佐伯祐三

Born the second son of Saeki Yūtetsu, the fourteenth head priest of Fusazagi-san Kōtokuji, a Jōdo Shinshū Honganji sect temple in Nakatsu-mura, Nishinari-gun, Osaka city (present-day Nakatsu, Kita-ku, Osaka city). Yūzō entered Osaka Prefectural Kitano School (present-day Osaka Prefectural Kitano High School) and around his fourth year there, he began to study at the Western-style painting school of Akamatsu Rinsaku, then in Umeda. His father hoped he would become a doctor, but he always wanted to become a painter. After graduating from Kitano School, he went to Tokyo in September 1917. He studied and prepared for examinations at the Kawabata Painting School, Tokyo. In April 1918 he entered the preparatory course of the Western Painting Department of Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts, present-day Tokyo University of the Arts). During his first or second year of study there he received top marks in drawing contests and his oil painting classes. However, in the second half of his studies at Tokyo School of Fine Arts, in quick succession his elder cousin, father, and younger brother sickened and died, and he himself coughed up some blood. He missed some school as his health continued to be uncertain, and he was unable to concentrate on creating art as he worked towards his graduation. His personal life also changed dramatically with his marriage to Ikeda Yoneko, the daughter of a Ginza trading merchant. They had one daughter, Yachiko. After graduating from art school, the Great Kantō Earthquake somewhat delayed his plans, but he was determined to travel to France for study. He spent approximately two years in Paris beginning in January 1924. After his father died his older brother Yūshō had become head priest at Kōtokuji. Yūshō provided Yūzō with both emotional and financial support which allowed him to take his wife and daughter with him to Paris. There they led an economically untroubled life. On June 30, 1924, accompanied by Satomi Katsuzō, he visited Maurice de Vlaminck in Auvers-sur-Oise, and showed him “Nude” he had painted after arriving in France. Vlaminck exclaimed, “How academic!” and this proved a turning point in Saeki’s painting. Using the superior drawing and technical prowess that dated to his Tokyo Fine Arts School days, he had been effectively integrating the styles of Rembrandt, Renoir (via Nakamura Tsune), Cézanne, and others that interested him into his work. At last he began groping for his own distinctive expression. He learned how to express a sense of materiality and an object’s local color he had learned from Vlaminck and spent the latter half of 1924 in trial-and-error experiments. At the end of the year he moved into a studio in the Fifteenth arrondissement of Paris and saw the works of Utrillo and others. These events led him to gradually begin seeking out cityscape subject matter. He also personally discovered scenes he considered worth painting. After he began to directly confront his subjects and draw, he established his own painting style. He discovered a somewhat oppressed, working-class neighborhood and its buildings. His distinctive eye that was not drawn to the ordinarily beautiful characterizes all of his works. During his first stay in Paris he filled his compositions with straight-on views of these buildings and conveyed the feel of their walls through thickly applied matière, arriving at his own unrivaled expression. His “Cordonnerie” (Shoe Store)” (whereabouts unknown) was accepted by the Salon d'Automne in September. “Wall” (Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka), dated by inscription to October 5, 1925, is representative of this period. He began to pick up the pace of his painting as he found buyers for several of his works. However, his mother was worried about his health and regrettably he decided he must return to Japan. Saeki and his family departed Paris in January 1926, traveled across Italy, and set sail for Japan from Naples. After his return to Japan Saeki faced a completely different setting than the hard-surfaced streets of Paris and he struggled to find motifs for his works. Focusing on painting amid such circumstances means that most of his extant works of this period feature Shimo-Ochiai scenes near his Tokyo studio and moored ships in Osaka. The View of Shimo-Ochiai series reveal experiments with his own personal expressive style developed in Paris amid adroit use of compositional cutouts to convey the hilly, uneven terrain of that area. Telephone poles also appear. Linear elements are all the more striking in the Moored Ships series. Despite all of these works having the same composition, ships seen from straight side on, clearly the painter’s greatest interest was in the rope and mast lines that fill most of each composition. This newly acquired line expression then connected to the works from his second Paris period. View of Shimo-Ochiai and Moored Ships were some of the few subjects that Saeki found in