Prehistoric Storks

Across an expanse of a pair of screens, a flock of storks has taken flight—geometricized and abstracted in ink. The Kyoto-based painter Shimomura Ryōnosuke pioneered new modes of expression in the field of Nihonga (modern Japanese-style painting) in postwar Japan. He is especially known for being an early ardent member and later the primary leader of the Pan Real Art Association, which had been founded in Kyoto in 1948, and which set out to chart out a radically new direction for Nihonga, which by the 1930s and through the war period had become associated with conservative values and even nationalism. Shimomura achieved a reputation as a “rebel painter” within the traditional genre of Nihonga, and is counted among the pioneering artists of the “avant-garde” art movement in postwar Japan.

Born in Osaka, Shimomura studied at the Kyoto Prefectural School of Painting (the present Kyoto City University of Arts). His earliest works showed Cubist and Surrealist influences, but the experience of war had instilled deep skepticism toward traditional Nihonga and its representation of idyllic scenes of nature, and the artist expanded his attention to social and political subjects in some of his works. After the war, Shimomura completely abandoned conventional “Flower, Bird, Wind, and Moon” (Kachō fūgetsu) depictions of nature. Shimomura began creating low-relief painting-sculptures made from papier-mache on plywood, over which he painted. These early works approximated the appearance of fossilized glyphs surviving from a pre-modern culture, which he then transferred to the medium of painting. He became preoccupied with the theme of birds, but not rendered in a traditional manner. Even in his works on natural themes, inspired by Rinpa precedents, he was attempting to create paintings on avian themes that were dominated by “birds that slash through the sky.” During the late 1970s, Shimomura created a series of major paintings on the theme of storks, including this set of screens. The artist referred to the birds as Marabou storks (hagekō), but the artist revealed in his writings that he was not depicting a living species, but rather was inspired by an extinct variety of giant (six-foot-tall) marabou storks that are only known from fossils.