小出楢重

Koide Narashige was born in the area of central Osaka then known as Nagahoribashi-suji, Minami-ku, on October 13, 1887. His father, who conducted the family apothecary “Tensuikō,” named for the original-brand ointment they sold, was also a devoted hobbyist: he studied painting under Watanabe Shōeki of the Shijō School, adopting Shōsen as his “gō” (art name), and also excelled at calligraphy. Narashige attended Daihō Ordinary Elementary School in the Shimanouchi area of Minami-ku and spent his early years surrounded by down-to-earth Osaka townspeople. The boy entered Osaka Prefectural Ichioka Middle School in 1901, the year it opened, and proved an outstanding art student. His surviving drawing books containing pencil sketches made during his higher elementary and middle school years testify to the fact. A frail youth, he suffered from a heart ailment, and this delayed his graduation by a year. It is said that during the final months of his schooling, with a view to someday becoming a Yōga (Western-style) painter, he studied watercolor and drawing with his art teacher. In April 1907, he moved to Tokyo and, fulfilling a long-held dream, took the entrance examination for the department of Western-style painting at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (present-day Tokyo University of the Art). He failed due to a lack of familiarity in drawing with charcoal. As the Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) department still had vacancies, he started there instead. Determined to carry through with his original plan, however, Koide studied parttime at the Hakubakai Yōga Kenkyūjo (Hakubakai Institute of Western-style Painting) and was eventually able to transfer to the Fine Art School’s Western-style painting department. His graduation works, when he finally completed the course five years later, were “Jigazō” 自画像 (Self-Portrait) (1913, Tokyo University of the Arts) and “Ginsen” 銀扇 (Silver Fan) (1914, Nakanoshima Museum of Art Osaka). He returned to Osaka, and from there often traveled to the neighboring prefecture of Nara to paint. In October 1914, the year he graduated, he submitted work to the Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition (Bunten) but was not accepted. The first piece of his selected for an open-entry exhibition was “Yama no Shoka” 山の初夏 (Early Summer in Mountains) (1915, Osaka Prefectural Ichioka High School), entered in the Yōga section of the Second Inten Exhibition (Japan Art Institute Exhibition) the following year. Koide was fortunate to be able to reside in the former home of the Nihonga painter Kitano Tsunetomi in Kajiyamachi, Minami-ku, close to his birthplace. He married a local girl, Shigeko, in 1917, and their first son Yasuhiro was born the following year. It was around this time that he began to reveal to the world his talent as a painter. At the house in Kajiyamachi, he produced “Geijutsuka no Kazoku” 芸術家の家族 (The Family of the Artist) (1919, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art) and then, incorporating additional motifs within a similar composition, “N no Kazoku” Nの家族 (Mr. N’s Family) (1919, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki). The latter work, entered in the Sixth Nika Exhibition on the recommendation of his friend the novelist Hirotsu Kazuo, won the Chogyū Prize, marking his arrival as a Yōga painter. The following year, five works by him were selected for the Seventh Nika Exhibition, including “Shōjo O-Ume no Zō” 少女お梅の像 (Portrait of a Girl Named O-Ume) (1920, Woodone Museum of Art, Hiroshima), which won the Nika Prize and led to his being nominated as a fellow of the artists’ group. It is clear that from early on in his career in Osaka he made solid first steps as a Yōga painter. Koide now took the opportunity, like many other Japanese artists at the time, to breathe the air of Europe for himself. He headed for France and would be away for eight months. This sojourn, however, did not follow the typical pattern of enrollment in a local art school and tutoring by a particular painter. His surviving notes on prospective works reveal that he conceived only eight of them while abroad.(1) It seems that he spent much of his time moving about—visiting the Louvre, for instance—although he did paint two oils at Cagnes-sur-Mer in southern France, where Pierre-Auguste Renoir had spent the final period of his life. After sending his last postcards to his wife and a friend from middle-school days Ishihama Juntarō (a future scholar of Oriental history), Koide set sail from Marseille in February 1922 and arrived at the port of Kobe on April 7. The following September, he exhibited four works at the Ninth Nika Exhibition, including “Mado” 窓 (Window) (1922, private collection), produced in France, and a reverse glass painting. He also became a frequent contributor to magazines: “Garasu-e ni Tsuite” (On Reverse Glass Painting) appeared in “Mizue” (no. 193) in 1921 and “Kokkyō Kenbutsu” (Visit to the Frontier) in “Mizue” (no. 215) in 1923; and another 82 essays were written between 1924 and 1931 for various magazines including the “Chūō Bijutsu,” “Atelier,” and “Shūkan Asahi.”