Of Books, Trees, and Leaves: The Nagano Landscape

Kōno’s introduction to painting was highly informal despite the professional ties of his father, Kōno Jirō 河野次郎 (1856–1934), to the art world as an artist and teacher trained under yōga pioneer Takahashi Yuichi 高橋由一 (1828–1894).¹⁸ Surrounded by his father’s extensive library of art books, journals, and prints, rather than receiving direct instruction from his father, Kōno curated his own artistic experience as a child and developed an intimate relationship with the old masters, whose work he admired and copied from Western art survey books. In later years, Kōno vividly recalled the strong smell of this “mountain” of art books, which he described as being “inseparable from happy recollections of my childhood.”¹⁹

Kōno’s encounter with the Western canon, like that of many of his contemporaries, was mediated and shaped by print. While yōga students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, under the aegis of powerful institutional figures, received private funding or government stipends to study in Europe, artists outside the academy relied on illustrated books and magazines for precious glimpses of European painting. Despite the obvious limitations of this vicarious education, Kōno benefited from the freedom it afforded him to peruse the canon at will, unimpeded by institutional doctrines regarding school, style, or nationality. Kōno’s engagement with the tide of imagery entering Japan from Europe at this time via his father’s library was further liberated by his lack of formal pedagogical structure and relative distance from the hubbub of the Tokyo art world, and thus the young artist’s willful imagination organically integrated images of canonical artworks into a highly personal curriculum.

Kōno’s artistic education was the product of a symbiosis between his father’s books and the local landscape in which he spent his youth playing with friends and sketching. Kōno was as much drawn to nature as to painting—if not more so—and his desire to capture the beloved environs of the nearby Susobana River directed and inspired his ceaseless study of the Western masters, who furnished him with a range of lenses through which to understand and describe the natural world. Kōno’s middle-school diary and artworks document his unique artistic formation between the Nagano countryside and European landscapists as he sought to master the depiction of the willow trees he encountered daily by the river. At this time, among the many artists studied by Kōno, from Rubens (1577–1640) to Rembrandt (1606–1669), Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) captured the student’s imagination for his depiction of mighty oaks (see, for example, fig. 6). Such was Kōno’s fascination with these trees and their potential to aid his expression of the Susobana willows that he dedicated weeks to detailed studies of Lorrain’s “Oak tree in winter,” spending at least thirty minutes on the careful reproduction of each branch.²⁰

FIGURE 6. Claude Lorrain (1600–1682). Drawing, Trees in Vigna Madama, France, ca. 1638. Ink on paper, 33 × 22.4 cm. British Museum, London, Oo,7.224. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

Kōno’s innumerable sketches and paintings of the willows that populated the banks of the Susobana River reveal how he synthesized the stylistic models he studied in his father’s books to create idiosyncratic, visionary interpretations of the local landscape. Kōno had traveled far from the antique serenity of Claude Lorrain by 1915 with his Susobana River Willows (fig. 7), which is alive with the writhing lines of blustery clouds and bushy trees. While Susobana River Willows borrows something of the earthy color and picturesque composition of the John Constable (1776–1837) landscapes the young artist studied, its expressive line, full of pulsating vitality, and the playful narratives suggested by the mysterious figures scattered throughout the landscape are Kōno’s own.

FIGURE 7. Kōno Michisei, Susobana River Willows, Japan, 1915. Oil on canvas, 91 × 116.7 cm. Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, 411

For Kōno, the boundary between the mythical, foreign landscapes he experienced vicariously in print and the real landscape on his doorstep was highly porous, resulting in almost febrile visions of the Nagano countryside playing host to ethereal nudes and biblical figures (fig. 8). While he imagined the Susobana willows as the real-world locus of the nymphs he encountered in Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s (1796–1875) Dance of the Nymphs (fig. 9),²¹ his imaginative engagement with the Claude Lorrain landscapes he copied when fifteen transformed Lorrain’s quiescent pastoral scenes into alien worlds filled with impossibly tangled, elongated trees familiar only to the young Kōno.²²

FIGURE 8. Kōno Michisei. The Garden of Eden, Japan, 1915. Ink and pencil on paper, 23.4 × 31.3 cm. Chofu City Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, K-D-50055

FIGURE 9. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875). Dance of the Nymphs, France, ca. 1860–65. Oil on canvas, 49 × 77.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF1783. (© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

As a student of art, Kōno’s highest ideal was not the accurate imitation of the canonical works he studied in books but the compelling depiction of the natural world around him, in particular, trees. While copying Lorrain’s oak trees, Kōno spent his evenings reading about the botany of trees to augment his depictions, and by 1916 he proudly noted in his diary that “my knowledge of trees is second to none, past or present. It’s unapparelled. Unparalleled. Truly!”²³ Trees were firmly planted at the center of Kōno’s worldview as a child. Trees both inspired his art and channeled his nascent Christian faith as a junior member of the Russian Orthodox Church (Nihon harisutosu seikyōkai 日本ハリストス正教会) in Nagano. According to his father’s wishes, Kōno was baptized at the local church at the age of nine and spent his childhood in a small but diverse Christian community populated by Methodists and Anglicans as well as Orthodox devotees.²⁴

