NAKAJIMA Kiyoshi Retrospective

Overview

In the turbulent years of Taisho and Showa, the cosmopolitan, progressive city of Yokohama produced an unconventional "Nihonga" painter, NAKAJIMA Kiyoshi, who was always open to new possibilities and never stopped experimenting.

Have you heard of NAKAJIMA Kiyoshi? His name is not familiar to everyone and even the many people who know of him have difficulty associating him with just one kind of painting. Kiyoshi was a highly talented and immensely curious artist who was continually exploring new styles and techniques. It is difficult to believe that the kaleidoscopic artistic world he created could have been produced by one man. It is not surprising that he gained a reputation as a protean painter.

Kiyoshi developed a great love and knowledge of Buddhist art as a young man living in Kyoto and obtained superb painting skills through a study of traditional painting at the "Angado" painting school in Tokyo. Throughout his career, he continued to surprise his audience by abrupt changes of style as he explored new possibilities of painting with traditional Japanese mediums, beginning with a fresh approach to traditional bird-and-flower motifs, switching to boldly deformed figures, and finally engaging with geometrical abstraction. His paintings are characterized by great freedom and openness, often enhanced by irony and humor. A viewer who hopes to construct a unified image of the artist may be bewildered by their incredible diversity and have the unsettling feeling of being pulled into an endless artistic labyrinth.

This exhibition follows Kiyoshi’s entire career from youth to old age, exploring his changing interests in motifs and methods. It introduces studies and sketches in addition to finished works to provide a better understanding of his unique way of developing pictorial compositions. The stylistic shifts in Kiyoshi’s paintings reflect the times in which he lived, the eras of Taisho (1912-1926) and Showa (1926-1989), which saw dramatic transformations in people’s lives and values. While following the evolution of this artist chronologically, the exhibition will also highlight the ideas and esthetic principles that he adhered to faithfully throughout his life in spite of the seemingly drastic changes in his art.

※Some of the works are shown for a limited period. Please contact the museum for details.