The Mysterious Portraits of Reiko and the Revolutionary Painting of Kishida Ryūsei
At the Tokyo Station Gallery, from August 31 to October 20, the ninetieth anniversary of the death of Kishida Ryūsei (1891-1929) is celebrated with a rich retrospective. Represented by 150 paintings in this exhibition, Kishida was a fundamental figure in twentieth-century Japanese painting. Imagine an unsuspecting visitor in this gallery, discovering an artist who faced radical changes in style, tragic personal events, and historical upheavals. They would surely be astonished by the realism of some works and the surrealism of others, and would, like many before them, experience a sense of confusion upon seeing his portraits. They would end up wondering: why are his works so enigmatic and different? And what made him one of the most mysterious and studied painters of twentieth-century Japan?
Let’s follow our visitor through the gallery: they would see tree-lined landscapes, glimpses of paths, and self-portraits of the painter, similar to those of the Impressionists and late nineteenth-century European artists, like "The Road on the Hill," created in 1915. This was certainly a novelty in the history of Japanese art at the time. Continuing their exploration of Kishida’s work, they would also encounter various portraits of the same child, quite similar to one another, with sometimes minimal variations between one and the other. However, at this point, if our observer were attentive, they would notice that in some versions the child hints at a sweet smile, while in others her gaze is wild, distant, unnatural, and even anguished. The drawing is precise and realistic, but the details are surreal. Among the ink drawings, the visitor would find the same child, but more like a spirit, a doll, or a yōkai (spirits, goblins), a strange presence reminiscent of the ukiyo-e prints depicting legends of monsters and ghosts. Our visitor would be curious about this constant repetition and wonder who this child is and why her presence conveys discomfort and unease, as much as tenderness and familiarity.
Who Was Kishida Ryūsei?
Kishida was born in Ginza, today a luxury district in Tokyo, into a wealthy family with a cultured background. His artistic education began under the protective wing of Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924), one of the most important painters of the time and responsible for the dissemination of Western art in Japan. From him, Kishida learned an important lesson: it is not necessary to paint exclusively “in the Japanese style” or “in the Western style”; there is great value in capturing the best of both. During his career, he became involved in various associations and movements, attracting both friendships and rivalries in equal measure. Due to the uniqueness of his style, he faced criticism and suspicion, and his precarious health and various misfortunes further hindered his career. The great Kanto earthquake (1923) forced him to move to Kyoto and then to Kamakura. Nonetheless, he managed to establish himself as an art critic and theorist, as well as an artist. In 1916, three years after the birth of his daughter, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Over time, he developed alcoholism, which led to renal failure, and he died shortly after returning from the only overseas trip he ever made: to Manchuria in 1929. This summary of Kishida’s life might lead one to believe that his existence mirrors the troubled and tormented life typical of artists. However, to understand the deepest feelings and the truth behind his art and philosophy, we must consider the climate in which he worked and what drove him to challenge his predecessors, both European and Japanese. After exploring Impressionism and Western style, in the second part of his career he returned to Chinese and Japanese tradition and developed a completely new realism, inspired by yōkai and yūrei (ghosts). What caused this metamorphosis? And why can’t we talk about Kishida without mentioning his daughter, Reiko?
The Series of Portraits of Reiko
The character portrayed in all these variations is Kishida's daughter, Reiko. Every year from 1914 to 1929, on his daughter's birthday, Kishida would create a portrait of her. To be precise, the first painting in the series is not actually a portrait of Reiko; it is a painting of Kishida's wife, Shigeru, pregnant, depicted from the neck down, as if the main subject was the baby rather than the mother. These snapshots were not only a celebration of an anniversary: they allowed Reiko's father to fix an image, to challenge the passage of time. As if the little girl were in constant change and the artist sought to capture what remained constant, her essence. Almost always a bust from three-quarters, almost always dressed in red, almost always a realistic image of a child in a kimono. When the shot widens, Reiko is usually seated in the Japanese style, more rarely standing. However, some elements change constantly: Reiko might be holding a drum, a toy, an apple. In one version, she is smiling; in another, she looks troubled. But the variations on the theme don’t stop there. One of the most explicit transformations depicts the child as the Chinese poet Hanshan (寒山), in the style of 13th-14th century ink painting. In another painting, we see two nearly identical Reikos, one with more human features, who arranges the hair of the other, which resembles a puppet. Other representations are more fairy-tale-like and playful, showing her playing with a puppy, admiring flowers, or serving tea from a richly decorated teapot, often with an expression very distant from the realistic, sweet ones of the earlier works.
