Yuki Katsura

Yuki Katsura (桂ゆき, Katsura Yuki, also Katsura Yukiko, 10 October 1913 – 5 February 1991) was a Japanese artist whose career spanned from the prewar to the postwar eras.

During her six-decade career, Katsura did not conform to one particular artistic genre or style, instead employing a variety of approaches including painting, mixed media collage, and caricature to depict a range of subjects using folkloric allegory, religious iconography, realism, and experiments into abstraction.

She was trained in both Japanese and Western painting styles and traditions, which was a rare accomplishment for a woman of her time.

Katsura engaged with subjects that responded to critical socio-political events in mid-century Japan, such as societal expectations for Japanese women, the militarization of Japan, the post-war occupation, the rise of nuclear power, and gender equality.

Her diverse approaches, engagement with critical issues, and adherence to personal autonomy gained her critical acclaim; she has been called a "pioneer among women artists," and is considered influential to the genesis of the Japanese avant-garde before and after the Asia Pacific War.

Born into an upper-middle class family of samurai lineage during the Taishō Democracy in 1913, Katsura was raised in a conservative household that expected her to uphold Japan's traditional gender roles.

However, she also absorbed the more individualistic mindset manifested in Western cultural products such as books and music brought home by Katsura's father, a professor of engineering at the Tokyo Imperial University who had received his education in Europe.

Katsura had one younger brother, the novelist Katsura Hidezumi.

Katsura's desire to study Western-style oil painting (yōga) was rejected as it was considered an unacceptable pastime for women at the time.

Instead, Katsura studiedJapanese style painting (Nihonga), which was considered a cultivated, ladylike pursuit for amateur "lady painters" (keishū gaka).

In 1926, Katsura enrolled at a girls' high school.

From the age of 12, she trained under renowned ink painter Shūho Ikegami, a specialist in Chinese bird and flower painting (kachōga).

She was finally allowed to study oil painting when she was 17 years old, after a bout of tuberculosis, enrolling in the Tokyo ateliers of yōga painters Nakamura Ken'ichi and Okada Saburōsuke, but was disappointed when both men expected her to paint "feminine" subject matter, such as dolls and flowers.

Having long been a "collecto-maniac," Katsura began to incorporate unconventional subjects into her work in the early 1930s, such as crumpled leaves, cork shavings, wood grain, rope, and Japanese kasuri fabric.

Katsura claimed that cork "was a motif that touched her soul" and a "collage technique that no one [else had] imitated."

The artist sought to directly engage with the textuality of these material experiments, thus establishing herself as a pioneer in Japanese modern art.

In 1933, she entered the Avant-Garde Yōga Research Institute (Abangyarudo Yōga Kenkyūjo) where she was able to study under the more radical Tsuguharu Fujita and Seiji Tōgō.

She was able to begin experimenting with styles and approaches at her new school, as many of her teachers there, including Fujita and Tōgō, had been to Europe and were proponents of abstraction and Surrealism.

Despite the many challenges of being a female artist in Japan's male-dominated arts community, Katsura refused to be pigeonholed into any singular mode of expression throughout her career.

She constantly searched for her own unique style, combining elements of realism, collage, assemblage, trompe-l'oeil, abstraction, and surrealism, destabilizing dominant traditions throughout her six-decade oeuvre and proclaiming that she must "resist Fauvism, resist Surrealism, and paint pictures that are no one's but my own."

Katsura has largely been categorized as having three primary styles: collage, detailed depiction of surface textures, and caricature.

These inventive explorations allowed Katsura to make a name for herself in art circles, and by the age of 22 she had held two solo exhibitions in Tokyo—the first with the support of painter Ebihara Kinosuke at Kindai Gallery in 1935, and the second at Galerie Nichido in 1938, upon recommendation of her teacher Fujita Tsuguharu.

Katsura participated in annual Nika-ten exhibitions of the Nika-kai (Second Section Society) from 1935 to 1943.

During this period, Katsura combined mixed media collage and realism to investigate the position of women and female creativity within a patriarchal society, such as Letter (1936), Diary (1938/1979), Genji (1938/1979), and Crown (1939/1979).

She hoped to "paint pictures according to [her] own self as a woman without imitating anyone."

In 1938, Katsura was invited to help Yoshihara Jirō and Yamaguchi Takeo, among others, to establish the Kyūshitsu-kai (Ninth Room Society), as a more experimentally-minded offshoot of the Nika-kai, gathering younger artists who had been placed in Room 9 of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum at the time of Nika's annual salon.

In March 1938, the National Mobilization Law went into effect, marking the beginning of Japan's total war initiative that mobilized civilians into the aid of the Imperial war effort.

That same year, Katsura produced Human I and Human II, two paintings that Namiko Kunimoto has analyzed as "refuti[ng] the rising tides of nationalistic aggression."

Both paintings including formless bodies, lined up as if being disciplined, and also a negative depiction of one of Japan's national icons, Mount Fuji.

Kunimoto has argued that Katsura used zoomorphic folklore as a way to avoid political conversion and continue making artworks during the war.

In 1940, Katsura and Yoshihara were both commended as being at the forefront of Japanese abstract art by the English-language newspaper the Japan Times.

Katsura stopped using cork when the war began, but returned to it in the late 1970s, showing many cork assemblages at her major solo exhibition, "Yuki Katsura: Works from the 1978–1979" at Tokyo Gallery in 1979.

Many of Katsura's prewar artworks, especially her cork-based compositions, were destroyed in the wartime devastation of Tokyo.

Katsura continued to paint as much as she could during the Asia Pacific War, though materials quickly became scarce and the state's co-option of Japan's leading artists to contribute to wartime propaganda was imminent.

Katsura has been the subject of several large museum retrospectives in Japan, including the Shimonoseki Municipal Museum of Art (1991); Ibaraki Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (1998); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2013).

While she is very well-known in her native Japan, Katsura was left out of the canonization of Japanese art and art market in a Western context for many years.

In the 2010s, she became the subject of more curatorial and art historical interest and publications in English.

Katsura's artworks are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama; Ohara Museum of Art; Itabashi Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; the Yokohama Museum of Art; and the University of Arizona Museum of Art.

According to curator Naoko Seki of the 2013 "A Fable [ある寓話]" retrospective of Katsura's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Museum, these are the fundamental methods of Katsura's artistic expression; the comprehensive retrospective of her artwork at MOT was thus organized into these categories for the exhibition.

During her time at the Avant-Garde Western Painting Research Institute, Katsura was exposed to new European art, including Dada, Surrealism, and Fauvism.