柳原義達

Yanagihara Yoshitatsu was born on March 21, 1910 at Sakae-machi, Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture. He was the third child of Yanagihara Tatsujirō (達二郎), who ran an advertising business, and his wife Mine. An art enthusiast, Tatsujirō was keen for his son to pursue a career in Nihonga (Japanese-style painting), while also encouraging him into sports to improve his health, which was frail early on. At Hyogo Prefectural Third Kobe Middle School (today’s Nagata High School), the boy competed for the track-and-field club as a middle-distance runner, later becoming team captain, and from the second grade he began to study Nihonga under Fujimura Ryōichi. Having gained admission to Kyoto City Technical School of Painting (now Kyoto City University of Arts), advice from the artist Fukuda Heihachirō gave him a better appreciation of the difficulties of Nihonga, and he switched to the study of drawing at the Kansai Bijutsuin (Kansai Art Institute) with a view to taking up Western-style painting. However, after coming upon an illustration in a book (Note 1) of Emile Antoine Bourdelle’s equestrian statue “Monument to General Alvear” (1913–1923, Recoleta, Buenos Aires), he changed tack again and finally decided to become a sculptor. Yanagihara moved to Tokyo in 1930 and studied drawing at the Dōshūsha art school, before enrolling the following year in the modeling section of the sculpture department at Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo Fine Arts School, present-day Tokyo University of the Arts). Among the teachers there were leading sculptors of the time including Asakura Fumio, Kitamura Seibō, and Tatehata Taimu. But Yanagihara consciously kept his distance from the academic stream, instead taking instruction from Shimizu Takashi, an artist recently returned from France whom he admired, and absorbing the quoted words of Auguste Rodin. (Note 2) While at the school, his “Onna no kubi” 女の首 (Woman’s Head) (whereabouts unknown), a work praised by Shimizu Takashi, was selected for the 13th Teiten (Imperial Fine Arts Academy Exhibition) in 1932. From the following year, Yanagihara began to exhibit in the sculpture section of the exhibition of the Kokugakai, a group to which Shimizu belonged. He graduated from Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1936 and attended the postgraduate class for about two years. His progress was rapid: he received the Kokugakai’s Encouragement Prize in 1933, became a member of the group in 1937, and won the Kokugakai Prize in 1939 for “Yagi” 山羊 (Goat) (Mie Prefectural Art Museum). After leaving the group in 1939, he joined in founding the sculpture section of the Shin Seisaku-ha Kyōkai (Shinseisakuha Art Society) with Yamauchi Takeo, Hongō Shin, Satō Chūryō, Funakoshi Yasutake, and others and continued to exhibit with this society (renamed the Shin Seisaku Kyōkai in 1951) until his withdrawal in 1963. As he later self-critically reflected, his working method during this period was to reproduce the models in front of him by applying the methods and ideas of Auguste Rodin, Bourdelle, Aristide Maillol, Charles Despiau, and other artists that he had absorbed from books. Although his statues—human figures with large and bulky frames conveying a sense of mass—were apparently disparaged in some quarters for their warps and irregularities, contemporaries admired his distinctive expression, which lent the figures a presence unattainable had he taken a superficial approach. (Note 3) In 1937, Yanagihara married Kojima Misao, a pioneer of fashion illustration who achieved success early in her career. From now on she supported her husband’s work. In 1939, he built a house-cum-studio in Akatsutsumi, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, where he lived and created until his final days. During the Second World War, Yanagihara took a labor management job at a mine. Around 1944, he also collaborated on statue production at the patriotic artists’ collective “Gunju Seisan Bijutsu Suishintai” (Art Unit for Promoting the Munitions Industry). On answering a call-up notice to join the army’s Sakura Regiment in 1945, he learned of Japan’s surrender on August 15 while waiting on the platform for the train to take him to his unit. In 1946, most of what he had produced up until then was destroyed in a fire at the residence of the art collector to whom he and another sculptor, Sato Chūryō, had entrusted their pieces. As a result, the only pre-war works known to have survived (all Mie Prefectural Art Museum) are “Monyuman shisaku Nan hi kanshi no zō” モニュマン試作 楠妃諫子之像 (Study for the Monumental Statue “Wife and Son of Kusunoki Masashige”) of 1936, “Yagi” (Goat) of 1939, and “Yamamoto Kakuji san no kubi” 山本恪二さんの首 (Head of Yamamoto Kakuji) of 1940. At the 14th Shinseisakuha Art Society exhibition in 1950, Yanagihara presented “Inu no uta” 犬の唄 (Song of the Dog) (Mie Prefectural Art Museum), a statue of a woman making a dog-like, begging gesture with her hand. The artist took his inspiration from a painting by Edgar Degas, “At the Café-Concert: The Song of the Dog” (1876–1877, The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection), which an acquaintance, Uda Hiroshi, told him Degas had created to