ArtistAoyama, Yoshio

Artist Years1894-1995

Artist NationalityJapanese, French

TitlePaysage du Midi

Yearca.1935-40

MediumPainting > Oil

DimensionsCanvas: 13 X 16.6 inches

ProvenanceUmeda Gallery, Tokyo, 1972

Accession NumberRC1467

NotesYoshio Aoyama's started training under the influence of Japanese master Oshita Tojiro in 1911. Aoyama became orphaned by father and mother and was adopted by Tojiro as son and apprentice.

He was admitted to the Nihon Suisaiga Kenkyusho School. From a young age, he devoted himself entirely to painting, largely self-taught. Afterwards, he studied Fine Arts at the University of Tokyo. His first teacher, Tojiro, had a Western style, and was a specialist in watercolours (a promoter of the art magazine Mizu-e). This course at the Tojiro workshop was devoted to copying classical studies, nudes and landscapes. Aoyama was thus well trained in Western art.

His early works show a thick oil trait, typical of his formation as an artist, which defines the contours, and a range of dark colors such as brown, greens, browns, ochres, which give a cold melancholy. At other times his colors make the boundaries of the figures, creating marked and delimited shapes, using primary colors, a technique that is related to the traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e painting, where the backgrounds are completely flat and the figures seem to float on stage. There is also a clear influence of the kano-style and Namban period screens of the 16th-17th centuries in his work.

Yoshio Aoyama came to Europe to complete his training. He inherited his father's passion for Europe from a samurai family that became secretary of the Japanese Navy Ministry. It was his father who breathed into him his love of travel. The first European city to which he settled was Paris, recommended by one of the first collectors. Paris was the seat of an international community called the École de Paris created in 1910 by artists such as Raoul Dufy, Picasso, Modigliani, Chagall, and the great ambassador of oriental art Tsuguharu Fujita. At that time Aoyama met and befriended Ryuzaburo Umehara. The École de Paris, located in the bohemian quarter of Montmartre, was a real artistic tower of Babel, where mixed styles as diverse as cubism, futurism, primitivism, but with common characteristics such as fascination with colorful exoticism. Thus Aoyama came into close contact with the European vanguard.

After his time in Paris, he decided to move to a hotter place due to health problems. He chose the capital of the French Riviera, Nice. His doctor had diagnosed him with a tuberculosis and advised was to go to "go south". In Nice, Aoyama continued his painting, and it was at one of his exhibitions that he met Matisse. Matisse, fascinated by his color, called Aoyama a wonderful colorist. Yoshio Aoyama became a disciple of the great French master. From 1926, his lessons with Matisse caused a great change in his technique. He began to create a new original style. His figures acquired the volume and depth of compositions, a sense of lyricism, a poetry inundated with a certain mystery. This change in Aoyama's painting gradually took place in the precepts of fauvism, leaving behind the Japanese tradition. Now, pink and blue colors are a constant in his work.
(source: wikipedia.org)