On the 24th, when warm spring sunlight returned, older visitors stood out in the restaurant street on the basement first floor of the Palaceside Building. They seemed to be people coming or going from the large retrospective “50 Years After His Death: Kiyokata Kaburaki” (hosted by The Mainichi Newspapers and others) at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, next door.
Kiyokata Kaburaki (1878–1972) was a master of modern Japanese painting, ranked with Shoen Uemura as a virtuoso of bijin-ga, paintings of beautiful women. “Tsukiji Akashicho” (1927), a representative work whose whereabouts had long been unknown, and the two paintings that complete a triptych with it, “Shintomicho” and “Hamacho Riverbank” (both 1930), were rediscovered in 2018 and drew wide attention. About 110 works, including that triptych, are on view.
“Tsukiji Akashicho” won the Imperial Fine Arts Academy Prize and made Kiyokata, in name and in fact, one of Japan’s leading painters. It had been missing since 1975; after the rediscovery, the museum acquired all three works of the triptych.
Kiyokata in fact had ties to The Mainichi Newspapers. His father, the gesaku writer Dempei Jono, was one of the founders of the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, Mainichi’s predecessor. Raised among men of letters and painters, Kiyokata began as an illustrator and later turned to painting—a path that seems only natural.
The exhibition runs through Sunday, May 8. Admission is 1,800 yen for adults, 1,200 yen for university students, 700 yen for high-school students, and free for junior-high students and younger.