藤島武二

Fujishima Takeji was born in 1867, on the eve of the Meiji Restoration, in Ikenoue-cho (located in what is now Kagoshima City), where the largest Edo-era temple in southern Kyushu, Gyokuryūzan-Fukushōji (abolished in 1869), was located. He was the third son of Fujishima Masakata, a clansman of the Satsuma domain. According to the account the painter gave to his disciples, the Fujishimas had moved from the Echizen region (in today’s Fukui Prefecture) to serve as temple-samurai of this Sōtō-sect temple when it was built in the 14th century. Takeji took over as head of the family in his early teens, his two elder brothers having died from injuries sustained during the Seinan War (1877). While studying Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Hirayama Tōgaku, a Shijō School painter in Kagoshima, he revealed an early talent, and in 1884, at the age of 17, he entered the Second Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai (National Painting Competition) in Tokyo. Aspiring to be a Yōga (Western-style painting) artist, he moved to the capital soon after. In 1885, he became a pupil of the Nihonga artist Kawabata Gyokushō, taking the pseudonym Gyokudō, and also started to learn French. (Years later, Fujishima served as an instructor in the department of Western-style painting at Kawabata Gagakkō [Kawabata Painting School] founded by his master.) In parallel with his studies under Kawabata, Fujishima began to practice Yōga in earnest, taking lessons from Soyama Sachihiko and then Nakamaru Seijūrō, Matsuoka Hisashi, and Yamamoto Hōsui. All four painters had studied abroad during the early phase of Japanese interest in Yōga, so Fujishima received the most orthodox education in oil painting available at the time. In May 1891, he exhibited “Muzan” (Cruelty) at the Third Spring Exhibition of the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Art Association). This debut piece (no longer extant), which apparently depicted two girls swatting butterflies with branches, was actually shown under the name of his friend Shirataki Ikunosuke. The novelist Mori Ōgai took notice of the work and praised it highly in a newspaper review. The following year, he produced “Sakuragari” (Cherry Blossom Hunt) (the original has not survived, but a study is held by the Kagoshima City Museum of Art), a depiction of ladies-in-waiting of the Genroku period (1688–1704) attending a cherry-blossom viewing. Although his direction as a painter was not yet fixed, the works foreshadowed his preference later on for the motifs of flowers, butterflies, and women. About now, he began a correspondence with the painter Kuroda Seiki, who was then in Paris, and saw the works the artist sent back to his home in Tokyo. In July 1895, at the age of 26, Fujishima was sent as an assistant teacher to Mie Prefectural Ordinary Middle School (now Tsu Senior High School) in Tsu City. While the appointment enabled him to meet his financial obligations as head of the family, it did not mean abandoning the path of a painter. From Tsu, he often participated in exhibitions of the Meiji Art Association. On his return from Paris in 1893, Kuroda Seiki’s painterly expression of luminous outdoor light brought a breath of fresh air to the local Yōga scene. After being put in charge of the new department of Western-style painting at Tokyo Fine Arts School (founded in 1889; now Tokyo University of the Arts) in the summer of 1896, Kuroda appointed Fujishima as an assistant professor. True enough, both were from Kagoshima, the sons of Satsuma clansmen, and almost the same age, but the choice of someone from faraway Tsu over the many other painters nearer at hand speaks volumes for Kuroda’s opinion of his colleague. During the many years he taught at the school, prior to his death in 1943, Fujishima made clear how much he benefited from the careful guidance of his mentor. This tends to support the belief that Kuroda set out to introduce a more up-to-date approach to artistic expression than Fujishima, for one, had known from painters of the previous generation. Indeed, at the core of Kuroda’s project was a wish to establish in Japan a form of national academism comparable to the system entrenched in France by the late 19th century, based on the École des Beaux-Arts (professional education) and the Salon (exhibitions open to all comers). Even though Fujishima would not venture far outside this system, he nevertheless endeavored to establish and develop his own art—occasionally willing to stray from the middle ground as a “mild dissenter.” The society of Yōga artists known as Hakubakai (White Horse Society) was founded in 1896 (the same year the Tokyo Fine Arts School’s Western-style painting department started) and continued under Kuroda’s leadership until 1911. The Hakubakai exhibitions were Fujishima’s main venue for presenting works during the first half of his painting career. Around 1900, however, he moved away from the outdoor light expression he had learned from Kuroda and set out to create paintings that spoke directly to the hearts of his contemporaries. This style is referred to as Meiji Romanticism, because of its links to the era’s new literary trends represented, for example, by the poet Yosano Akiko and the literary magazine “Myōjō.” Shown at the Seventh Hakubakai Exhibition in 1902, Fujishima’s “Reminiscence of the Tempyo Era” (Artizon Museum, Tokyo) is an ambitious work which expresses a longing for the 8th-century Nara period, what could perhaps be considered Japan’s equivalent to classical antiquity. A product of elaborate historical research, the bold adaptation also draws on ancient Greek and late 19th-century French art. Notably, by setting out to share a particular emotion with the viewer—in this case, the longing for antiquity—it exhibits a characteristic typical of turn-of-the-century romanticism. Demonstrating a further sharpening of the artist’s aesthetic orientation, “Chō” (Butterflies) (private collection), produced two years later, shows a head-and-shoulder image of a woman in profile surrounded by butterflies and kissing a flower she holds in her hand. In the autumn of 1905, at the age of 38, Fujishima was sent to Europe to study by the Ministry of Education, and was away for four years. His first experience of the West thus came later in life than it did for many of his colleagues and students—a source of frustration as earlier opportunities had passed him by. However, if we consider the way his career developed and the general state of the art world, the timing possibly could not have been better. Although he was still at sea on his way to Paris when Henri Matisse and the other “fauves [wild beasts]” roared at the Salon d’Automne, and so missed that particular sensation, he was able to attend both the Paul Gauguin retrospective held at the same venue the following year and the exhibition honoring the recently deceased Paul Cézanne a year later. Fujishima then moved to Rome, where he associated with Italian painters including Giacomo Balla, soon to become a key proponent of Futurism. He was thus able to experience first-hand the new waves of art stirring in the wake of the Impressionist movement. While studying under Fernand Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Carolus Duran at the French Academy in Rome, he could also take stock of European academism at that point in time. One notices how Fujishima’s dignified yet lively brushwork in his landscapes and portraits fully exploits the viscosity of the oil paints. His Western exposure had a twofold significance: first, he could gain comparative perspectives on the dichotomic aspects of Western art, present and past, French and Italian; and, secondly, he could navigate his way toward a particular form of expression including by acquiring the necessary oil-painting techniques to support his art. In January 1911, after completing four years of study, two each in Paris and Rome, Fujishima returned to Japan and was promoted to a professorship at Tokyo Fine Arts School. However, exploiting what he had learned in the West, now he was back in Japan, meant turning his gaze toward the East. For two months, from November 1913, he toured Korea. A comment he made at the time, that he found commonalities there with Italy in terms of geography, climate, and the prosperity of their ancient arts, displayed a marked Orientalist view from a Japanese perspective. The respective histories of Korea and Japan, in his mind, were comparable to those of Italy and France, the former an ancient power and birthplace of the Renaissance and the latter the new leading force in modern art. In other words, he transposed the Western view of the East, as he had observed it in the West, onto the Japanese view of Korea. Inevitably, China would soon be drawn into this Orientalist prism. In the mid-1920s, Fujishima worked on a series of female portraits in profile, beginning with “Orientalism” (1924, Artizon Museum), in which the subject, always a Japanese woman, was arranged at his Tokyo studio posing in Chinese dress. While borrowing ideas from the typical Italian Renaissance portrait, the artist superimposed not only the intellectual gaze but also the art style of the West onto the East, as it were. His interest in Chinese culture––shared by the Japanese literary fraternity in the 1910s and 1920s––resulted in a painterly approach melding East and West. Two commissions related to Emperor Hirohito, which he received at the end of the 1920s, marked a further turning point in his career. A mural panel depicting the view at Cape Shionomisaki in Wakayama was completed and delivered in late 1931 for the Kaintei teahouse in the Fukiage Imperial Garden. The other was his 1928 commission for a painting to decorate the emperor’s study. Given a free hand, he chose the subject he considered most auspicious for a new monarch: “sunrise.” “Kyokujitsu Rikugō o Terasu” (The Rising Sun Shines Across the Cosmos) (The Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shozokan, Tokyo), set in the Manchurian desert and given an elemental, almost abstract, treatment, was delivered a decade later in December 1938. Before settling on his final approach, the painter had searched throughout Japan and its satellite territories for suitable horizon or mountain-cresting sunrise views. The many landscapes that resulted from his research––works with and without sunrises––form a rich legacy from the last decade of his career. The most outstanding examples depict the Port of Kobe, Ōarai Beach, Yashima, Cape Daiō, the Usui Pass, and Mount Niitaka (Yu Shan). In the case of “Highly Cultivated Hills” (1937, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki), one of the “non-sunrise” paintings, the use of fluid brushwork and bold color planes to capture the mass of the cultivated land and natural forest covering a mountainside in spring lends the work a particular appeal. When Fujishima returned to Japan, back in 1911, he immediately started to use the word “simplicité” to describe his painting philosophy and kept using it from then on. His aim, he said, was to eliminate anything unnecessary and apply to the picture plane only what he felt compelled to paint. At the heart of this creative principle were the Zen and Taoist philosophies to which he constantly referred throughout his life, from early on in Kagoshima until his last days––an orientation that survived his Western exposure. With his feet firmly planted in Japanese and other Asian cultures, he intensely absorbed what he considered necessary from Western art, and nothing more, while concentrating on developing the skills necessary to creatively exploit the characteristics of oil paints. (Kaizuka Tsuyoshi / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) (Published online: 2024-03-08)