Yōkai and Yūrei
Throughout Japanese history, spirits and ghosts, yōkai and yūrei, have always appeared in legends, ukiyo-e prints, and illustrations in horror storybooks, much loved by the public. In the twentieth century, several Japanese intellectuals began to question the beliefs and superstitions passed down for centuries, reevaluating their meaning and historicity. Inoue Enryō (1858-1919), a prominent Buddhist philosopher, published several essays on the topic of yōkai, influenced by Western logic and the scientific method: according to his thinking, they are physical manifestations of discomfort, catastrophes, earthquakes, and fires, taking on almost animal-like and human-like forms in the collective imagination, allowing people to give a body and a face to painful and abstract phenomena. Art, like yōkai, serves to make us forget earthly pains and distractions and bring us closer to Buddhist enlightenment. Moreover, both are cathartic and give us the opportunity to process traumas and unpleasant events: let us remember that our artist experienced the 1923 earthquake. This philosophy strongly influenced Kishida, who, after illustrating the book Ghost Stories (1924), also explored the universe of yōkai in his series of Reiko, where they become part of human history, interact with, and transform into human beings, like his daughter. The painter plays with metamorphosis: Reiko is caught in a continuous transfiguration, dissolving and reappearing, altered, changed, like a ghost, and becomes a symbol of change, transformation. The symbolism does not end there: the portrait of the two Reikos mentioned earlier, for example, also represents Japan at the time, divided between modernity and Western sciences, and tradition and native philosophy. His country is undergoing an epochal transition while he paints. The artist argues that yūrei, the incorporeal and transparent ghosts familiar to us Westerners, respond to a "need for mystery" and represent an "instinctive terror": this is why they can be found in various moments of world art. Kishida brings ghosts and the supernatural subtly and unexpectedly into the everyday: this is why many critics have defined his work as “magical realism.” He drew his conclusions after becoming passionate about the study of early ukiyo-e prints, such as those by Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694), in which famous heroes fight spirits and demons. It’s as if an attractive force pushed him to return to the artistic origins of his country.
The Influence of the West and the Call of Tradition
For almost a century, critics and art historians have studied the series of Reiko and the motivations behind the various stylistic choices. An artist active during the Taishō (1912-1926) and early Shōwa (1926-1989) periods, Kishida did not passively imitate the recently introduced Western style in Japan, as some of his contemporaries did. Instead, he developed a completely personal style, shaped by his fascination with Flemish painters, Michelangelo, Delacroix, Rembrandt, and Rodin, as well as his love for ancient Japanese culture seen in a contemporary light. At the end of the nineteenth century, all Western philosophy, science, and art history entered Japan simultaneously through various channels: Kishida thus discovers Christianity, to which he converts, the Impressionists, Leonardo’s works, and Enlightenment discoveries all at once. After his conversion, the painter develops an approach to artistic creation heavily influenced by monotheistic religion, in which the painter is a potter, an artisan who molds the material of reality as they see fit: a more Western view of art. In the 1910s and 1920s, Japanese painters were mostly divided into two categories, adhering to yōga (Western-style painting) or nihonga (Japanese-style painting). The yōga school revived the Western painting tradition, using chiaroscuro, shading, perspective, and other European techniques, employing oil paints, which were completely new in Japan. In response to this apparent obsession with Western styles, there was the nihonga movement, more closely aligned with traditional art, blending themes and techniques from the Kanō and Rinpa schools of the 15th and 16th centuries. Kishida dabbled in both styles, ultimately creating a highly personal alternative, influenced equally by Van Gogh and Chinese painters of the Song dynasty: seemingly so distant, these contributions helped him realize the differences and unexpected similarities between the two traditions. By studying European painters from black-and-white photographs of their works, Kishida discovers a parallel world of yōkai in Western art. Monsters and fantastic characters populate many paintings of one of his favorites, Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The distorted faces and monsters of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) remind us of some of Reiko’s smiles. The more recent experiences of the Impressionists and Van Gogh leave a deep mark on his technique. His self-portraits were a novelty for the Japanese public: they showed deep introspection and revealed the psychology of the subject in a unique way. Even when he depicts Reiko, the artist wants us to focus on her inner world, the spirit that remains unchanged through the various transformations. However, Kishida quickly realizes that Western realism is not the only possible approach, and that there are prominent examples of realism in Japanese art. Driven by his passion for traditional art, he takes up ink painting, which allows him to evoke highly detailed figures with just a few strokes. Thanks in part to the pull of nihonga style, Kishida returns to a kind of Oriental realism, with a centuries-old history, where what is real are the sensations and emotions conveyed.
Kishida attempts to explore human nature, the concept of change, and primal fears in his portraits of his daughter. Reiko is not just a bizarre hybrid: she is the symbol of humanity’s fears and how we try to overcome them; she is the testimony of the revolution in thought and Japanese art at the beginning of the last century, but also the story of a universal and timeless narrative. For this reason, Kishida will always be celebrated as one of the greatest Japanese painters of the 1920s, in retrospectives such as the one at the Station Gallery. If our visitor knew the origins of his variations and eccentricities, they might appreciate the artist’s experimentation even more sincerely, and perhaps be moved by the portraits of Reiko.
Sources
- Paper: Les Fleurs artificielles - Les Portraits de Reiko de Kishida Ryūsei, ou comment les fantômes sont à l'œuvre
- Paper: Que peut-il sortir de bon de Nazareth ? Introduction à l'œuvre de Kishida Ryūsei
- Masaaki Iseki, La pittura giapponese dal 1800 al 2000, pp. 98-118