Kajiwara Hisako (1896-1988)
Dantō (Mild Winter), mid-1950s
Signed: Hisako
Sealed: Hisako
Framed panel: ink and color on silk
18 x 20 inches (45.7 x 50.8 cm)
Kajiwara Hisako painted Dantō during the mid-1950s. By then, a decade after the war, Japan was beginning to emerge as a democratic nation with strong economic growth. Hisako’s subject, likely a young housewife, mirrors the budding optimism that characterized Japan at the time. Her hair stylishly permed, she is dressed in a red kimono with an unusual dotted pattern and wears a grey coat highlighted in yellow and green. The dark red gloves echo the color of her lips and kimono, providing a strong visual accent. Her animated hands—in contrast to her serene face—indicate that she has just finished putting on the gloves and is now ready for an outing. Sophisticated and refined in a fashion that flawlessly combines tradition and modernity, the woman exudes a sense of physical and psychological well-being.
Born to a family of a prosperous sake brewer in Kyoto, Hisako received a higher education when it was available only to girls of the privileged class and well-to-do families. Her artistic talent was first recognized by her high school painting teacher, Chigusa Sōun, who urged her to depict the truth about human life, advice Hisako would remember throughout her training to become a professional painter. Upon graduating from high school in 1914, Hisako entered the juku (private school) of Kikuchi Keigetsu. In 1918, she made a spectacular debut in the Kyoto art world when her painting was accepted at the first Kokuten exhibition sponsored by the progressive Association for the Creation of National Painting (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai). Titled Train Station in Early Evening (Kureyuku Teiryusho), her honest portrayal of an exhausted waitress resting at a bench at a train station signaled a radical break from the mainstream bijinga (paintings of women) so popular at the time. Two years later, her unembellished depiction of a used kimono seller in Furugiichi (Old Clothes Fair) won her first acceptance at the Teiten exhibition. Throughout the latter half of Taishō, she continued to represent downtrodden working-class women in an uncompromising style influenced by western realism and became one of the most controversial women painters of her generation. Hisako’s painting was at times condemned as an example of “vulgar realism” by critics. During the 1930s, however, as Taishō liberalism dissipated under the rise of the military government, Hisako turned to conservative subjects and style. After the war, she maintained her successful career with steady participation in the Nitten through 1985 but never returned to the socially provocative themes of her earlier years. Dantō is a masterful work from the period when Hisako began to celebrate the contemporary women of post-war Japan.
Hisako’s paintings are in the collection of Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Kinoshita Museum, and Seattle Art Museum, among others.
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