Aoki Shigeru

Aoki Shigeru

Palace under the sea

Harvest of the Sea (excerpt)

Aoki Shigeru ( Japanese 青木 繁 ; * 1882 in Kurume , Kyushu ; † 1911 in Fukuoka , Kyushu) was a Japanese painter.

biography

Aoki Shigeru was very early interested in western modern painting and the western-influenced art direction yoga that developed from it . He left his family at 17 and went to Tokyo to study painting. He first worked with Koyama Shōtarō , a student of the Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi , who taught at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō (Technical Art School Tokyo), and then went to Kuroda Seiki at the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō , the Tokyo Art School, today Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music . Aoki completed his training around 1904 after he was able to exhibit his pictures together with the Hakubakai artist group around Kuroda, which was founded in 1896 as a student .

In addition to painting, Aoki concentrated on literature and was particularly interested in Japanese, Indian and European-Christian mythology. Over these preferences he came to a romantic-influenced style of painting and some of his most famous paintings represented history pictures with mythological content. These included Tenpyō Era and Harvest of the Sea , both of which were created in 1904 and are now in the Artizon Museum in Tokyo. Also Ōnamuchi no Mikoto (1905) and under the Sea Palace (1907) can be seen in this museum and are based on mythological content from the Kojiki . Aoki was also able to paint some book illustrations for his friend, poet Kanbara Ariake , and he also regularly painted sea and coastal landscapes on the coast north of Tokyo.

Aoki Shigeru left Tokyo and returned to Kyushu, where he largely isolated himself from social life. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1911 at the age of 29 and his pictures were forgotten until after World War II .

Remarks

1. ↑ This picture was shown at the exhibition Japanese Painting in Western Style 1985 in the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne.

literature

• J. Thomas Rimer: Aoki Shigeru , Grove Art Online , Oxford University Press 2007; Access required.
• Japan Foundation (Ed.): Japanese Painting in the Western Style, 19th and 20th Centuries. Exhibition catalog, Cologne, 1985.

Web links

Commons : Aoki Shigeru  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Aoki is the family name, Shigeru the first name.