Museums

AOKI Shigeru《A Gift of the Sea》1904 Oil on canvas (important cultural property)

Aoki was born in Shojima-machi, Kurume, in Fukuoka. In 1899, intending to become an artist, he left Fukuoka Prefectural Meizen Middle School in Kurume to go to Tokyo and enter Koyama Shotaro’s Fudosha painting school. In 1900, he was admitted to the Western Painting Faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In 1903, he showed his Yomotsuhirasaka and other paintings on mythological themes at the eighth Hakubakai Exhibition, winning the Hakuba Award. In 1904, after graduating in July from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Aoki went with Sakamoto Hanjiro, Morita Tsunetomo, and Fukuda Tane to Mera, a fishing port in Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture. During his stay there, which continued until the end of August, he produced A Gift of the Sea and other superb paintings on maritime themes. He showed A Gift of the Sea at the ninth Hakubakai Exhibition that fall, garnering further attention in the art world. However, his Paradise under the Sea, which he submitted with great confidence to the Tokyo Industrial Exhibition in 1907, received only the third prize, to his great disappointment. That August, at the death of his father in Kurume, he returned to his old home. His dream of returning to the center of the art world never realized, he roamed throughout Kyushu before his death from tuberculosis. Aoki’s career, brief as it was, placed him at the pinnacle of Meiji romanticism in painting.

Paul CÉZANNE《Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir》c. 1904-06 Oil on canvas

Cézanne sought to go beyond the Impressionist effort to capture on canvas the glowing moment seen with one’s eyes and to create paintings with an enduring sense of volume, an eternal tenacity. Achieving those contradictory qualities within the same painting was extremely difficult and required much trial and error. To realize his goal, Cézanne chose to distance himself from his Impressionist fellows and follow his own solitary path. He hoped to achieve his objectives by repeatedly painting several set subjects. In the latter half of the 1880s, he produced a series of paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a limestone mountain east of Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, where he was born. With this image. he succeeded at last in adding a sense of energy and resonance to the forceful picture plane, supported by vivid colors, in a work of great refinement. This painting is the culmination of his experiments. In the foreground is a dense growth of trees. Several brushstrokes form a single block of color, carving out a rhythm and creating a sense of depth in the picture plane. The yellow building, the Chateau Noir, is the only geometric shape in this painting; placed in the center, it pulls the composition together. By painting the same subject repeatedly, Cézanne was able to retain the sense of immediacy of the scene as he had perceived it while achieving paintings with a structural quality. His revolutionary work quickly had a decisive influence on twentieth-century art, including Cubism, Fauvism, and Abstraction.

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