Annotations on Kōno’s landscape sketches hint at how Christianity nurtured his innately profound connection to nature, giving his work to capture the landscape around him a sense of divine purpose. In a sketch dated November 16, 1914, in the sky above a wooded rural scene he recorded a divine intervention in his work: “Ah, also today I can hear a voice from the heavens. Thou! Thou!” (fig. 10). Kōno would later recall that in his youth he believed that to paint trees was a mission handed down to him by God.²⁵ The vitality of his landscapes from this time suggests that Kōno attributed a kind of powerful autonomous spirit to natural phenomena, and thus his brush imbues trees with a life-force typically reserved for humanity alone. As Ejiri Kiyoshi notes, there is an animistic spirit typical of Japanese Shintoism in Kōno’s painting that did not conflict with his Christianity, but rather, due to the Russian Orthodox Church’s relative tolerance for divergent indigenous beliefs, enriched his devotional practice.²⁶ Kōno’s art was thus born of a syncretism unique to the artist in which art history, nature, and faith directed his hand and molded his burgeoning sense of self.

FIGURE 10. Kōno Michisei. “Ah, also today I can hear a voice from the heavens. Thou! Thou!,” Japan, 1914. Conté crayon on paper, 38 × 58.5 cm. Chofu City Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, K-D-00026

While as a child Kōno saw trees as endowed with a divine spirit and playing host to Corot’s nymphs, as he matured Kōno regarded trees as a locus of artistic virtuosity redolent of the painter’s unique character. “Every first-rate artist,” he argued, “has an ideal when it comes to trees. It is true of Corot and true of Constable.”²⁷ One of Kōno’s favorite passages from John Charles Van Dyke’s (1856–1932) published lectures, The Meaning of Pictures (1903), which he read in Japanese translation, tied the painting of trees to artistic individuality, suggesting how the young artist came to include an arboreal attribute, oak leaves, in his Self-Portrait. Kōno was inspired by Van Dyke’s assertion that “if three painters, say Turner, Rousseau, and Claude Monet, could be brought together and induced, each for himself to paint a given tree … each would differ from the other and yet no one of them [would] be false.”²⁸ The painter’s power to determine the character of the tree in a painting, argued Van Dyke, in turn requires that the tree “exhibit what we have called [the artist’s] individuality.”²⁹ This statement is borne out not only in Kōno’s adolescent manifestations of the Nagano landscape, but in the giant clusters of golden oak leaves positioned behind the artist in his 1917 Self-Portrait.

Circumscribed in a more subdued iteration of Kōno’s characteristic writhing line, the larger-than-life oak leaves in Self-Portrait exude a preternatural vitality commensurate with the artist’s deeply spiritual connection with nature. While a cluster behind the artist’s right shoulder seems to shrink and recede into the darkness, another larger cluster rises up to his left. Kōno’s inclusion of oak leaves in this inaugural self-portrait was natural for an artist whose sense of self and the world had been mediated by trees, but immersed in anxieties about his future, Kōno confessed a fearful ambivalence toward his arboreal muse:

Here’s the thing. I can paint anything and I feel empowered. First of all, I studied trees, but later, I became consumed with the idea that it was my unique mission to paint trees. . . . That was my trick, my method. I completely lost my way. I must not lose my senses or principles on this path. I must not lose sight of my goal. I must not stray from my true path. It seems there is an open path ahead, but, in truth, it’s a labyrinth.³⁰

Ejiri Kiyoshi notes the tension between Kōno’s seeming desire to manifest his own spirit and personhood through conscious reference to Dürer’s Christo-morphic image in Self-Portrait with Fur-trimmed Robe and the vital presence of the oak leaves, which he interprets as the manifestation of Kōno’s subconscious inner daemon. Noting the potential for the strangely animate oak leaves to either protect or threaten the young artist, Ejiri concludes that, “although some time has passed since he left Nagano, [Kōno] cannot escape the call of his daemon.”³¹ However, while the largest cluster of daemonic oak leaves rears up behind Kōno, he calmly looks ahead, seemingly unaware of its presence, ignoring its call to follow a seductive labyrinthine path. While the centripetal arrangement of the leaves and their curling edges suggest a primeval life-force within, the leaves’ golden and dessicated appearance reveal a vitality that is waning, or rather, subdued.

