黒田清輝

Kuroda Seiki was born in 1866, shortly before the Meiji Restoration, in Kagoshima, the capital of the Satsuma Domain (today’s Kagoshima City). His father Kiyokane was a Satsuma clansman. After being formally adopted as heir by his uncle Kiyotsuna in 1871, Kuroda took up residence in Tokyo the following year. The youngster set his sights on a career in the law, in deference to his adoptive father, who, among other things, served as a member of the Chamber of Elders in the new Meiji government. He attended Nishogakusha (secondary school), Kyōryū Gakkō (college-preparatory school), and Tsukiji English School, before transferring to the second grade of the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages’s French department. A year later, in 1884, he traveled to France to pursue the legal studies for which he had been preparing. While in Paris, however, through associating with the Yōga (Western-style) painters Yamamoto Hōsui and Fuji Gazō and the art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa, he awakened to his own artistic talent. In 1886, he became a pupil of the painter Raphaël Collin whom he met while acting as an interpreter for Fuji. Abandoning his law studies altogether the following year, he began to devote himself to painting. Another of Collin’s students, Kume Keiichirō, became a lifelong friend. Collin was an academic painter who excelled at female figures, especially nudes, depicted in bright, plein-air light. Under his tutelage, Kuroda made a thorough study of drawing the human form. As an admirer of Jean-François Millet of the Barbizon School, he often went in search of pastoral subjects in rural villages outside Paris, notably Grez-sur-Loing on the southern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. Having first visited this small village in 1888, he moved there in 1890 and produced many small-scale works with scenic motifs. Another product of the period, “Reading” (1891, Tokyo National Museum), for which he used a local girl Maria Billault as model, was selected for the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français, marking Kuroda’s debut in the French art world. In 1892, with an eye to the government-sponsored Salon, he embarked on a painting of young women relaxing in a field, under the working title of “Summer,” but then set it aside. During his last year in France, he produced “Chōshō” (Morning Toilette) (destroyed during the war), depicting a female nude standing before a mirror grooming herself. This was accepted for the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Returning from France in 1893, Kuroda went to Kyoto, where he painted the colorful “Maiko Girl” (Tokyo National Museum) and conceived the idea for the large work “Mukashi gatari” (Talk on Ancient Romance) (1898, destroyed during the war). The following year, he and Kume Keiichirō took over Yamamoto Hōsui’s art school, Seikōkan, reforming and renaming it Tenshin Dōjō. From November 1894 until February 1895, he observed the Sino-Japanese War as a correspondent for the Paris newspaper “Le Monde illustré.” Soon after coming back from the war, Kuroda decided to exhibit his “Morning Toilette” at the Fourth National Industrial Exposition held in Kyoto. Condemned in certain quarters as an affront to public order and morals, it sparked the so-called “nude painting controversy.” Kuroda had based his activities since returning from Europe in the Meiji Art Association (Meiji Bijutsukai), with its exclusive focus on Western-style art. The fresh, new style of painting he inherited from Collin was called “Violet School” (Murasaki-ha) to distinguish it from the Association’s older “Resin School” (Yani-ha) that favored dark brownish tones. Seeking to promote a free and egalitarian approach to art, without rules or officeholders, Kuroda, Kume, and others formed the group Hakubakai (the White Horse Society) in 1896. When, in the same year, the Tokyo Fine Arts School (present-day Tokyo University of the Art) established a new Yōga (Western-style painting) department, Kuroda was hired to teach. He rose to professor-in-charge in 1898. With the Hakubakai exhibitions, where students could show their works, complementing the art education provided by the college, Kuroda and those around him managed to establish a firm basis for the academic caste of modern Japanese Western-style painting. Despite the earlier uproar over “Morning Toilette,” for the Second Hakubakai Exhibition in 1897, Kuroda again boldly took up the subject of the nude in the triptych “Chi Kan Jō” (Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment) (Tokyo National Museum), a work that also showed how abstract concepts could be represented in painting. Having exhibited his studies and underdrawings for the Kyoto-inspired “Talk on Ancient Romance” at the First Exhibition in 1896, he finally presented the completed painting at the Third Exhibition in 1898. It is thought he set out to demonstrate with this Japanese work the kind of