Migishi Kotaro
A Sapporo-born Western-style painter who represented early Showa modernism. In a short life of 31 years he changed styles one after another, and in his last years he left dreamlike works of butterflies and shells.
Migishi Kotaro was born in Sapporo in 1903 and in 1921, the year he graduated from Sapporo Daiichi Middle School, went to Tokyo to become a painter. He was accepted to the Shunyokai exhibition for the first time in 1923 and won the Shunyokai Prize the next year. That same year he married Yoshida Setsuko (Migishi Setsuko), later a well-known Western-style painter.
His early style was naive and recalled Henri Rousseau, but after passing through the influence of Kishida Ryusei he moved on to exotic works based on a trip to China and to works on the theme of clowns. In 1930 he joined the founding of the Independent Art Association as its youngest member. From around 1932 he experimented with abstraction and with avant-garde expression built from line alone.
In 1934 he published a dreamlike series of butterflies and shells, but in July of that year he collapsed in Nagoya, where he had stopped on the way home from a trip, and died at 31. The Hokkaido Migishi Kotaro Museum of Art in Sapporo was opened around works donated by his family and centers on his art. He was a poet as well as a painter, and left prose poems such as "Butterflies and Shells." The speed of his stylistic changes and his dry, lyrical use of color still draw many people today.
