Kuroda Seiki

Kuroda Seiki ( Japanese 黒田清輝 ; born August 9, 1866 in Kagoshima ; died July 15, 1924 ) was a Japanese painter of the Yōga style and politician.

Life

Kuroda was born the son of a samurai in Kagoshima , then grew up as an adopted son with his uncle, Vice Count Kuroda Kiyotsuna (1830-1917), in Tokyo. As early as 1878 he began with pencil drawings and watercolors under the guidance of Takahashi Yuichi . He learned English and also attended the foreign language school in Tokyo. From 1884 he went to France with the aim of studying law. In Paris, however, he met Yamamoto Hōsui and other Japanese painters and in 1886 decided to switch to painting. Raphaël Collin became his teacher .

Act

In 1893, after nine years back in Japan, he developed a wide-ranging activity as an art teacher. Together with Kume Keiichirō , whom he knew from Paris times, he opened the School for Western Painting Tenshin dōjō . A mixture of impressionist and open-air painting was taught there. In 1896 he founded the Hakuba-kai as a kind of secession alongside the already existing, western-oriented Meiji bijutsu -kai . The society headed by Kuroda advocated painting of the spontaneous impression as a replacement for the academic painting that had been taught up until then. In 1897 he was appointed as a teacher at the Tōykō bijutsu gakkō (predecessor of today's Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku ) and appointed professor in 1898. In 1909 he was chosen as the first painter of the yoga direction as Teishitsu gikei-in. In 1922 he succeeded Mori Ōgai as the second president of the Academy of Fine Arts .

When his adoptive father died in 1917, he became a vice count. In 1920 he was elected to the (aristocratic) upper house of parliament.

The Japanese Post honored Kuroda with postage stamps. Especially his painting Maiko is revered as an icon of painting from the Meiji period. In the Kuroda Memorial Hall (Tōkyō, Ueno Park) belonging to the National Research Institute for Cultural Goods Tokyo , pictures and bequests are shown.

"Reader" (1882)
"In the kitchen" (1892)
"Maiko" (1893)
"At the lake shore" (1897)
"Raspberries" (1912)

Remarks

↑ The characters of his first name are commonly read Kiyoteru .

↑ The Hakuba-kai, literally White Horse Society , was also called the Purple Society because of the emphasis on open-air painting .

↑ An institution founded in 1890, which no longer exists in this form in the meantime, whose members were under the special protection of the Tennō.

↑ The painting "Maiko" (Geisha apprentice) was shown at the exhibition Japanese Painting in Western Style 1985 in the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne.

literature

Nihon no bijtsu No. 350 (1995): Yōga of the Meiji period - painters who went to Europe during the Meiji period . (Japanese)
Japan Foundation (Ed.): Japanese Painting in the Western Style, 19th and 20th Centuries. Exhibition catalog, Cologne, 1985.
Kawakita, M .: Modern Currents in Japanese Art . Weatherhill / Heibonsha, 1974.

Web links

Commons : Kuroda Seiki - collection of images, videos and audio files

personal data
SURNAME	Kuroda, Seiki
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	黒田清輝 (Japanese); Takehisa, Shintarō (real name); 黒田新太郎 (real name, Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Japanese painter
DATE OF BIRTH	August 9, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH	Kagoshima
DATE OF DEATH	July 15, 1924

[1] The characters of his first name are commonly read Kiyoteru .

[2] The Hakuba-kai, literally White Horse Society , was also called the Purple Society because of the emphasis on open-air painting .

[3] An institution founded in 1890, which no longer exists in this form in the meantime, whose members were under the special protection of the Tennō.

[4] The painting "Maiko" (Geisha apprentice) was shown at the exhibition Japanese Painting in Western Style 1985 in the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne.