Yorozu Tetsugoro
A Western-style painter from Iwate Prefecture. In "Nude Beauty," his graduation work at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he put forward expression through strong color and simple form, becoming a pioneer of avant-garde painting in Japan.
Yorozu Tetsugoro was born in 1885 (Meiji 18) in Tokazuki Village, Waga District, Iwate Prefecture (now Towa, Hanamaki). He went to Tokyo, studied at the Hakubakai institute and elsewhere, and in 1907 (Meiji 40) entered the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. While there he was strongly stimulated by paintings of van Gogh and Matisse introduced in magazines and elsewhere.
"Nude Beauty" (1912, Meiji 45; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Important Cultural Property), his graduation work, shows a woman reclining on grass in strong reds and greens with heavy outlines. He was among the first in Japan to take up the idea of Fauvism, in which color serves to express the painter's feeling rather than to describe form. He then took up Cubism, which assembles things from geometric planes, and in "Leaning Figure" (shown at the 1917, Taisho 6, Nika exhibition; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) he painted the figure as overlapping angular planes. For a time from about 1914 (Taisho 3) he returned to his hometown of Tsuchizawa and devoted himself to work.
In his later years he lived in Chigasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, and besides oils he also took to nanga (Japanese painting learned from Chinese literati painting). He died in Chigasaki in 1927 (Showa 2). In his hometown, Towa in Hanamaki, stands the Yorozu Tetsugoro Memorial Museum of Art. The Iwate Museum of Art in Morioka also holds a substantial group of Yorozu's works.
