Wada Sanzo

Sanzo Wada ( Jap. 和田三造 * 3. March 1883 in Ikuno , District Asago , Hyogo Prefecture ; † 22. August 1967 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese painter and costume designer , who at the Oscar ceremony in 1955 an Oscar for Best Costume Design in won a color film .

Life

Poster of the movie The Gate of Hell (1953)

Wada Sanzō attended the Daimyō Elementary School in Fukuoka and then in 1897 the Shūyūkan Middle School of Fukuoka Prefecture. After graduating from school, he began studying painting in 1899 with the well-known painter Kuroda Seiki , who introduced western elements to Japanese art at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and thus shaped the school of western painting ( Yōga ). In 1901 he moved to the Tokyo Art Academy (today Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku ), where he met artists like Aoki Shigeru . In 1902 he settled first on the Pacific island of Hachijō-jima and then on Izu-Ōshima , where he began with his painting cycle Südwind .

After returning to Tokyo in 1904, he began to study at the local school of fine arts. In 1907, with funding from the Ministry of Education, he exhibited his pictures publicly for the first time and received several prizes for them. During this time he was in contact with the ultra-nationalist organization Gen'yōsha, which was active in the Japanese Empire . At the invitation of the French Ministry of Education, he went on an educational trip to Europe in 1909 , where he dealt with handicrafts, design and early film . He later studied oriental art in Burma and India between 1914 and 1915 .

In the following years he organized exhibitions for the Academy of the Arts and in the early 1920s also studied color theory . In addition, in 1923 he studied the Nihonga painting style introduced by the orientalist Ernest Francisco Fenollosa and the art historian Okakura Kakuzō around 1890 , before he created large wall paintings in the official residence of the Governor General in Korea in 1924 . In 1927 he became a member of the Academy of Arts for his services to Japanese painting .

Also in 1927 he advocated the introduction of standards by founding the Society for the Standardization of Colors. He published the results of his research on color theory in the book In the Light of Total Color (1931) and in 1932 took over a professorship for design at the Tokyo Art Academy, where he taught until 1944. After the Japanese Institute for Color Research was reorganized as the Society for Color Standardization in 1945, he became its president and in this capacity introduced the first Japanese color standard card in 1951.

In 1953 he was instrumental in the production of the film production company Daiei film color film produced The Gates of Hell ( Jigokumon ) of Teinosuke Kinugasa with Machiko Kyo , Kazuo Hasegawa and Isao Yamagata in the lead roles as a costume designer and color consultant and won this at the Academy Awards 1955 Oscar for the best costume design.

In the last years of his life he also dealt with sumi-e , the black and white Japanese ink painting and was named a person of special cultural merit in 1958.

His most famous works, which include paintings such as Hope Ōshima (1907), To the South (1907), Too Much (1933), Self-Massage (1936), Possible Rain on the Sumida River (1937), Koa Mandala (1940) and Poppy (1960 ) are on display at the National Museum of Modern Art , the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, and the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

Awards

• 1955 : Oscar for best costume design

Web links

• Sanzo Wada in the Internet Movie Database (English)