青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

The year 2024 marks 120 years since the birth and 50 years since the death of Okumura Koichi, a Japanese-style painter noted for his work with landscapes. Born in Kyoto in 1904, Okumura attended the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting and also studied under the Japanese-style painter Nishimura Goun. In 1929 his work Mountain Village won him a place in the annual state-sponsored Teiten exhibition for the first time, and over the following years the Teiten and its successors became his main forum for showing his perceptively detailed portrayals of landscapes through the seasons. Fine Morning (cover), depicting snow-covered trees standing in the pristine air of winter, earned especially high acclaim, including special prize at the 1946 Nitten, the first state-sponsored exhibition held in Japan after World War II.

In 1948, however, Okumura broke with the state-sponsored exhibitions and founded the Sozo Bijutsu association (present-day Soga-kai Association of Japanese Painting) with Yamamoto Kyujin, Uemura Shoko, Akino Fuku, and other fellow artists. With this he shifted from delicate brushstrokes to powerful outlines and compositions presenting his subjects prominently across the picture plane; he also embraced close-ups and bold abstraction, giving shape to works highlighting the roiling motions of waves and clouds or the dynamic vitality of trees.

This volume brings together some sixty-five paintings from every phase of Okumura’s career plus roughly a hundred sketches from his travels in Japan and around the world, inviting readers to appreciate his outstanding compositional and sketching skills as well as the immediacy that comes from his practice of venturing out into nature to put himself in the presence of the scenes he wished to render. Postcards, magazine covers, and other miscellaneous works reveal the full range of his artistic activities, while writings in the form of the picture-and-essay contributions he made to newspapers and other publications provide insight into his responses to nature and the processes by which he captured it in his art.

Okumura Koichi (1904–1974), born in Kyoto, studied at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting and under the Japanese-style painter Nishimura Goun. He was selected to participate in the annual state-sponsored Teiten exhibition for the first time in 1929 and subsequently mainly showed his landscape paintings at the Teiten and its successors, including the 1946 Nitten, where he was awarded special prize for Fine Morning. In 1948 he joined in the founding of the Sozo Bijutsu group (present-day Soga-kai Association of Japanese Painting) as part of an effort to pioneer new forms of Japanese-style painting. Rigorously reexamining his own art, he shifted from a style marked by delicate brushstrokes to one featuring powerful outlines and bold abstraction; in his later years he focused on landscapes rendered up close so as to highlight trees and their vitality. He was also acclaimed for the sketches he produced of his trips into the mountains, for which he won the moniker “artist of the hills.” He served as professor emeritus at Kyoto City University of Arts and professor at Kyoto Saga Art College.