Karl Walser, a shadow that re-emerges from the past

It is not a name that belongs to the canon - and perhaps that is why it returns. In Tokyo, at the Tokyo Station Gallery, the exhibition dedicated to Karl Walser marks the first major retrospective in Japan of an artist who moved through the early twentieth century without ever settling into a single definition. Born in Switzerland in 1877, Walser trained between Bern and Berlin, where he joined the Berlin Secession and developed a painting shaped by Symbolist influences and a refined use of color. Rather than aligning with a single movement, he built an irregular trajectory, working as an illustrator, stage designer and visual artist across multiple fields. The exhibition brings together around 150 works, many shown in Japan for the first time, and follows this dispersion as a method. There is no linear evolution, but a sequence of crossings: from early Symbolist paintings to Jugendstil drawings, and on to theatrical and editorial work. The most unexpected chapter is his time in Japan. In 1908, Walser travelled there with writer Bernhard Kellermann, staying in Tokyo, Kyoto and Miyazu. The resulting watercolours and sketches depict landscapes, festivals and everyday life. They are not exotic in the conventional sense: the gaze is direct, almost documentary, yet shaped by a subtle chromatic sensitivity. Here, something shifts. Color becomes lighter, more fluid, while composition loosens its structure. It is not a clear stylistic break, but a perceptual displacement, as if the encounter with another visual culture introduced a lasting instability. Long overshadowed - not least by his brother Robert, a central figure in European literature - Walser now re-emerges as an artist difficult to classify. The exhibition does not attempt to resolve this ambiguity, but to reveal it: a practice that moves across media, contexts and disciplines, leaving traces rather than systems.