Lot 155: Kawabata Ryushi (1885-1966) Taisho/Showa Period

Taisho/Showa Period
Kakejiku, in ink and colour on silk, depicting two bamboo shoots, one shedding its outer layer of brown skin as it transforms into a young bamboo (wakatake), the skin drifting onto the ground like petals, signed Ryushi with seal, with double-wood storage boxes, the inner tomobako titled and signed by the artist Wakatake zu Ryushi jidai with seal Ryushi. 126.5cm x 50cm (49¾in x 19¾in). (3).

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Kawabata Ryushi was the pseudonym for Kawabata Shotaro. He was the most adventurous, varied and innovative of the second generation of Nihonga artists. He was born in Wakayama, but moved to Tokyo in 1895, and in 1904 began in earnest the study of Western-style painting (yoga) at both the Hakubakai and Taiheiyo Art Institutes.

The turning point in his career came when he visited the United States in 1913 to study Western-style paintings in more depth but instead, he became so deeply impressed by the Japanese paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (many of them collected by Ernest Fenellosa, the spiritual father of Nihonga itself) that he switched to the Nihonga genre on his return to Japan in 1914, exhibiting at the Inten in 1915. However, he soon disassociated himself from the Institute due to its ever increasing academism, and established his own Nihonga art circle, the Seiryusha in 1928, continuing to produce works of great vigour after World War II and, together with Yokoyama Taikan and Kawai Gyokudo, he came to be regarded as one of the 'Three Big Figures' in the field of Nihonga painting.

The artist's works are in the collection of the Tokyo National Modern Museum, the Adachi Museum, the Wakayama Municipal Museum, the Yamatane Museum as well as the Kawabata Ryushi Memorial Musuem in Tokyo.