熊谷守一

Born in Tsukechi-mura, Ena-gun (present-day Tsukechi-chō, Nakatsugawa-shi), Gifu on April 2, 1880 as the third son (the seventh and youngest child) of father Magorokurō and mother Tai. Magorokurō, was a businessman who later became the first mayor of Gifu-shi and a member of the House of Representatives. At age three, Morikazu was separated from his real mother, and while often called back to Tsukechi, he lived in Gifu-shi, where his father and two mistresses resided. After finishing Gifu Prefectural Elementary and Middle Schools, Morikazu moved to Tokyo. He experienced the Nōbi Earthquake when he was eleven years old. In Tokyo, he attended Seisoku High School from a house his father rented in Shiba. However, after a year, he withdrew from that school and studied at Ōbun Seikoku Gakkan (Summers School), a private English school run by James Summers in Tsukiji. It was around this time that he aspired to become an artist. Despite his father’s objection, he was told that he could do what he liked if he attended Keiō Gijuku Futsūgakka [tertiary school] for one term. After attending Keiō for one term, he studied the basics of nihonga Japanese-style painting at Kyōritsu Bijutsu Gakkan, which was affiliated to Tokyo Fine Arts School. In September 1900, Kumagai entered the Elective Course of the Western-style Painting Department at Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo Fine Arts School, present-day Tokyo University of the Arts). He studied under Kuroda Seiki, Fujishima Takeji, Nagahara Kōtarō, etc., and his classmates included Aoki Shigeru, Wada Sanzō, Yamashita Shintarō, and Kojima Torajirō. Following the sudden death of his father in 1902, he lived together with Wada Sanzō, Hashimoto Kunisuke, Tsuji Hisashi, and Yanagi Keisuke in Iriya, Shitaya-ku until 1904. This community was later to become known as “Iriya no gonin otoko [The Five Men of Iriya].” In 1904, Kumagai completed the elective course with first-class honors. That year, “Self-Portrait” (Tokyo University of the Arts) was accepted at the 9th Hakubakai (White Horse Society) Exhibition. During this period, in 1903, Kumagai witnessed a woman committing suicide at a railroad crossing near Nippori Station, and sketched the corpse that had been run over by a train. After completing the elective course, he was enrolled in the postgraduate course for three years, during which he joined the Karafuto Survey Team dispatched by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce for two years and was engaged in producing sketches as records (which no longer remain due to the Great Kantō Earthquake). In 1908, he planned to submit “Rekishi” [Run Over by a Train] (The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu), a painting based on the above-mentioned sketches, to the 2nd Monbushō Bijutsu Tenrankai (Bunten, Ministry of Education Art Exhibition), but was rejected. This may have been one of the reasons he rejected the government thereafter. Instead, he submitted “Portrait,” which was accepted for the first time. At the 3rd Bunten held the following year, “Candle” (The Museum of Fine Arts Gifu) won a certificate of merit. These works demonstrate the artist’s interest in darkness and the light emitted from a faint light source. “Rekishi” was submitted to the 13th Hakubakai Exhibition in 1910. During this period, Kumagai painted works which might be described as Expressionistic. In October 1910, Kumagai returned to his hometown having received notice that his mother was in critical condition. After his mother’s death, he remained in Tsukechi. While staying at his elder brother’s and making brief visits to Tokyo, he spent two years as a day laborer floating timber down the river. In 1912, Saitō Toyosaku, a friend from his Tokyo Fine Arts School days, returned from France and visited Kumagai. Time and again his friends advised Kumagai to go to Tokyo, which he finally did in June 1915. He received financial support from Saitō every month. Once in Tokyo again, he presented his work at the Nika Association from the 2nd Nika Art Exhibition onward. He submitted his work to that exhibition more or less every year. Although the first half of his career was unprolific, the fact that he was deeply in touch with nature through surveying Karafuto and traveling on foot was to lead to his later work. In 1922, Kumagai married Ōe Hideko, the daughter of a forest landowner in Wakayama. They had altogether five children, three in the following four years, and one each in 1929 and 1931. However, three of these children died, and Kumagai recalled the deaths of his family sometimes impulsively (“The Day My Son Yō Died,” Ōhara Museum of Art, Okayama) and sometimes in retrospect (“Way Back from the Crematory,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu). Once Nika Gijuku (later renamed Banshū Gijuku and Nika Bijutsu Kenkyūjo) was founded, Kumagai worked there as lecturer for ten or so years. His rapports with his pupils there and the sketch trips which continued from after he resigned from the Gijuku until after World War II provided Kumagai with a broad range of motifs to select from and utilize in his paintings. The transportation costs he received from the Gijuku were Kumagai’s main income, and he was constantly reduced to poverty. However, thanks to support from Hideko’s parents, the family was able to build a new house in Nagasaki-Nakamachi (present-day Chihaya), Toshima-ku in 1932, where Kumagai lived for the rest of his life. Kumagai also had many music-related friends such as Nobutoki Kiyoshi, and received financial support from them too. As Kumagai’s house was close to an area where there were many houses with studios for rent, he was looked up to by artists of Ikebukuro Montparnasse, and his rapport with Hasekawa Toshiyuki is particularly well-known. Kumagai held his first solo exhibition at Kōbe Gallery in 1933, when he was fifty-three years old. From around 1937, following Hamada Shigemitsu’s advice, he