Kōno’s curling oak leaves mark a distinct departure from the vegetal motifs seen in the more famous Renaissance-inspired portraits of Kishida Ryūsei, with whom Kōno was acquainted by this time.³² Kōno’s senior by four years, Kishida was an active figure in avant-garde circles in Tokyo and leader of the Grass and Earth Society (Sōdosha 草土社). Having experimented with Post-Impressionism in his early career, Kishida turned to a form of meticulous realism based on Dürer to better express his vision of the world, and from 1915 he produced a number of portraits in this mode, often featuring floral attributes. In Portrait of Koya Yoshio (fig. 11), for example, Koya holds a stem of wild grasses that extends from the tips of his fingers and reaches delicate tendrils toward his face, as if they are growing toward its luminescence.

FIGURE 11. Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929). Portrait of Koya Yoshio (Portrait of a Man Holding a Plant), Japan, 1916. Oil on canvas, 45.5 × 33.5 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, NMTO00756. MOMAT / DNPartcom

Like Kōno, Kishida had been touched by Christianity in his youth, and while his faith was less devout he maintained a positive view of nature as a divine gift to be protected and cherished. Nature was thus an indispensable part of Kishida’s project to “paint the portrait of humankind,” and floral motifs in his work, like the grasses in Koya’s portrait, have been understood as symbols of life’s vitality and humans’ affinity with God’s creation.³³ This is not quite the nature that appears in Kōno’s self-portrait, however. The tender spirit conveyed by Koya Yoshio and the delicate grasses in his hand contrasts markedly with the supernatural scale and presence of Kōno’s oak leaves, which unfurl in his shadow to assert something other than nature’s divine beneficence.

Immersed in Renaissance art history and the imagery of the Russian Orthodox Church, with his overgrown golden oak leaves Kōno perhaps sought to invent a personal iconography equal to the grandeur of the European Christian tradition. Taking seriously Van Dyke’s assertion that a tree can manifest an artist’s individuality, Kōno refined the tree down to one of its most distinctive features, a leaf, to create a symbol of his self. His oak leaves, therefore, are not a product of nature’s vitality, like Kishida’s vegetal motifs, but of the artist’s own creative force. Considering Kōno’s profound artistic and spiritual connection with the river willows of the Susobana, however, it is curious that he would select the oak as his herald. This again reflects the artist’s stated desire to shrug off the childish obsessions of his youth and embrace a more serious and worldly path. The magisterial oak trees he assiduously studied in the drawings of Claude Lorrain, and doubtless encountered throughout printed histories of Western art, would have struck Kōno as an alternative arboreal motif of a heritage and gravitas adequate to his new mission to become a fully fledged artist in emulation of the old masters of Europe.

In his self-portrait, the rich golden hue and ovoid form of the oak leaves to Kōno’s left complement and echo his face, which, like the unfurling leaves, lays itself bare to the discriminating eye of the viewer. This congruence establishes a link between the artist and his arboreal icon, inviting the viewer to look past Kōno’s minutely rendered features and into the profound darkness beyond, where a vital creative force can be sensed emanating from the strange golden leaves. The retreat of the desiccated leaves to Kōno’s right and their autumnal appearance suggest that a centripetal force also lies within these clusters. Their visionary revelation of the artist’s creative spirit is short-lived. As Ejiri Kiyoshi notes, the nature of the spirit disclosed by Kōno’s oak leaves is ambivalent. The question, however, is not whether this spirit will protect or coerce the artist, but rather whether the artist himself can draw out its potential vitality and manifest his true self.

In October 1916, only a few months prior to the conception of Self-Portrait, Kōno received word that the three works he had submitted to that year’s Bunten had been refused. He pasted the refusal letter on the back cover of his notebook and wrote: “My drawings are so powerful, so full of invention. My landscape drawings approach those of Da Vinci at age twenty-one. Such is my expertise and skill but as for true ambition, ability, power … and artistic personality, I am worried about whether I even come close to Da Vinci.”³⁴ As he approached the composition of his self-portrait, Kōno’s notebook charts a turbulent course between exhilarating confidence and crushing self-doubt. One day he is Leonardo’s superior, and the next he is no more than a naïve student of drawing; “I have no knowledge of the truth. No matter how much I can express with drawing, it means nothing.”³⁵ For Kōno, the acquisition of truth and therefore artistic greatness was repeatedly frustrated by his uncertain sense of self. As such, while his oak leaves speak of the desire to prove himself as a serious artist at the Bunten with the iconographical gravitas of a Renaissance painting, the ambivalence of the leaves’ forms, opening and closing, golden but waning, reveals the existential dilemma underlying Kōno’s artistic mission. The presence of Kōno’s oak leaves problematizes the assumption that he cast himself in the mode of Dürer simply to appropriate the earlier painter’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric. Despite his obvious ambition, Kōno’s deeply introspective and questioning nature held his ego in check, and thus, in order to understand why this earnest young artist turned to Dürer, it is necessary to examine his relationship to the old masters and his conception of the portrait genre more closely.

