This exhibition follows the transition of what the artist focused on, from objective realism to subjective realism, with some 170 works.
Kishida Ryūsei is a Western-style painter active during the Taishō period (1912-1926) and is well known for his unique realism and strong personality expressed in his works. He had never visited Europe in his lifetime, and had accepted Western-style painting on his own and independently while he lived in Japan. On the other hand, he gradually started to express the beauty hidden inside a subject.
This exhibition introduces Ryūsei’s paintings, prints and other works such as book designs mainly from the collection of Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, and follows the transitional process of his expressions from the objective realism which he learned and accepted from Western art in the beginning to the subjective realism — focusing on capturing the substance of a subject and describing his own feelings — which had been developed with a distinctive manner in his later works of Japanese-styled paintings and Oriental-styled book decorations. By exploring the process of how he had accepted Western art and overcame it, the exhibition provides an opportunity to reexamine a cross section of Japanese modern art.