¡°Higashiyama Kaii Retrospective (1908-1999)¡± at The Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, actually only presents half of Higashiyama¡¯s life. It¡¯s a truncated career survey focusing on the mid-to later-life masterpieces of ¡°painting as a form of prayer¡± by the artist known as ¡°the people¡¯s landscape painter.¡±
The popular image of Higashiyama today has its origins in the successful reception of his landscape ¡°Afterglow¡± (1947), when it showed at the prestigious national Nitten exhibition. Another work, ¡°Road¡± (1950), is among the most recognized and revered paintings produced in postwar Japan. The exhibition calls these ¡°quintessentially Japanese landscapes,¡± but such works were also examples of Higashiyama¡¯s conservative dialogue with European and American abstraction. Distinctive geographical signs were deliberately omitted by the painter, his compositions geometricized and the palette simplified.
Higashiyama was among a number of contemporary painters westernizing nihonga (Japanese painting) at that time. They made large-scale works, put pictures in frames instead of mountings and aped the impasto of oil painting. This was part of what mid-20th-century nihonga painters thought would make their work appear ¡°international,¡± a buzzword of the era.
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