Page 111 - japanese and korean art Utterberg Collection Christie's March 22 2022

NIHONGA

MODERNIST “JAPANESE STYLE PAINTING”

A group of five paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, the early Showa period,
by five different artists born in the Meiji period, spans the gamut of the
new look of Nihonga (lots 36-40). There are Chinese sages, reflecting
Japan’s long love affair with China; lyrical landscapes featuring beloved
local scenery; a close, almost portrait-like presentation of birds; and even a
fashionable young woman in modern dress—a school uniform. Although
many Japanese artists, often trained in the West, were now producing oil
paintings, these five prefer traditional themes and aesthetics, as well as
traditional materials, techniques and formats—hanging scrolls and folding
screens.
These Nihonga paintings do incorporate realistic Western perspective and
shading but are immediately distinguished by extreme delicacy and an
elegant sophistication in a Japanese idiom. Several are also enormous in
scale, reaching eight to nine feet. Why? All were likely made for juried,
government-sponsored exhibitions, and three were purchased directly from
the artist or exhibition by the most prominent art patron and collector of
that era, the Tokyo businessman Hosokawa Rikizo. Hosokawa owned at
least thirty paintings by Tateishi Harumi, for example, some of them now
in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (lot 40.)
Hosokawa came to Tokyo in 1897 to open a bathhouse, but by the late
1920s he expanded, opening a high-class restaurant, the Gajoen, in the
Meguro district of Tokyo and then adding an annex; eventually it became
an enormous wedding complex famed for its extravagant and exotic
interiors. Much of Hosokawa’s huge collection of twentieth-century
paintings, stored in Meguro Gajoen Museum, was released onto the art
market some twenty years ago.
Several recent publications explore early Showa-period painting in more
depth: John W. Dower, Anne Nishimura Morse, Jacqueline M. Atkins and
Frederic A. Sharf, The Brittle Decade: Visualizing Japan in the 1930s (Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, 2012) and Kendall H. Brown et al., Taisho Chic:
Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco (Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2002).