depict the spirit of resistance of his people after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Frustrated and angry with life in Occupied Japan, Yanagihara sought to express the complex feelings of a population wavering between deference and opposition to the conqueror. The nude woman’s posture incorporates the spiral movement favored by Rodin; the paw-like shaping of the right hand implies a gesture of flattery, while the withdrawal of the left arm behind her back hints at a secret resolve to resist. The subject of “Song of the Dog” later became an important leitmotif for Yanagihara, due in part to the influence of the art critic Hijikata Teiichi whom he first met in Italy a few years after the 1950 exhibition. He produced multiple works using the same subject and title from the 1960s through to the 1980s. When the exhibition “Salon de Mai in Tokyo” was held in 1951, introducing contemporary European art, Yanagihara was deeply impressed. Eventually he decided to go to France at his own expense to re-study sculpture. He traveled to Paris in December 1953 and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he studied under Emmanuel Auricoste and worked hard to “turn his two-dimensional eye into a three-dimensional, quantitative eye.” (Note 4) He visited museums throughout Europe and made the acquaintance of other active sculptors. As a result of these experiences, he began to transform his approach from one that simply reproduced a subject to one that sought to capture a broader impression of nature and life through the subject. Moreover, an increased awareness of different sculptural materials, as employed in the works of abstract sculptors, and encounters with Italian contemporaries and the French female sculptor Germaine Richier greatly contributed to his impending change of style. After returning to Japan in February 1957, Yanagihara began to create sculptures in which the figures were considerably deformed, pieces that also retained the rough texture of the clay. A series of works in this style from that year earned him the 1st Takamura Kotaro Prize in 1958, and thereafter he steadily built a reputation as a leading artist of figurative sculpture. In 1974, he won the 5th Nakahara Teijirō Prize for “Dōhyō, Hato” 道標・鳩 (Milestone, Pigeon) (1973, Mie Prefectural Art Museum). Yanagihara began the “Dōhyō” (Milestone) series in the mid-1960s, a major undertaking of his later career that evidenced his constant reflection on the direction he and his sculpture should take. Convinced that capturing the beauty of nature and life in constant motion was something only a sculptor could do, in the plastic arts, he used as models living crows seen at the zoo and pigeons kept in his studio. Always groping for answers, the works in the series were “milestones” helping him to create art without losing his way. From the 1960s, collaborating with Hijikata Teiichi, he participated in the planning of early open-air sculpture exhibitions, including the Ube City Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition (now UBE Biennale, Yamaguchi) and the Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition at Suma Rikyu Park, Kobe. From 1968, he taught at Nihon University College of Art, preparing the next generation of sculptors. Altogether, he played a significant role in the world of sculpture in Japan after the war. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1996. A fine writer, he actively produced articles giving his thoughts on sculpture for art magazines and other publications. He was also keenly involved in introducing French sculpture and contemporary Italian sculpture to postwar Japanese audiences. A compilation of key literature related to the artist, “Kodoku naru chōkoku: Yanagihara Yoshitatsu bijutsuron shū” (Loneliness of Sculpture: Collection of Art Essays by Yanagihara Yoshitatsu) (Chikumashobo, 1985), is an important reference not only for his works but postwar sculpture more generally. In 2002, he donated his major sculptures and drawings to the Mie Prefectural Art Museum, with which he had long been associated through exhibitions, and the Yanagihara Yoshitatsu Memorial Gallery opened at the museum the following year. He passed away on November 11, 2004 at a hospital in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo. After his death, various items that remained in his studio, including his library, plaster casts, and tools, were donated to the museum by his family. (Kōso Yūko / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) ( Published online: 2024-12-20) * The museums mentioned in this commentary as holding Yanagihara’s works also hold the plaster casts. Notes 1. “Sekai bijutsu zenshū, dai 33 kan: Ōshū kindai to Meiji Taishō jidai” (A complete guide of world art, vol. 33: Modern Europe and the Meiji and Taisho periods), Heibonsha, 1929. 2. As translated and edited by Takamura Kōtarō in “Rodan no kotoba” (Rodin’s Words), Oranda Shobō, 1916. 3. Yamamoto Kakuji, “Kubi no moderu ni natta koro” (The time I posed for the ‘Head’), Sansai (featuring Yanagihara Yoshitatsu, Ogisu Takanori, and Kokuryō Tsunerō), no. 428, 1983. 4. Yanagihara Yoshitatsu, “Hansei no rekishi” (History of reflection), Bijutsu Journal, no. 24, 1961, p. 23.