(2) In each of the years from 1923 to 1929, Koide also served on the jury for the Nika Exhibitions in Tokyo––the same forum he chose to showcase his own attractive works, both oil paintings and reverse glass paintings. For the 10th Exhibition, in September 1923, he prepared five works, including “Still-Life with Hat” 帽子のある静物 (1923, Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City). On the first day of the month, vernissage day, as many artists were gathering, the devastating Great Kantō Earthquake struck. That night, Koide, Kuroda Jūtarō, and others slept outdoors in front of the venue in Ueno. The next day, he took refuge at the home of the painter Yamashita Shintarō, before returning to Osaka in the middle of the month. Influential though he was within the Nika Association in the Kansai region, Koide’s leadership position in art circles would chiefly come through his activities at the art institute Shinanobashi Yōga Kenkyūsho. Established in April 1924, it occupied premises in one of Osaka’s most modern buildings, a six-story block on a corner of the Shinanobashi intersection in the Nishi-ku district. Among the founding members, Koide, Kuroda Jūtarō, Nabei Katsuyuki, and Kunieda Kinzō had all become members of the Nika Association the year before. The institute contributed to the popularization of Yōga in the Kansai region by organizing summer seminars—a form of event soon taken up by others across Japan—and conducting open-entry exhibitions. Most notably, the institute’s own exhibition evolved into the Zen Kansai Yōga Tenrankai (All Kansai Yōga exhibition), first held in 1927, which brought together members of the various prewar Kansai Yōga circles in Osaka. Koide’s “Self-Portrait with a Hat” 帽子をかぶった自画像(1924, Artizon Museum, Tokyo), painted during the institute’s first year, portrays a confident image of himself as a Yōga painter, a leader in his field. In 1926, as the Taisho gave way to the Showa period, Koide established a modern, Western-style studio befitting a Yōga painter in Ashiya City, Hyogo Prefecture. Selecting a Western-style house, “without a zashiki [tatami room] to sit in,” and “wearing Western clothes at all costs,”(3) the painter resided within the orbit of so-called “Hanshinkan Modernism”, a reference to the area between Osaka, undergoing urban modernization, and fashionable Kobe, with its foreign settlements. (The second national census in 1925 revealed that Osaka had overtaken Tokyo as Japan’s most populous city.) Having a dedicated studio encouraged him to embark on still lifes and female nudes. In the latter category, the resulting masterpieces would earn him the nickname “Narashige of the female nude.” He also created illustrations for Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novel “Some Prefer Nettles,” published in 1929 (by Kaizōsha, Tokyo), and Naoki Sanjūgo’s essay “Osaka o Aruku” (Walking Osaka), serialized in the daily “Yūkan Osaka Shimbun” (10 installments) in December 1930. His other activities around this time included making and performing in 16 mm films and designing three photo albums. In mid-December 1930, Koide fell ill and was admitted to Osaka Imperial University Hospital. He was discharged the following month; then, on February 12, he suffered a heart attack, fell into a coma, and passed away the next day. His last work was “Kareki no Aru Fūkei” 枯木のある風景 (Scene with Felled Trees) (1930, Woodone Museum of Art). The painting, adopting a somewhat Surrealist style, shows the front yard on the south side of his house, with great logs resting in the foreground and overhead wires of the Hanshin Electric Railway visible beyond. The studio where he spent his last years—dismantled, relocated, and reassembled—can be seen at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History that opened in 1991. Complete with the sofas, tables, and other furnishings depicted in his paintings, it offers a valuable insight into his former creative surroundings. In 2003, the early painting “Mr. N’s Family” was designated an Important Cultural Property. (Yamano Hidetsugu / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) (Published online: 2024-03-06) Notes 1. The following article contains the full text of his 20 pages of “notes”: Koide Ryūtarō, “Sakuhinbikae no Memo [Planning notes on works],” in “Kikigaki Koide Narashige [Dictation Koide Narashige]” (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1981). 2. These texts are included in “Koide Narashige Zenbunshū [Complete writings by Koide Narashige],” ed. Takumi Hideo (Tokyo: Gogatsu-Shobō, 1981). 3. Koide Narashige, “Ashiya Fūkei [Views of Ashiya],” “Bi no Kuni,” vol. 4, no. 4, April 1928.