Sekine Shōji

Self-Portrait, 1918

Sekine Shōji ( Japanese 関 根 正 二 ; born April 3, 1899 in Shirakawa ; died June 16, 1919 ) was a Japanese painter of the Yōga direction of the Taishō period .

life and work

Sekine Shōji grew up in a penniless craftsman family in Shirakawa, then came to Tōkyō with his father in 1908, where the two of them lived very cramped in a house in the Fukagawa district. After graduating from middle school in 1912, Shōji got work as an assistant in the design department of the Tōkyō printing company ( 東京 印刷 株式会社 , Tōkyō insatsu kabushiki kaisha ). It was there that Itō Shinsui and others interested him in painting.

Sekine left the company and went on a journey. He met the slightly older artist Kōno Tsūzei ( 河野 通 勢 ; 1895-1950) in Nagoya , who showed him his collection of Renaissance paintings. That seems to have been an enlightenment for Sekine. In any case, he began to paint incessantly afterwards, almost without training. In 1915 he exhibited at the 2nd Nika-kai ( 二 科 会 ) exhibition and did so in the following years. In 1918 he won the Chogyū Prize with the painting “The Suffering of Faith” ( 信仰 , Shinkō no kanashimi ). That put him in the spotlight, but poverty, exhaustion, and eventually tuberculosis put an end to his life at twenty. He did not even live as long as his talented contemporary Murayama Kaita , who also died early , leaving behind only about 20 pictures, but also many drawings.

Other well-known pictures are “Geschwister” ( 姉弟 , Shitei ; 1918) and “Drei Sterne” ( 三星 , Sansei ; 1919).

photos

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  Boy, 1917

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  Portrait of a woman, circa 1918

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  Mourning believers, 1918

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  Prayer of the Gods, 1918

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  Siblings, 1918

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  Three stars, 1919

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  Boy, 1919

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Fukushima Prefectural Art Museum
2. ↑ ^{a b} National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo .
3. ↑ Ōhara Art Museum .
4. ↑ Artizon Museum .

Remarks

1. ↑ Named after the author and literary critic Takayama Chogyū .
2. ↑ This picture was seen at the exhibition Japanese Painting in Western Style 1985 in the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne.

literature

• Tazawa, Yutaka: Sekine Shōji . In: Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Art. Kodansha International, 1981. ISBN 0-87011-488-3 .
• Laurance P. Roberts: Sekine Shōji . In: A Dictionary of Japanese Artists. Weatherhill, 1976. ISBN 0-8348-0113-2 .

Web links

Commons : Sekine Shoji  - 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 . Thus Sekine is the family name, Shōji the first name.