Japan and he decided to return to Paris and create paintings of its walls and advertising posters. He only interacted with Japanese painting circles for a very short period during the approximately year and a half that he was in Japan. Immediately after his return to Japan in May 1926, Saeki joined his Paris friends Satomi Katsuzō, Maeta Kanji, Kojima Zentarō, and Kinoshita Takanori in forming the 1930–nen Kyōkai (1930 Association) with their first exhibition held that month. In September 1925, as a newly returned to Japan painter, he was allowed a special display of nineteen works in the Thirteenth Nikaten, and he received a Nika Prize. The following year he held his first solo show at Kinokuniya, Shinjuku, thus showing a succession of activities suited to a new artist. Yet he was not fully appreciated in Japan, and then given his return to France and his far too early death, it wasn’t until after his death that the art world next fully noticed him. In August 1927, again accompanied by his wife and daughter, he set out for France via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. He immediately set up his easel in the streets of Paris, capturing the scene on canvas through the force of his brush as is, all rendered in narrow, meandering brush strokes. Striking examples of such strokes can be found in the leafless trees of “Jardin du Luxembourg” (Tanabe City Museum of Art, Wakayama) and the poster lettering in “Gas Lamp and Advertisements” (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). These lines became the greatest expression of Saeki’s powerful individuality. His Cafe Restaurant series painted in late November show these linear strokes extending to motifs other than letters, dancing across the composition. Around this time Saeki was rapidly painting, and he is said to have finished several works in a single day. Quickly applied strokes are thus an important, characteristic element of his painting style, as he sped up the ground drying process, activating the lines by not blending them with the background pigments. Struggling, unsatisfied with most of the works he was able to create, his style gradually changed. After reaching the stage where his liberated lines, estranged from the material surface of the subjects depicted on the canvas, floated free in space, those lines disappeared from his compositions around the beginning of the year and he once again began searching for powerfully outlined subjects and firm compositions. Sensing that he had reached a dead-end in his painting, he went looking for new motifs. On February 10, 1928, he set out on a sketching trip to the village of Villiers-sur-Morin, about forty kilometers east of Paris. There he took as his subject the village’s simple church structure and used heavy black outlines as he sought powerful expression combined with compositional clarity. Saeki’s expressive methods and strict creative attitude greatly influenced his companions on the journey, Ogisu Takanori, Yamaguchi Takeo, Ōhashi Ryōkai, and Yokote Sadami. With a few days break in the middle, he stayed in Morin until early March. He produced around thirty works there, including “Brickkiln” (Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka). It was freezing cold in Morin and so painting in plein-air sapped his strength. Then he insisted on sketching out in the rain after his return to Paris. He ended up in bed sick. The people who chanced to visit him during this time became his models for rare examples of his figural work produced in the studio, such as “Postman” and “Russian Girl” (both 1928, Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka). Around this same time as a bit of his strength returned, he went outdoors to paint “Yellow Restaurant” 1928, Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka) and “Door” (1928, Tanabe City Museum of Art, Wakayama). This resulted in his vomiting blood at the end of March. He was unable to hold a brush after that. In June he escaped his apartment, got lost, and ended up in the Ville-Evrard Psychiatric Hospital, where he died on August 16th at the age of 30. Saeki did not establish a name for himself as a painter during his lifetime, and many today position him as representative of Japanese Fauvism, or in some cases, as an École de Paris painter. Yet, Saeki himself, with the exception of the time when he was groping for a painting style, did not show a tendency towards a particular painter or style. Rather he was immersed in creating his own works in solitude. There is probably value in verifying the originality of his works from a vantage point that steps outside the previously noted frameworks of his time. The characteristic line work of his second Paris period’s similarity with Asian calligraphy was in particular noted early. There also is value in comparing his work to that of the Abstract Expressionists active in postwar America. (Takayanagi Yukiko / Translated by Martha J. McClintock) (Published online: 2024-03-25)