Ishii Hakutei (born Mankichi)

Ishii Hakutei was a Japanese painter and woodblock printer best remembered for his Western-style (yōga) landscape paintings. His writings on European modernism also contributed to the rapid global dissemination of Cubism before the First World War.

Born in Tokyo in 1882, Hakutei was the son of the Nihonga, or traditional Japanese-style, painter and lithographer Ishii Teiko, with whom he studied early in his life. In 1898, a year after his father’s death, Hakutei became a student of the master painter Chū Asai, who taught him oil and watercolor painting. An artist and activist who advocated for a Western-style and teaching reforms, Hakutei was then associated with the art and literary magazines Myōjō (1900–8), Heitan (1905‒6), and Hosun (1907‒10), the last of which was modeled in layout and scope on the German Art Nouveau periodical Jugend. Hakutei traveled to Egypt, Turkey, and Italy in 1910, as well as Paris and London. He then lived in the French capital between 1911 and 1912. During this time, Hakutei wrote extensively about European art, reporting on Fauvist, Futurist, Cubist, and the Blaue Reiter painting he had seen exhibited at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne, among other exhibitions. Hakutei published the first known accounts of modern painting in Japan in Tokyo asahi shimbun in July 1911 and Waseda bungaku in December 1912, informing local readers about the avant-garde. One year later, his Japanese translation from the English edition of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s 1912 book Du Cubisme was published in serial form in the art journal Gendai no yōga.

Hakutei’s writings, as well as exhibitions of work by Japanese artists who had studied abroad, spurred local painters to adopt Western developments in modernism by the First World War. While Hakutei advocated for a new modern art—even co-founding the secessionist group Nikakai in 1914—he nonetheless emphasized that Japanese art should retain its national character. In his publications, Hakutei highlighted works by Japanese artists such as Yasui Sōtarō, Narashige Koide, and Seifū Tsuda alongside discussions of Cubism’s visual vocabulary.

Between 1915 and 1920, Hakutei traveled widely across the Asian continent, visiting China and Korea. In 1921 he co-founded the Bunka Gakuin College in Tokyo along with the poet Tekkan Yosano, his wife Yosano Akiko, and the printer Nishimura Kumakichi. He taught art classes there until he resigned during the Second World War. In addition to this post, Hakutei also served as a faculty member at Tokyo University and the Imperial Fine Arts Academy.

In 1923, Hakutei also returned to Europe, traveling in Belgium, England, Italy, and Scandinavia, and exhibiting in a solo show at Galerie Marcel Bernheim et Cie in Paris. Four years later, in recognition of his contributions to the dissemination of knowledge about Parisian modern art in Japan, Hakutei received the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the French government. In subsequent years, Hakutei founded and participated in numerous other artist societies dedicated to advancing the aesthetic and techniques of Western modernism. After his Tokyo studio was air-raided in March 1945, he and his family left to live in the inland Shinano province. He later returned to Tokyo and was awarded the Kyokujitsu-shō, a national honor badge recognizing exemplary achievements, just weeks before his death in 1958.