小出楢重の美術学校時代と初期作品

Koide Narashige (1887-1931) was a man of exceptionally modern sense among Japanese Wes- tern-style painters, and has left many notable works from about 1920 to his last years. Detail ed study about him, however, has not been made heretofore. His early paintings and activities, more especially, remain rarely unknown. Recently a few of his early works have been discovered, and it became also known that there are some letters of this period which provide us with sources of information about a part of his student period. Based upon these new discoveries, the author discusses on Koide's career during his studentship at the Tokyo Art School (now the Tokyo University of Arts). In 1907 Koide tried to enter the Western Painting Department of the Tokyo Art School. He failed to pass the examination and entered the Japanese Painting Department, where he was taught by Shimomura Kanzan, Tsuruta Kisui and other professors on Japanese painting. He was particularly favored by Tsuruta, who guided him days and nights and promised him a bright future. At about the end of his second year grade in 1908, however, he realiged that the materials of Japanese painting were not suit able for his art, and decided to turn to Western painting as he had formerly wished to. In 1909 he finished the two-year course of Japanese painting and re-entered the Western Painting Department. He thus made a renewed start as a Western-style painter under the guidance of Professors Kuroda Seiki and Nagahara Kôtarô. In the field of Western-style painting in Japan at the time, the Plein-airistic style, which Kuroda studied under Rephael Collin and brought back to Japan, was dominant. The Western Painting Department at the Tokyo Art School also laid importance on the Plein-airistic style, to which, however, Koide showed a strong resistance. Nevertheless, he was not a man of such vehement character to participate in Fauvistic movement which impressed young artists of the time. His painting in this period are rather realistic ones in which dark color tones and modest expression were the keynotes. Speaking on a general ground, they do not yet show any distinctive original style of his own. He spent the years at the Tokyo Art School as an unnoticed student and was graduated in 1914, to experience thereafter a few more years of trying self-exploration.