Of Idols and Icons: Old Master Portraits

Kōno’s early sketchbooks are filled with diligent studies of a wide range of canonical Western artists’ works, from the figures of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Dürer to the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29–1682), and Corot, demonstrating the ease with which the young artist assimilated a plethora of pictorial stimuli as he grew up in the rural margins of the Japanese art world. However, it was not only the reproductions of these artists’ works that fascinated Kōno, but also their biographies. Kōno eagerly read the rousing accounts of the European masters published by Kuroda Seiki and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which, significantly, appeared before the White Birch Society’s heroizing accounts of the pioneers of European Expressionism.³⁶ Such late-Meiji-period biographies were typically prefaced by engraved portraits of their subjects based on canonical paintings, which Kōno internalized along with details of the artists’ legendary lives. These biographical icons elevated the greatness of the old masters in Kōno’s mind and set the stage for his first foray into self-portraiture.

One such series of portraits, featuring Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo, and Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), illustrated by engravings in the first Japanese art journal, The Beauties of Art and Scholarship (Gayū sekichin 臥遊席珍) (April–August 1880), caught Kōno’s imagination despite their abbreviated form.³⁷ In response to the Leonardo portrait (fig. 12), Kōno later recalled, “I remember looking at that god-like visage and thinking, ‘What a remarkable person. [He was] surely a great painter.’”³⁸ Indeed, a passage in Kōno’s notebook dated to October 17, 1916, reveals not only the high esteem in which he held Leonardo and the old masters, but how his relationship to their genius and his own nascent artistic identity was being mediated through portraiture:

What hinders the artist from painting his own face? The beauty of a person’s face (in the general sense) is said to be in the arrangement of their eyes, nose, and mouth. I crave the dignity and authority of Da Vinci. . . . That man’s personality was immense. . . . Based on the beauty of the Mona Lisa, his appearance must have been tremendously beautiful. But why are beautiful looks (bibō 美貌) counted among the elements that constitute personality (jinkaku 人格)? It’s just personality. If personality shines through a beautiful face, it is splendid (sōrei 壮麗). If it shines through an ugly face, it is majestic (sōgen 壮厳). Raphael, Rubens, and Goethe belong to the former. Socrates, Dante, and Michelangelo belong to the latter.³⁹

FIGURE 12. Illustration of Leonardo da Vinci in Gayū sekichin (The beauties of art and scholarship), 1880. Reproduced in Aoki Shigeru, ed., Kindai bijutsu zasshi sōsho 2: Gayū sekichin (Modern art journals 2: The beauties of art and scholarship) (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 1991), 26

Kōno did not question the veracity of the portraits he encountered in his books, but rather their physical beauty and its relationship to the artist’s innate genius and character. Kōno’s concern with these artists’ personalities (jinkaku) was symptomatic of his time, as great painting was increasingly understood to be the product of a great personality. In addition to Van Dyke’s exhortation that paintings “are partial autobiographies of the painters,”⁴⁰ Kōno was also made aware of the commensurability of a painting to the artist through the articles of the White Birch (Shirakaba 白樺) journal and encounters with figures involved in the strongly individualist group.⁴¹ Given his introspective nature, Kōno took seriously the idea that, as famously declared by Yanagi Sōetsu in a 1912 issue of the White Birch, “Art is the reflection of personality, and that reflection is precisely the expression of individuality.”⁴²

According to Yanagi and his peers, as a manifestation of the artist’s personality, painting reached its apex when produced by an individual of great self-awareness. The paintings of modern artists such as Van Gogh and Cézanne epitomized the highest ideals of the Taishō-period avant-garde not only because of their praiseworthy anti-academic style, but because the works were perceived to be the direct expression of the artist’s existence; they were “the essence of their lives.”⁴³ The essential oneness of artwork and artist was driven home by biographies in the White Birch extolling the genius and life experiences of these artists, and as in the old master biographies of The Beauties of Art and Scholarship, these accounts were illustrated with self-portraits that equated the artist’s face and brush with his biography. Despite the relative paucity of visual information in the engravings praised by Kōno, particularly in contrast to the photogravure illustrations of the White Birch, the young artist’s immersion in contemporary print culture and avant-garde discourse embellished these spare portraits with a compelling sense of truth and personality in his mind’s eye.

