Maeta Kanji, the Modern

He died at just thirty-three, yet in little more than a decade he helped reshape the course of Western-style painting in Japan. Marking the 130th anniversary of his birth, a major retrospective - the first in eighteen years - revisits the remarkable career of Maeta Kanji (1896 - 1930), highlighting the decisive role he played in ushering in a new chapter in Japanese modern painting. The exhibition also celebrates the centenary of the founding of the 1930 Society, the avant-garde group established by Maeta together with some of the most promising young Japanese painters returning from Paris. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1921, Maeta quickly gained recognition when Flowers and Children was selected for the prestigious Imperial Art Exhibition. The following year he moved to Paris, where he remained for about two and a half years. There he closely studied the works of Courbet, Ingres and Manet, carefully observing the evolution of European painting while developing the ambition to forge a distinctive artistic language of his own. Those years proved crucial not only to his artistic development but also to his intellectual formation. His friendship with Marxist theorist Kazuo Fukumoto led him to reflect on the social role of art and inspired him to turn his attention to workers and the realities of modern society. The exhibition highlights three central themes that define Maeta's artistic vision. The first is poetry. For Maeta, painting was above all a search for the poetic dimension of the image. While still a student he wrote in his notebook, "A painting is a poem," and throughout his life he repeatedly declared that "a painting without poetry is worthless." This was not simply a Romantic ideal, but the conviction that art should transcend representation in order to evoke emotional and spiritual experience. The second theme is realism. Maeta was among the first Japanese painters to depict contemporary society without rhetoric, as demonstrated by works such as Family of a Master Carpenter. For him, realism did not mean merely reproducing appearances faithfully; it emerged from the balance of texture, volume and a profound sense of reality, enabling a painting to convey the essence of its subject rather than simply its outward form. Finally, the exhibition explores Maeta's constant pursuit of beauty, which he regarded as something ever-changing and deeply connected to its own time. "Beauty changes. That is the truth," he wrote in 1927. During his final months in Paris he created some of his most compelling nudes, including Woman in Black and Reclining Nude. After returning to Japan, he continued to paint female figures that reveal a fully mature and highly personal language, poised between the legacy of European painting and a distinctly Japanese sensibility. His premature death in 1930 brought to an end a career that seemed destined to redefine modern Japanese painting. For this reason, the retrospective represents far more than a commemorative tribute: it restores to public view an artist who understood that true modernity did not lie in imitating the West, but in transforming its visual language into something entirely new.