elaborate composition he had attempted back in Europe with the unfinished “Summer.” In 1900–1901, he traveled again to France, charged by Japan’s Ministry of Education with investigating the art scene and researching methods of teaching painting. During his stay, he exhibited pieces at the Paris Exposition, including “Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment” and “Lakeside” (1897, Tokyo National Museum). The former work earned a silver medal, the highest ever awarded to a Japanese Yōga painter at such an event. “Portrait of a Nude Woman” (1901, Seikado Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo), produced in Paris and exhibited at the Sixth Hakubakai Exhibition after his return, provoked the so-called “loincloth incident (koshimaki jiken)” in which the event organizers were ordered by the police to cover the subject’s lower body. Ever since the appearance of “Morning Toilette” at the Fourth National Industrial Exposition in 1895, Kuroda had been at the center of controversy over the rights and wrongs of the nude in art. He insisted that the depiction of the human body was an essential strand of Western-style painting and often turned to the press to educate the public about its importance. When the Ministry of Education held its first Fine Arts Exhibition (Bunten) in 1907—a project advocated by Kuroda along the lines of the official Salon in France—he was chosen to serve on the jury. In 1910, he became the first Yōga painter appointed as Imperial Artists. The following year, he dissolved Hakubakai on the basis that the Bunten had taken over its mission of mounting exhibitions. In 1913, he was nominated to be the inaugural president of the National Art Association (Kokumin Bijutsu Kyōkai) that he set up to safeguard the status of artists and serve as a mutual-aid society. The same year, he and the photographers Ogawa Kazumasa and Maruki Riyō were commissioned by the Bureau of Furnishing of the Ministry of the Imperial Household to photograph members of the Imperial Family, including the Emperor and Empress. In 1917, on the death of his adoptive father, he succeeded to the hereditary title of viscount. He was elected to the House of Peers in 1920. A member of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy from its establishment under the Minister of Education in 1919, he took over from Mori Ōgai, the first director, after he passed away in 1922. In December 1923, while on duty at the Ministry of the Imperial Household, Kuroda collapsed due to an attack of angina. Although his heart condition abated temporarily, he died seven months later on July 15. He was 57. Thirty years earlier, on returning from France, this pupil of Raphaël Collin had set out to establish academism as the dominant force in Japan’s Yōga circles. During the time Kuroda Seiki taught at the government-run Tokyo Fine Arts School, his influence was such that he became known as “maître [master].” He was instrumental in developing the country’s modern system of fine arts by, among other things, advocating for the establishment of the Bunten. As a painter, he continued to pursue the subject of the nude in the face of criticism, determined to lay down the roots of Western art in Japan. While the Western academic approach to painting can also be seen in “Talk on Ancient Romance,” this sort of large-scale composition, with multiple figures, was not a form in which he necessarily excelled. There are almost no other completed large-group portraits among his oeuvre. His talent was shown to best advantage in motifs adopted from his surroundings and rendered in a sketch-like manner with bright colors. As he approached his final years, he executed more and more of these small pieces, especially depictions of landscapes and flowers, distinguished by their spontaneous method. While such an approach was dictated somewhat by the many demands on his time––professor at the Tokyo Fine Arts School, Bunten juror, Imperial Artist, president of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy—to a large extent, it was a reflection of his own inclinations. Kuroda Seiki bequeathed a portion of his estate for the promotion of art in society. In 1930, the Art Research Institute (now the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties), affiliated with the Imperial Fine Arts Academy, was established to undertake academic research related to art and collect materials. In honor of the man whose bequest had helped to bring it into existence, the Institute established the Kuroda Memorial Room to exhibit works donated by his family and others, including “Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment” and “Lakeside.” The building as a whole came to be known as the Kuroda Memorial Hall. In 2007, the hall and its collection were transferred from the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties to the Tokyo National Museum. (Shioya Jun / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) (Published online: 2024-03-06)