While the artistic discourse of the time argued that all genres of painting, from landscape to figurative scenes, could reveal the artistic self, Kōno was particularly drawn to portraiture. The heightened impact of portraiture on Kōno’s perception of the artist and artistic excellence can be attributed not only to his familiarity with avant-garde ideas, but to his exposure to iconic art. As a member of the Russian Orthodox faith, Kōno regularly encountered painted icons at his local church, the Church of the Resurrection (Fukkatsu kaidō 復活会堂).⁴⁴ As an integral component of Orthodox worship, icons had by this time been disseminated to Japanese churches nationwide by talented local artists trained in icon painting such as Yamashita Rin 山下りん (1857–1939), and even Kōno’s father.⁴⁵ Although Kōno may not have grasped the full significance of the acheiropoieta tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in which icons convey the potent likeness of a miraculous original image of Christ, his upbringing in the church married to his vivid imagination must have enlivened the icons to which he prayed with an extraordinary sense of presence and spiritual truth. Between these hieratic images and the severe old master portraits of his books, Kōno formed a notion of the painted visage and, by extension, of the portrait that extended beyond the realm of simple self-presentation to the declaration and enshrinement of a lofty religious or artistic persona. How Kōno tried to conceive of himself within this concept of portraiture becomes apparent in Self-Portrait.

As Kōno’s 1916 notes reveal, the artist had struggled to depict himself on canvas before April 1917, when his Self-Portrait, destined for the Bunten, emerged from a short but intense period of study. Among his extant works, only one self-portrait predates the Bunten piece and it is in a mannerist mode akin to his landscapes.⁴⁶ Despite Kōno’s introspective nature, his oeuvre up to this time lacks the obsessive serial production of self-portraits common in the work of his contemporaries, including Kishida and Yorozu, who used self-portraiture as a vehicle of self-discovery.⁴⁷ As Winther-Tamaki describes, through self-portrayal yōga artists “constructed fundamental qualities of the artist’s body and Self,” and thus many Taishō artists returned to self-portraiture again and again, examining their bodies from various angles in a variety of stylistic modes, in a quest to embody an autonomous self.⁴⁸ However, prior to 1917 it is not in his own likeness, but rather in his intense study of trees and the Nagano landscape that a process akin to self-conceptualization can be observed in Kōno’s work. Interestingly, the 1917 Self-Portrait differs markedly from these lively mannerist landscapes in almost every regard. Serene where his landscapes are agitated, and reserved where they are effusive, Kōno’s self-portrait stands out in his early oeuvre as a singularly academic representation of himself and his art.

The academicism of Kōno’s painting can be attributed in part to the rhetorical mode of the icons of Christ he encountered in the Russian Orthodox Church. Yamashita Rin’s The Resurrection (fig. 13) reflects the synthesis of hieratic composition and idealized naturalism in late nineteenth-century Japanese icon painting, which was informed by Italian Renaissance realism as well as by the Byzantine icons historically favored by the Orthodox Church.⁴⁹ The naturalistic depiction of Christ’s serene countenance in Yamashita’s icon surely augmented his sense of presence to the faithful, while his holiness was preserved by the otherworldly perfection of his form. As in Dürer’s Self-Portrait, the frontality and central placement of the artist’s body in Kōno’s painting clearly allude to the formal language of religious icons. Similarly, Kōno’s conversion to a reserved and deferential mode of brushwork, seen in the delicate chiaroscuro and high finish of his own self-portrait, also draw upon the power of Christ’s perfect visage. While Kōno’s Self-Portrait was consciously modeled on Dürer’s image, the rhetorical power of the Christian archetype at work in the old master portrait, known to Kōno personally through the Orthodox Church, could not have been lost on this devout artist. Applied to the problem of self-representation, such pictorial conventions could perhaps have served Kōno’s mission to inhabit a dignified Leonardo-esque personality.

FIGURE 13. Yamashita Rin (1857–1939). The Resurrection, Japan, 1891. Papier-mâché, oil, and lacquer; frame in the maki-e technique, 32 × 26.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, ЭРЖ-2283. (© The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Leonard Kheifets)

Consideration of another project from this time, Portrait of Yoshiko (fig. 14), offers further insight into Kōno’s development of a distinctive portrait mode for Self-Portrait. In Portrait of Yoshiko, Kōno frames his friend and first love, Yoshiko, with a Renaissance-inspired golden arch, through which a verdant landscape can be seen. Yoshiko herself is depicted with a high-degree of verisimilitude, to which Kōno has diligently sublimated his typically energetic line. Among the numerous studies of Yoshiko produced as preparatory works for this portrait, a faithful copy of Dürer’s drawing of his mother appears alongside a profile of Yoshiko’s pretty face (fig. 15). Executed and dated within days of one another, in these drawings Kōno explores the limits of Dürer’s detailed but grotesque realism and the relationship between visual fidelity, beauty, and character in portraiture.

