Yokoyama Taikan
The renewer of nihonga.
Yokoyama Taikan developed a modern Japanese painting without outlines, mōrōtai, and painted Mount Fuji hundreds of times.
Yokoyama Taikan was born in 1868 in Mito, north of Tokyo, the same year the Meiji period began. He belonged to the first intake of students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which opened in 1889. There he studied under Okakura Kakuzō, also known as Tenshin, who wanted to create a modern Japanese painting, and under the painter Hashimoto Gahō.
When Okakura was forced to leave the school in 1898, Taikan followed him and helped found the Nihon Bijutsuin, the Japan Art Institute. That same year he painted Kutsugen, a picture of the Chinese poet Qu Yuan. Together with his friend Hishida Shunsō he developed a technique without distinct outlines, in which colour was allowed to flow and create air and light. Critics disparagingly called the style mōrōtai, the hazy style, but it became a hallmark of the new nihonga, modern Japanese painting.
Taikan travelled to India in 1903 and to the United States and Europe in 1904–05, where he and Shunsō exhibited. He absorbed Western ideas of light and space but held on to Japanese materials: mineral pigments, ink, silk, paper and gold. One of his principal works is the long handscroll The Wheel of Life from 1923, which follows a drop of water from the mountains to the sea. It is in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and is designated an Important Cultural Property.
Mount Fuji became his great subject, and he reportedly painted it hundreds of times. In the 1930s and 1940s he was one of Japan's most celebrated artists, and he received the Order of Culture when it was instituted in 1937. He also put his art at the service of wartime nationalism and sold Fuji paintings to fund military aircraft. Since the war this has made him a controversial figure.
Taikan died in Tokyo in 1958. His home in Ueno is now a memorial museum, and the Adachi Museum of Art in Shimane holds a large collection of his works. He is counted among the most important figures in nihonga and as the one who showed that Japanese painting could be renewed without becoming Western.