Yasui Sōtarō
Self-Portrait, 1913
安井曾太郎 《自画像》 1913年
Yasui Sōtarō 安井曾太郎 (May 17, 1888–December 14, 1955)
PROFILE
Yasui Sōtarō was one of Japan’s most respected Western-style (yōga) painters from the 1930s through his death in 1955. Born in Kyoto to a merchant family, he studied in Paris from 1907 until 1914 at a time when at least a dozen Japanese painters had made pilgrimage there to learn the latest Western techniques and to live amongst the great modern works and European artists of the time. Upon Yasui’s return to Japan in 1914 he found himself famous for the work he created while in France, but faced with a dilemma of reconciling what he learned and the work he created in France with the Japanese physical environment, tradition and his own temperament. Struggling with this reconciliation for many years there emerged in 1929 what came to be known as the “Yasui style,” which combined clear lines with rich colors. While also creating landscapes and still-lifes, he is primarily known for his portraits. Throughout his career Yasui was active in various progressive artist organizations and as a teacher, particularly during the latter part of his career when he taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In 1952 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit.
1933 photo
BIOGRAPHY
Yasui was born into a Kyoto merchant family that wholesaled cotton-goods. While his parents intended to have their son join the family business, sending him to Kyoto City Commercial School, Yasui’s desire to be an artist drove him to switch to Shōgo-in Institute of Western Art (Shōga-in Yōga Kenkyū-jo) at the age of 16, and later to the Kansai Academy of Art (Kansai Bijutsu-in), where he was taught by Asai Chū (1856-1907) and Kanokogi Takeshirō (1874-1941), leading Western-style artists of the time. In recalling Yasui’s time at the Kansai Academy of art fellow painter Ogawa Chikami recollects: “Yasui had the simplicity and sturdiness of the cotton goods his father sold, and his pictures were dark and tastefully severe…. Here was the tall Yasui, with his crew-cut hair, walking around shamelessly in the main streets of Kyoto in khaki work clothes splattered with paint – a sight that was indeed unusual in the Kyoto of those days.”1
In a period when Post-Impressionism was exerting the most influence on young Japanese artists studying in the Western-style, the dream of many of these artists was to study in Paris2 and in 1907, at the age of 19, following the death of his teacher Asai, Yasui traveled to France where he was to live for seven years, primarily in Paris. “During that period, he received a renewed grounding in painting through his art school studies and absorbed even more from being exposed to the art of his time on its home ground, in the museums and galleries of Paris. He was deeply impressed by Pissarro, Renoir, and especially Cézanne.”3
Like many students of Asai Chū, Yasui initially studied with the historical painter Jean-Paul Laurens (1838 – 1921) at the Académie Julian, founded in 1868. In 1907, inspired by the posthumous Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, he left the academy to develop a more personal style and as he later wrote, “to see nature through the Master’s eyes.”4
While at the Académie, Yasui was considered a particularly brilliant student and his sketches and paintings regularly took prizes at their shows. As with other young painters, Yasui took up pleine air painting while at the Académie and began trips to the countryside to paint, eventually abandoning academic training in order to develop a more individual style.
In 1914, at the outbreak of WWI, Yasui along with other, but not all, Japanese painters returned to Japan. Upon his return, he became active in the Nika-kai5 (formed in opposition to the official Bunten exhibition) and in the 1915 Nika Exhibition his European work attracted enormous attention from both artists and the general public, demonstrating “just how accomplished the new generation of Japanese painters could become when freed from the earlier academic training still prevalent in Japanese teaching circles.”6
Following this initial success, while Yasuji continued to produce work, he wrestled with trying to “accommodate what he had learned in France to his own temperament and to his new environment. The quality of light, he came to realize, was sufficiently different in Japan from the fabled luminosity of France that it was necessary to create new techniques to render it. Further, some of the painting materials available in Japan did not produce the same effects as those the painter had used in France. In Yasui’s view, it was not until 1929 that he found himself again.”7
Portrait of a Woman, 1930 , oil on canvas
(The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto)
Along with another rendering of the same model created the previous year, this masterpiece marked the beginning of the famed “Yasui style” of the 1930s.
For Yasui, finding himself involved his transition from landscape, still lifes, and genre painting to portraiture where his greatest talent lay. Beginning in 1929 with his showing of several portraits of a young woman clad in kimono (see Portrait of a Woman, 1930 left), critics began speaking of a “Yasui style,” described as a style “in which clear lines and rich, mellow colors are combined.”8 His transition to portraiture was to secure Yasui an important position in the Tokyo art world.