FIGURE 14. Kōno Michisei. Portrait of Yoshiko, Japan, 1916. Oil on canvas, 79 × 60 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, NMTO00933. MOMAT / DNPartcom

FIGURE 15. Kōno Michisei. Dürer’s Mother and Profile of Yoshiko, Japan, August 1916. Ink on paper, 18.7 × 28.4 cm. Location unknown. Reproduced in Taishō no kisai Kōno Michisei: Shin hakken sakuhin wo chūshin ni (Kōno Michisei, Taishō genius: Newly discovered works), ed. Hijikata Meiji et al. (Tokyo: Bijutsukan renraku kyōgikai, 2008), 74, pl. II-35

For Yoshiko’s portrait, Kōno ultimately settled on a compromise between the aesthetic appeal of High Renaissance naturalism, derived from Leonardo’s enigmatic Mona Lisa, and the psychological insight afforded by Dürer’s mannerist approach, to depict a subject whose beauty hovers somewhere between the “splendid” and “majestic.” While Yoshiko is posed in a stately manner before a landscape bathed in golden light like her Renaissance prototype, her features are sharply rendered and somewhat distorted in accordance with the portrait of Dürer’s mother. Yoshiko’s beauty manifests itself as more earthy and therefore more authentic compared to the sfumato-brushed beauty of the Mona Lisa. Through painting Yoshiko, a familiar subject in which he believed a beautiful spirit indeed shone through a beautiful face, Kōno was first able to attempt the creation of a sincere and artistically refined expression of personality, at once faithful to the prevailing individualist sentiment of the times and redolent of great old master portraiture.

It was in the months after completing Yoshiko’s portrait in August 1916 that Kōno first noted the difficulty of artistic self-representation as he continued to question the effect of physical beauty upon the expression of personality in his notes. In a consideration of the portraits of European master artists, Kōno observed that, “on the whole, genius resides in the ugly more than the beautiful.”⁵⁰ Indeed, Kōno explored the affinity between poverty, ugliness, and genius in scenes of local beggars whom he believed to be touched by the divine (fig. 16). Also to this category of ugly or “majestic” genius belonged Michelangelo, one of Kōno’s greatest heroes, and yet in painting and personality, Kōno claimed to identify with the more “splendid” Renaissance master, Leonardo.⁵¹ As such, in spite of consistently manifesting a spiritually inspired mannerism bordering on the grotesque in his visions of the people and landscape of Nagano, and acknowledging the proximity of genius to ugliness, it was rather in the calm compromise and sincere realism of Yoshiko’s portrait that he sought a solution to the problem of self-portrayal.

FIGURE 16. Kōno Michisei. Three Beggars, Japan, 1916. Oil on canvas, 65 × 91 cm. Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, 599

As he grew increasingly committed to his artistic career and looked ahead to his next Bunten submission, Kōno determined that “the artists of the coming generation must be serious (shinkoku 深刻) in all respects, like Da Vinci, Dürer, and Michelangelo.”⁵² For Kōno, simultaneously immersed in the art of the Italian and Northern Renaissance through his books, the rigid boundaries between periods and styles entrenched in Western art history were of little concern, allowing the artist to make fluid associations between artists and to navigate schools according to personal prerogatives. Despite constantly shifting allegiances between Leonardo, Dürer, and Michelangelo in his notes, for Self-Portrait Kōno settled upon the German master for his model. While Leonardo’s Mona Lisa suited Kōno’s mission to portray the ineffable beauty of his first love, it seems Dürer’s Self-Portrait with Fur-trimmed Robe offered a visual rhetoric adequate to his desire to craft an image of himself as a “serious” artist in the mold of a Renaissance genius.

While Kōno’s friend Kishida had likewise discovered in Dürer a compelling mode of self-expression, following lengthy experimentation with other European models, he never applied the exacting realism seen in the portrait of Koya Yoshio to his own painted likeness.⁵³ When compared to Kōno’s meticulously crafted Self-Portrait, Kishida’s earlier series of self-portraits in a realist mode (fig. 17), which Kōno may have seen, retains a heavy, expressionistic use of paint derived from his study of the Post-Impressionists.⁵⁴ It seems that Kishida hesitated to cast himself in Dürer’s mold, perhaps for the legitimate fear of being labeled an unworthy mimic of the European tradition—a criticism previously leveled at his works in a Post-Impressionist style. Aware of the dangers of following Dürer’s “light,” but ambitious to make his mark at the Tokyo salon, Kōno departed from Kishida’s example and forged ahead with his plan to harness Dürer’s rhetoric to his own expressive ends.

