukuoka in order to receive treatment for tuberculosis for five years. In 1920, as he recovered health, his father allowed him to go back to Tokyo to become an artist. In his house in Itabashi, he “became immersed in painting as a baby sucks its mother’s milk,” and drew pastoral scenery of Itabashi.(1) In the following year, he built a new studio in Yoyogi, and his work was accepted for the first time by the famous exhibition sponsored by Nikakai. He received the award given to outstanding works, Nika Award in 1922, which marked his debut into the world of art. Although Zenzaburo was on his way to becoming a well known artist, he decided to go to France when much of Tokyo was destroyed by the big earthquake of 1923, to study the essence of oil painting which originated in Europe.
In the 1910s and the 1920s which were called “the youth stage of Japanese western-style painting,” Zenzaburo experienced joys and sor- rows of life as he struggled with illness and also married. Artistically, he learned much from the reprints of Cezanne’s paintings as well as from the avant-garde painter, Tetsugoro Yorozu and through these experiences, he nurtured his foundation of art.
2. Sojourn in Europe 1925–1928
“From Marseille, I travelled under the tunnel of apple flowers and reached Paris. This was May 15, when France was caught in the turmoil of spring. My art training days began soon after this.”(2)
Zenzaburo had left Fukuoka in March of 1925 for France, entrusting his family to his parents. After coming to France, he stayed in Moret-sur- Loing in the south of Paris and in Nice to recuperate from the tubercu- losis which recurred during the sea voyage and also to study French. He focused on learning the fundamentals of painting in the first two years, visiting Louvre Museum, and travelling in May, 1926, around Italy to learn classic techniques of painting. In Italy, he concentrated mostly on portraits, absorbing from Michelangelo’s powerful expressions of human body and Tiziano’s voluptuous nudes.
In the following year, he moved to a studio on 14 Cite Falguiere, a quarter where Modigliani and Brancusi used to live, then to a larger studio on 13 Rue de Chateau. To put to practice what he had learned, he painted many portraits of women. In this series of portraits including the Woman Holding a Mirror, now in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Sonya Standing which is said to be a masterpiece among portraits in the history of Japan’s modern western-style art, a strong influence of Renaissance art can be seen in the depiction of the voluminous bodies. The academic atmosphere and the brownish color tone is probably the influence of Derain’s neoclassicism. In July, 1928, Zenzaburo ended three years of study abroad and returned to Japan with about 110 works.
The purpose of his stay in France was not so much to learn the style in vogue as to learn fundamental shapes and color composition of west ern-style painting, especially the expression of three dimensional objects and sense of volume which the Japanese were not good at expressing. It is apparent from the series of portraits of women that he fulfilled his purpose.
Also, during his years in Europe, it is said that Zenzaburo learned from the poses of women and color composition in ukiyo-e works that were reprinted in books. It is likely that he was influenced in this by Tsuguharu Fujita, who was acclaimed in Paris for adopting the linework of ukiyo-e into his oil painting. However, Zenzaburo’s works imply that he was already set on establishing “oil painting distinctively Japanese.”
3. Yoyogi Period 1928–1936
After returning to Japan in July of 1928, Zenzaburo started working again in the Yoyogi studio. He was full of fervor, referring to his “insa- tiable ambition as a Japanese to make Japanese landscape my own.”(3) He exhibited his European works, and in the Nikakai exhibition the following year, he showed his group nudes, saying “I want to build up my individuality upon the foundation I have made.”(4) In group nudes, he simplified the outlines and forms, and proceeded with stylization while continuing to emphasize the three-dimensional quality and the sense of volume. The nude portraits of Japanese models were the result of Zenzaburo’s pursuit of modern realism that reminds us of Matisse and Derain.
Although he was recommended to become a member of Nikakai upon his return to Japan, he withdrew from the association soon after and founded with his fellow artists the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyokai in 1930. This was his attempt to distance himself from the French art that the Japanese painters aspired to, and was done with a lofty ideal to create “oil painting distinctively Japanese” that would be accepted internationally as well as to create a new Japanese art. Since then, he presented his works yearly in the exhibition of the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyokai except for the short interruption during World War II.
He stopped painting nudes after Springtime in 1933 due to “lack of good models,” and turned to landscapes. As mentioned earlier, his nudes had been influenced by ukiyo-e during his European years. He started to study oriental classic art such as Nanga (Southern painting) and Korin school of art, had a Japanese style garden built in his home-cum-studio, and began painting landscapes with Japanese sensibility. He sought sim- plification, flattening of forms, and ornamental expression that he had experimented in nudes, and reduced landscapes to simple shapes of circles, crosses, and triangles. This ambition of creating “oil painting distinctively Japanese” that blends east and west became the motif of Zenzaburo throughout his life.
4. Kokubunji Period 1936–1951
In the spring of 1936, Zenzaburo moved, in search of more opulent nature, to Kokubunji in Musashino, which is in the suburbs of Tokyo. During the Kokubunji period, he actively held one-man exhibitions and painted landscapes by traveling widely to such places as Hakone and Sapporo.
