Shima Seien - "Young Rebel"



Shima Seien 島成園

(February 1892 - March 5, 1970)

PROFILE

The youngest of the three most famous female nihonga artists of the Taishō era (1912-1926), Seien, along with Uemura Shōen 上村松園 (1875-1949) and Ikeda Shōen 池田蕉園 (1886-1917), was known as one of the "three 'en' of the three cities," Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo.[1] She became best known for breaking with the traditional idealized/romanticized portrayals of women in the genre known as bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women). She brought personal insight and experience into much of her early, pre-1924, work resulting in a realism absent in traditional bijin painting. These aspects of her work are epitomized in her 1918 painting titled Untitled an expressive self-portrait, discussed below. 

Seien became an Osaka media sensation for her skill as a painter of haunting bijin scrolls (see right), her success at the government sponsored Bunten exhibition in 1912 at the age of twenty, and her "striking looks".[2] 

Primarily a painter in the nihonga style, a mix of various Japanese styles and traditional materials often tinged with western influences, she was sought after as an illustrator for popular novels, women-focused magazines and, on occasion, a designer of woodblock prints. 


[1] 三都三園 - the "three cities" were Shima's Osaka, Uemura's Kyoto and Ikeda's Tokyo. "en" is a reference to the last syllable of their names.

[2] Dangerous Beauties and Dutiful Wives: Popular Portraits of Women in Japan, 1905-1925, Kendall Brown, Dover Publications, Inc., 2011, p. XVI. 

Woman (Black Hair Passion), 1917

おんな (旧題名・黒髪の誇り)

161.3 x 63 cm

note: this work was rejected for exhibition at the 4th Inten (exhibition of the Reorganized Japan Fine Arts Academy)

Prints in Collection

click on image for details

IHL Cat. #2589 

A Beauty and a Hero (2)  from the Righteous Samurai Collection, 1920

美人と烈士（2） 義士大觀

image: 9 7/8 x 13 5/8 in. (25.1 x 34.6 cm) 

sheet: 9 7/8 x 13 5/8 in. (25.1 x 34.6 cm) 

IHL Cat. #2631

The Heroine Yūgiri in Yūgiri Awa no Naruto from the series Woodblock Print Supplements to the Complete Works of Chikamatsu, 1923

夕霧阿波鳴渡 の夕霧

大近松全集 付録木版 

image: 15 1/8 x 11 3/6 in. (25.1 x 34.6 cm)

image measurement includes gray border

sheet: 18 x 11 1/2 in. (45.7 x 29.2 cm) 

BIOGRAPHY

A creator of provocative images of women which asserted, rather than restrained, female sensuality.[1] 

Biography compiled primarily from the following sources: 

Given name Narue 成栄 (なるえ), Shima Seien 島成園 was born in Sakai City just south of Osaka in February 1892[2]. The family register (koseki) shows she was adopted into her mother's family, surname Suwa 諏訪. Her father Shima Eikichi 島栄吉 and her older brother, given name Ichijirō (1885-1968), were both nihonga style painters.[3] Attending elementary and high school in Sakai, she obtained the usual education for girls focusing on domestic duties and crafts. To what degree she had any formal teaching at home from her father and brother is unclear, but sources suggest they played a supportive role in developing her talent, with her assisting her brother in fan painting.

At the age of thirteen in 1905 her family moved to Shimanouchi, a busy cultural and entertainment district of Osaka. It would be in Osaka that her formal teaching would begin, studying under the nihonga and print artists Kitano Tsunetomi 北野恒富 (1880-1947) and Noda Kyūho 野田九浦 (1879-1971). While her entry into the male dominated art world was aided by the earlier success of the older female painter Uemura Shōen 上村松園 (1875-1949), credited with "legitimizing bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) as a major genre within nihonga," it was her own extraordinary talent, with the required introductions by her teachers, that allowed her entry into the conservative government-sponsored exhibitions that were important vehicles for gaining recognition and commercial success.[4] 