FIGURE 17. Kishida Ryūsei. Self-Portrait, Japan, 1914. Oil on canvas, 45 × 37.3 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, NMT000200. MOMAT / DNPartcom

As Joseph Koerner has written, Dürer’s Self-Portrait has been widely regarded as an “emblem of the originary and productive power of the artist,” for “Dürer’s airtight placement at the center of the visual field, which allows not so much as a single hair to stray out of representation, affirms the consubstantiality of product and producer.”⁵⁵ Borrowing the key elements of this authoritative mode, from its hyper-detailed realism to its hieratic frontality, and attired in the fur-lined robe of a Renaissance humanist, Kōno appears to have sought to present himself at the nation’s premier exhibition as a personality capable of almost mythic image making.⁵⁶ According to Winther-Tamaki, by taking Dürer as his model, Kōno enthroned himself in “one of the most uncompromisingly self-aggrandizing prototypes supplied by the Renaissance” to elevate himself to the status of omnipotent artist.⁵⁷ While his allusion to Dürer’s self-portrait certainly allowed Kōno to co-opt the symbolics of the old master and equate his art with his self as per the Taishō avant-garde ideal,⁵⁸ Kōno’s subtle reinterpretation of his model rather suggests an approach to the status of the sitter that is at odds with Dürer’s rhetoric of self-aggrandizement.

Significantly, Kōno’s Self-Portrait demurs from emulating the perfection of Dürer’s model and its allusions to divinity. Kōno rather draws upon the unforgiving attention to physical detail characteristic of Dürer’s other works, such as the portrait of his mother, to create a more humble image of the artist, not as a universal entity but as a discrete individual. Although his hair, like Dürer’s, is groomed so that not a single strand is out of place, his face exhibits the imperfections of a human. Behind his glasses, which photographs show he wore from his late teens, Kōno’s eyes appear magnified and emphatically uneven, clearly exhibiting his flawed vision. His equally uneven ears are exposed by his closely cropped hair, which contrasts dramatically with the long, flowing locks that neatly frame the perfect symmetry of Dürer’s Christ-like face. As in his revisions to Leonardo’s ideal forms in his portrait of Yoshiko, Kōno insists upon a greater truth to appearance at the expense of superficial beauty. Kōno’s personality thus shines through a less than beautiful face, identifying him not as the divine creator but as a serious, even “majestic” artist in the vein of Michelangelo.

While Kōno poses himself in the dignified, patrician robe worn by Dürer, its style and fit are incongruous with the black kimono and white woolen undershirt peeking out from under its fur trim. Regarding the mismatch between Kōno’s heritage and his assumption of the demeanor of a European Renaissance genius, one contemporary critic haughtily noted that Self-Portrait would have been better had the artist portrayed himself honestly as a “Shinano peasant” (Shinanojin 信濃人), referring to Kōno’s humble upbringing in Nagano.⁵⁹ By pointing to his rustic Japanese roots in the habitual dress exposed beneath Dürer’s robe, however, Kōno does not hide or deny his origins in favor of assuming a Eurocentric universal standard of grandeur but attempts to embody both simultaneously. The awkward conjunction of these two sartorial modes, visible in the mismatch between the thick white cuffs of his homely undershirt and the grand, voluminous sleeves of the stately robe, suggests Kōno’s awareness of the difficulty of realizing a neo-Renaissance ideal within himself.

It is in Kōno’s hands that the most striking departure from Dürer’s self-portrait can be observed. While Dürer’s right hand points upward and inward toward his heart, in what Koerner describes as a gesture of self-affirmation,⁶⁰ Kōno’s hands rest entwined upon a strangely animated but empty work glove. Reaching up from beneath his clasped palms, it is this fatigued glove instead of Kōno’s hand that uncannily enacts Dürer’s self-referential gesture, pointing both to his humble origins and exhaustive manual efforts to acquire artistic greatness. Furthermore, the index finger of Kōno’s left hand is mysteriously hidden from view, lost among his intertwined fingers. While the meaning of this gesture is unclear—it could simply be hidden beneath the palm of his right hand, holding up the work glove—the index finger is typically used to point out or assert the place of something. By removing this finger from view, Kōno deprives it of the visual and rhetorical force of Dürer’s index finger in Self-Portrait with Fur-trimmed Robe. The physical restraint of the hands, each entwined within the other, also denies the fingers’ potential to signify the artist’s manual skill. Rather than indexing self-assurance or commanding a brush, Kōno’s hands manifest an introspective, pensive stance that gestures toward his admission that no matter how great his skill in drawing, without true ambition, power, and personality he would never be a master artist.

Seeking a Way: The Bunten and On

It is amid his anxious musings over the state of his skill and potential for greatness in the 1916 notebook that Kōno settles upon personality as the key to painting and his future. “It is undeniably clear,” he wrote, “that [the greatness of a painting] depends upon the force of [the artist’s] personality,” and for Kōno, personality could only be strengthened by something he feared he lacked, a knowledge of truth (naijitsu no chishiki 内実の知識) derived from heaven.⁶¹ Kōno’s conviction regarding the vital role of a fully realized self in the production of great art was akin to Yanagi’s call for art to express the fullness of an artist’s “experience of existence,” and therefore was not unusual at this time. However, as this study has shown, Kōno’s path to artistic self-actualization was shaped by a variety of factors unique to the artist, including his unorthodox training and his spiritual fervor.