Zenzaburo captured and stylized the seasonal changes of nature in the landscapes which dominated his works since his Yoyogi days, and produced many works filled with vitality and Japanese sensitivity such as Scorching Heat. In the ornamental expressions with bold forms and brilliant colors resembling the murals of Momoyama Era, it can be said that he perfected Japanese landscape painting, merging beauty of nature with beauty of style. Zenzaburo also painted still-life works of the flowers he grew in abundance in his garden. What was behind these works were the influence of Japanese and Chinese classic art as well as an aesthetic sense of tranquility which is also behind haiku poems. His interest on oriental art got stronger as can be seen in his experiments with ink and wash paintings.
Japan entered into World War II in 1941, and while many painters went to the battlefront to record the war, he refrained from painting for the war effort. Because of this, he had difficulty getting paints and canvases, but he continued to portray Japan’s traditional beauty and spirituality through landscapes and still-life works.
As the war intensified, Zenzaburo’s paintings evolved to a new stage. Doubting and reflecting that he had gone too far from realism, his painting returned to fundamentals and realism. Trying to represent things as they really were, and restraining individuality and stylization which he had pursued since the Yoyogi period, he began to express causality and view of nature that was uniquely Japanese. As a result he produced after the war, profound works full of natural vitality such as Coming Spring and Road to the Japanese Alps.
“Realism is the capturing of the eternal life. Capturing eternal life means exaggeration of a state as it is after casting off the concepts. This is a world of emotion that only artists can grasp,” he wrote.(5) It can be said that “oil painting distinctively Japanese” which the artist had been seeking was finally accomplished during the Kokubunji period when he was physically and mentally at his peak.
5. Ogikubo Period 1951–1962
In July of 1951, convinced that he has painted all that the nature in Kokubunji could offer, Zenzaburo moved his studio to Ogikubo, also in Tokyo. Shortly afterwards, he expressed his ambition in the new environment to “capture in some way the beauty of what is unstable, what lies delicately between stability and instability.”(6)
However, he had to struggle with tuberculosis which recurred. This forced him to paint mostly flowers, still-life, and portraits in the studio, but he went out when his health allowed, to paint landscapes which had been his favorite theme for the past 20 years. The landscapes of this period combine the grandeur of nature that longs for eternity on the one hand, and lyrical scenery of villages and towns which is close to people’s lives and their joys and sorrows on the other hand. They make us feel that human beings are part of the great workings of nature and that we are only allowed to live in the nature that continues from the past to the future.
In the modern still-life works of flowers such as Mimosa Arrangement, he skillfully blended the three dimensional expression and two-dimensional expression, combined with sensuous ornamental quality of the art of the Momoyama era. This was probably achieved by his return to real- ism after the Kokubunji period, by his challenge to incorporate contradic- tory qualities of three-dimensional and two-dimensional expressions, as well as by his attempt to capture fleeting beauty in the instability of con- tradiction. The still-life works of flowers painted during this period are pure and brilliant as ever, as if they were given eternal life in exchange for the short remaining life of the artist. “The most important thing is whether perpetual life flows in the back-ground of the paintings, whether all things in nature outside the canvas and my painting breathe into each other. My work is just beginning. Let us purge all superficial beauty! We must confront and try to capture what is deeper, as more powerful, and eternal even if it is only one, two, or hundred steps.”(7)
In the room where he died on March 22, 1962, six or seven works full of vitality were left. The works were so powerful that they do not seem like they were painted just before his death. The art critic, Atsuo Imaizumi who was close to Zenzaburo, wrote at the end of his message in the book of his paintings that Zenzaburo had looked forward to the publication, as follows.a
“I do not doubt that there will come a day when the evaluation of Zenzaburo Kojima’s art will rise and be endowed with highest legitimacy in the history of painting.”(8)
Notes:
1. Kojima, Zenzaburo, “Autobiography,” Dokuritsu Bijutsu, (Kensetsusha, 1934).
2. I bid.
3. Kojima, Z., “Directions,” Mizue, (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1928).
4. Kojima, Z., “Zenzaburo Kojima,”
1. Kojima, Zenzaburo, “Autobiography,” Dokuritsu Bijutsu, (Kensetsusha, 1934).
2. I bid.
3. Kojima, Z., “Directions,” Mizue, (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1928).
4. Kojima, Z., “Zenzaburo Kojima,”
Selection of Japan’s Modern Painters, vol.3, (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1954).
5. Kojima, Z., “Letters to Mr. Tai Okubo,”
5. Kojima, Z., “Letters to Mr. Tai Okubo,”
The Works of Zenzaburo Kojima, (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1972).
6. Umezaki, Haruo, “A Visit to the Studio: Zenzaburo Kojima,”
6. Umezaki, Haruo, “A Visit to the Studio: Zenzaburo Kojima,”
Bijutsu Techo, (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1951).
7. same as 5.
8. Imaizumi, Atsuo, “The Art of Zenzaburo Kojima,”
7. same as 5.
8. Imaizumi, Atsuo, “The Art of Zenzaburo Kojima,”
Zenzaburo Kojima, (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1962).