The 1930s saw a maturing of Yasui’s style which synthesized the “Western-style naturalistic representation that he had perfected in France, the influences of modernist art, especially Cézanne, and the heritage of East Asian art, particularly the two-dimensional treatment of space and arbitrary light source.”9
Through the 1930s and up until his death, Yasui “created work after work that his public felt represented a truly contemporary and authentically Japanese vision. His color were dynamic, and his ability to portray psychological elements of his portrait sitters was highly developed. [H]is growing ability to simplify forms and take delight in flat and abstract shapes represented for many a resurgence of a truly Japanese quality in his art. Some critics traced these accomplishments, as they did those of Umehara [Umehara Ryūzaburō]10, to their Kyoto background.”11
A 1934 photo of Yasui painting the portrait of Mr. Tamamushi Ichiroichi, principal of Daini Kotogakko, a high school under the prewar education system. On the occasion of his retirement, the school asked Yasui to paint a portrait. The full-length portrait produced then was submitted to the Nikaten and extolled as “the greatest portrait on record.” The finished painting Portrait of Mr. Tamamushi, 1934, in the collection of the Tōhoku University Archives, is shown on the right.
In 1935 he was made a member of the Imperial Art Academy, whereupon he left the Nika-kai. In 1936 he was instrumental in the organization of the Issui-kai, an organization of Western-style artists whose purpose was “to honor pure and correct art,” and who limited their membership to artists who created realist works.12
In 1944 he became a teacher at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) and a court artist (teishitsu gigei-in)13, but his artistic life proceeded unabated. In 1949, he became the first chairman of the Japan Artist's Association Nihon bijutsuka renmei 日本美術家連盟.14 He devoted himself to instructing young artists until 1952, in which year, with his old friend Umehara Ryūzaburō, he received the Order of Cultural Merit.
His last years were spent at Yugawara in Kanagawa Prefecture, where he pursued his spare style of painting. In 1955 at sixty-seven he died of heart failure after contracting pneumonia. A collection of his writings, Gaka no me (“An Artist’s Eye,” Zauhō Kankōkai, 1956) was published posthumously.
The Artist’s Woodblock Prints
Prints by Yasui are rare, but he saw prints as a useful step in oil painting, believing that the making of prints "is instrumental in expressing things by lines and colors."15 Japan's Independent Administrative Institution National Museum of Art shows 15 prints, in addition to this collection's print, in their database.16
While Merritt states that the works of Yasui "were reproduced as woodblock prints," the word "reproduced" suggesting fukusei-hanga, I've seen no examples of woodblock prints reproduced from his paintings.17 At least for the nine prints pictured below, along with this collection's print, they are original designs created by Yasui to be produced as woodblock prints by others, with his creative oversight.
Merritt goes on to discuss Yasui's prints in some detail, as follows: "In 1932 he sought the services of a sōsaku-hanga artist and skilled carver Hiratsuka Un’ichi, to make blocks for two prints, Woman in Chair and Fruits, to be published by Ishihara Ryūichi of Kyūryūdō. Hiratsuka, working in close association with Yasui, carved the desired blocks, but Yasui sought the services of a regular artisan to carve the blocks for other prints to be published by Kyūryūdō and Katō Junji. Although he probably felt empathy for Hiratsuka as a creative artist, Yasui seems to have concluded that Hiratsuka’s carving, because of its individual uniqueness, detracted from his own expression."18
A Selection of the Artist's Woodblock Prints (for reference - prints are not part of this collection)
Lake Towada in Autumn, 1932
十和田湖の秋
Early Summer, 1933
初夏
Artist and His Model, 1934
画家とモデル
Woman Leaning on a Chair, 1934
椅子に凭る女
Roses, 1934
薔薇
Woman Listening to a Record, 1935
レコードを聴く
Fruits, 1934
果物
Fishes and Snails, 1934
魚とサザエ
Spring in Yugawara
湯河原の春
Signatures and Seals of the Artist Appearing on His Prints
Sō 曾
Sō 曾
last revision:1/1/20247/10/2021
Prints in Collection
click on thumbnail for print details
Girl in New Year Clothes, 1933
IHL Cat. #905
Autumn at Lake Towada, 1935
IHL Cat. #1111
Oirasegawa, c. 1956
IHL Cat. #2011