While Kōno resolved to cultivate a greater sense of self following his failure to be accepted at the 1916 Bunten, he took heart in his supreme draftsmanship, which he also determined to push to ever greater heights. Six months later, the fruits of his dedication were borne out in Self-Portrait, an adroit iteration of the academy’s graduation portrait that would earn his entrée to the salon. The somber expression and earthy palette of Kōno’s painting chimes with the self-portraits of art school graduates like Yasuda Ryūmon 保田龍門 (1891–1965), who also arrived on the Tokyo art scene in 1917 (see fig. 2); Kōno’s technique however goes further in the pursuit of high realism and academic finish. Upon learning of his acceptance, Kōno professed to having felt no anxiety over the outcome of his submission, because “any judge who doesn’t feel the artistic prowess of that face, those hands, and that fur collar isn’t human.”⁶² However, as noted above, the strength of his hand and its affinity to Dürer were seen as obstacles to the revelation of Kōno’s “spiritual truth.” For fellow yōga artist Yamamoto Kanae 山本鼎(1882–1946), Self-Portrait lacked the authenticity of either Dürer or Kōno, and he therefore accused the newcomer of the ultimate sin in an age of individualism, being “a shameless copyist.”⁶³

Kōno’s self-portrait shared the same fate as the “minute realism” (saimitsu byōsha 細密描写) of Kishida and the artists of the Grass and Earth Society, who had been roundly criticized for their realist paintings inspired by “classicist” (kotenha 古典派) Renaissance art. For these artists, the subjective meaning of their work had been superseded by their perceived submission to objective realism and the unassailable authority of Renaissance artistic precedent.⁶⁴ Although Kōno’s oeuvre demonstrates that his interest in Northern Renaissance art predated his introduction to Kishida in 1915, he surely took heart in the senior artist’s belief in realism as a viable mode of self-expression. Ultimately, however, Kōno’s carefully orchestrated manipulation of Dürer’s Christo-morphic archetype, which actually revealed his profound comprehension of the iconography of Renaissance painting as well as the machinations of a creative spirit, fell by the wayside as critics continued to obsess over the relative merits of the realist mode introduced two years earlier by Kishida and his peers. In this way, despite the original conception of his self-portrait, Kōno was caught in a double bind between prevailing anxieties over yōga’s derivativeness and the poor reception of the Grass and Earth Society’s classicist vision.

The failure of Taishō critics to attribute personality or spiritual truth to Kōno’s Self-Portrait was not merely a product of the contemporary obsession with originality and style. The complex symbolism at work in the painting was so peculiar as to be entirely obscure to the majority of contemporary viewers, who had little understanding of either Kōno’s idiosyncratic beliefs or Renaissance iconography. On reflection, the narrative of Kōno and his painting accords with the Taishō avant-garde ideal of the “expressionist artist” (hyōgenha no hito 表現派の人) who passionately pursues his inner life and expresses it in his art without concern for public recognition. Although Kōno did in fact seek approbation, his painting was highly expressionist in that it could, in the words of Yanagi, “only be understood through empathy of the soul.”⁶⁵

Kōno had resolved to learn from, not copy, the likes of Dürer, but Self-Portrait suggests that, like so many yōga artists of his generation, he had yet to “build upon another rock.” Despite his prodigious efforts, in the eyes of his contemporaries Kōno was unable to transform Dürer’s style into an image of his own personhood. From the hand of an artist consumed with questions of self-worth, Self-Portrait could never be the confident representation of an aggrandized self seen in Dürer’s prototype and thus Kōno’s viewers were disappointed. However, in this ambitious attempt to express his self, Kōno did not deny his struggle to emulate the old masters and achieve greatness, but indexed them throughout the painting, from the awkwardly fitting robe and empty glove to the curling golden oak leaves. If there is a lack of self or personality in the painting, as claimed by Ōno Takanori, it is precisely that felt by the artist, making Kōno’s self-portrait a sincere expression of his “spiritual truth.”

After Self-Portrait went on display at the Bunten in October 1917, Kōno continued to contemplate his future and his place in the world as an artist. Undeterred by his painting’s mixed reviews, or perhaps inspired by them, under the heading “Endeavour—Seeking a Way,” Kōno wrote: “We are in a world filled with light. Our eyes can’t see it. We must remedy this. The more we see, the more light enters our eyes. The more we progress, the more light enters into us.”⁶⁶ Self-Portrait suspends Kōno in this act of seeking light from a place of existential and artistic darkness. Gazing unflinchingly out of the canvas with sleeves rolled up and hands at the ready, the young Kōno faces the world, seeking to progress whether by the light of God, the old masters, or the natural world.