also began painting nihonga. Triggered by a calligraphic work attributed to Kūkai, which he came across at Hamada’s house, he also worked on calligraphy. It was in 1938 at an exhibition of new brush paintings held at the Nagoya branch of Maruzen that Kumagai met Kimura Teizō, a collector thirty-five years his junior, who was eventually to become a great understander and supporter of Kumagai. His works began to sell from around that period. At the 27th Nika Art Exhibition held in 1940, there was a special display to commemorate Kumagai Morikazu’s sixtieth birthday, and “Kumagai Morikazu gashū” [Collected works of Kumagai Morikazu] (Tokyo: Kumagai Morikazu Gashū Kankōkai) was published in 1942. Opportunities to show his work at Galerie Nichido, Maruzen, etc. increased too. The Jōhoku Air Raid in April 1945 inflicted severe damage in the Toshima area in the north of Tokyo, but Kumagai’s house escaped getting burnt. After World War II, although the Nika Association resumed its exhibitions, Kumagai did not submit his works to them. In April 1947, he participated in the foundation of Dainikikai and submitted his work to its first exhibition. However, he withdrew from that society in 1951, and thereafter did not take part in group exhibitions. Nevertheless, he was involved in the magazine “Kokoro” as a member, and works and talks by Kumagai were featured in it. From 1951 to 1954, he submitted his works to Seikōkai (Seikō Society). In 1964, Kumagai’s work was shown at Galerie David et Garnier, Paris. Contours of the motifs became visible from the mid-1930s, and Kumagai employed a variety of methods to express thick and thin lines or colors. In 1956, nine years after the death of his eldest daughter, Man, Kumagai submitted “Way Back from the Crematory” (The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu) to the 2nd Gendai Nihon Bijutsuten (Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan). Depicted as a portrait of his family having overcome the death of their child, this painting is said to demonstrate how the artist had begun to work on his paintings by observing life. (Note 1) This may also have been due to the fact that Kumagai suffered a stroke in the spring of 1956, and, unable to travel afar, began to concentrate on observing the flora and fauna in his own garden. Perfection of the so-called Morikazu style of “coloring the inside of clearly contoured shapes in a single color” (Note 2) can also be identified. “My CV,” a serial which appeared from June to July 1971 in the newspaper “Nihon Keizai Shimbun,” was published as a book entitled “Heta mo e no uchi” [Even a clumsy picture is art] (Tokyo: Nikkei Inc.) in November that year. Kumagai’s attitude toward painting became known along with his looks and lifestyle, and opportunities to exhibit his works increased. Meanwhile, he attracted attention for declining the Order of Culture in 1967 and conferment of a Third Class Decoration in 1971. “Swallowtail Butterfly” (Kumagai Morikazu Museum of Art, Tokyo) produced in 1976 became Kumagai’s last oil painting, and he died of pneumonia on August 1, 1977. Works that anyone can understand, and no one can understand. (Note 3)—that is how Kumagai’s pupils described their master’s works. Although Kumagai did not take part in the reception of new trends in art history and the foundation of new groups, his works are widely recognized and have many deep-rooted admirers. Meanwhile, his hermit-like looks circulated through photographs and television, and even after his death, such images were reproduced as a movie, “Mori no iru basho (Mori, The Artist’s Habitat)” (2018). Thus, his lifestyle and character tend to have been emphasized more than his artworks. The artist himself said that you can tell most of the details by looking at the sketches and his inscriptions. (Note 4) This has made it difficult to identify the dates of production when appreciating multiple works depicting the same composition. However, efforts are being made to unravel such ambiguity. (Note 5) Studies on Kumagai will continue to renew established theories about this artist who, blessed by a wide-ranging circle of friends, pursued form and color. Kumagai’s works are kept at the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, which was his hometown, and the Kimura Teizō Collection at Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. At Tendō City Museum of Art, Yamagata, the Murayama Yūtarō Memorial Gallery contains works by Kumagai. As for facilities dedicated to Kumagai, a memorial museum opened in Tsukechi, Gifu in 1976. Following the establishment of a new Kumagai Morikazu Tsukechi Museum of Art in 2015, the works at the former memorial museum were entrusted to the new museum. In Chihaya, Toshima-ku, Tokyo, where Kumagai’s house cum studio stood, his second daughter, Kaya, founded Kumagai Morikazu Museum of Art in 1985. The management of this museum was transferred to Toshima-ku from 2007, and it celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its opening in 2025. Kumagai’s diaries, letters, etc. have been donated to Gifu Prefectural Archives. (Kobayashi Mioko / Translated by Ogawa Kikuko) (Published online: 2026-02-27) Notes 1. Koizumi Jun’ichi, “Kumagai Morikazu no gagyō,” in “Toshima Kuritsu Kumagai Morikazu Bijutsukan sakuhin shū” (Kumagai Morikazu Museum of Art / Kaya Co., Ltd., April 2025), 12. 2. Ditto. 3. Suzuki Tōgorō and Suzuki Suwako, “Kumagai sensei ni osowatta koto,” “Tendo City Museum of Art Bulletin” 1 (September 1998): 31. 4. Kumagai Morikazu, “Heta mo e no uchi” (Nikkei Inc., November 1971), 146. 5. Ikeda Ryōhei, “Kumagai Morizaku no mondaiten,” in “Botsugo nijūnen Kumagai Morikazu ten,” exh. cat. (Tendō City Museum of Art, Yamagata; Ashikaga Museum of Art; Hamamatsu Municipal Museum of Art; Iida City Museum, 1997–1998). In the essay cited in note 1, Koizumi Jun’ichi maintains that research on the latter half of Kumagai’s life in particular is yet to be furthered.