At the age of twenty her painting Evening in Soemon-chō 宗右衛門町の夕, picturing two maiko standing on a street corner, shown below as a reproduction, was accepted for exhibition at the 1912 6th Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition). The following year her work Festival Attire 祭のよそおい, shown below, was selected, receiving a certificate of merit. While winning recognition and awards for her work exhibited at the Bunten and at department store exhibitions (important venues for the display and sale of work by prominent contemporary artists), notoriety and controversy came with her 1918 self-portrait titled Untitled, pictured and discussed below.

 Evening in Soemon-chō, 1912

宗右衛門町の夕

(a postcard reproduction)

Festival Attire (Matsuri no Yosooi), 1913,

color on silk

22 x 56 in. (142 x 284 cm)

Osaka City Museum Modem Art

Here Shima contrasts the two young girls from a wealthy family on the left, dressed in sumptuous attire , to the more  modestly dressed girl sharing their bench, casting a perhaps envious glance at them, and the even more modestly attired girl off to the side, seemingly afraid to approach them. 

"Untitled"


The long history of paintings of beautiful women, bijin-ga, did not encompass introspection and social criticism. With her introspective and provocative work Untitled, first shown at the first "trial" exhibition of the Osaka Discussion Group (Osaka Sawakai 大阪茶話会) in 1918, Seien broke the traditional model.[5] The very act of self-portraiture in the bijin-ga genre was a radical break from tradition, let alone a figure who directly engages the viewer with her stare. The title alone, Untitled, was seen as a provocation leading a critic writing for the newspaper Osaka Nichinichi Shinbun to rant that not giving the painting a title was "cowardly." In the article an accompanying illustration of the print mocked it as a "courtship advertisement" and dismissed Shima's depiction of the bruise on her face as non-existent.[6]


Contemporary commentaries in English on this painting varyingly describe the bluish tint below the figure's eye (痣 aza) as a nevus or bruise and all recognize the work as pioneering. Writing for The Japan Times on the occasion of the 2021 exhibition “Ayashii: Decadent and Grotesque Images of Beauty in Modern Japanese Art," held at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Alice Gordenker, comments:

In her remarkable work “Untitled” (1918), a woman in a black kimono sits on the floor, her hair disheveled, staring directly at the viewer. Under one eye spreads an ugly bruise, as if she has just been struck. Rather than use a model, Shima studied her own face in a mirror when working on this painting. The bruise, she said, was symbolic of the many abuses routinely inflicted upon women by men. [7]


Shima Seien, Untitled 無題 , 1918

color on silk 49 1/2 x 74 7/8 in. (125.8 x 190.2 cm)

Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts

[I've painted] "a bruised woman who cursed her fate and cursed the world." - Shima Seien [8]

In addition to some critics, even some established male and female artists denounced the work of the emerging young women artists in Osaka and Kyoto. The famous yōga (Western-style oil painting) artist Kishida Ryūsei (1891-1929), best known for his portraiture, singled out Shima in "denouncing the 'women like ghosts' recently on display."[9] Even the female artist Uemura Shōen did not hide her irritation with these younger rivals. In a 1920 magazine article, she remarked, "Nowadays 'Woman Painter' has become a kind of fashion. Everyone is so boasting about herself and is falling into ecstasy, that no one would be able to build her own sanctuary of the fine arts.  Newspapers and magazines irresponsibly praise them and show their unskillful works in photographs and make their heads swell. I cannot find any trace of originalities in works by such young women nowadays, maybe because they have become painters so thoughtlessly." She went on to complain that young artists had emulated her name by taking names ending with "-en."[10]  

In 2008, along with her works Festival Attire (shown above) and Fragrance of Aloeswood (shown below), Untitled was designated as a Municipal Tangible Cultural Property of Osaka (度大阪市指定有形 文化財).[11]

A Painter and an Illustrator