Minakami Taisei 水上泰生 (1877 –1951)
Melting of the Snow「 雪解け」
Item number: T-3282RSize: H 66.4" x W 147.6" (168.7 x 375 cm)
Age: circa 1920
Pair of six-panel folding screens
Mineral pigments, ink, gofun and gold on silk
Signature: Taisei 泰生. Seals: Kōjundōjin 廣純堂人
The artist presents the viewer with a tour-de-force nature study of a mountain meadow at the time of melting snow. Among the rough forms of the mossy rocks, we see snow banks melting by a profusion of new plants. Among others we see the bramble (ibara), mountain mandarin orange (yama tachibana), Amur Adonis (fukujusō), ferns (shida), violet (sumire), magnolia (kobushi), spindle tree (mayumi), pine (matsu), bamboo grass (sasa), bamboo (take), pampas grass (susuki), and a creeper (kazura).
The title yukidoke—Melting of the Snow—is a term that has been used in the visual arts and in literature as a point of change that marks the end of the cold and the approach of spring. As such, the painter’s theme plays within long Japanese traditions. The execution of the painting, however, is daringly unconventional and anything but traditional. The rocks, in particular, are painted with a mixture of techniques unusual for Nihonga paintings: for example, tarashikomi (dripped pigments), hatsuboku (»broken« ink), varied gofun applications, accentuated brush marks, and the application of thick layers of pigments. The rocks appear in an imaginative new mixture of Japanese techniques with the new abstracted art images imported from European artists. Through the combination of numerous techniques and daring experimentation, the rock surfaces now appear to be wet with moisture, almost as if they were streams of water, adding to the sense of the snow melting and of the imminent arrival of spring.
The artist, Minakami Taisei (1877 –1951), was a native of Fukuoka in Kyūshū. He studied in Tokyo, graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1906, and then continued his studies under Araki Bokusen and Terazaki Kōgyō (1866 –1919) before returning to Kyūshū. Teaching at a local college, he started a parallel career as a painter, submitting works to exhibitions, both in Japan and abroad. After his resounding success in exhibitions and universal critical acclaim, he decided in 1916 to resign his teaching position and move back to Tokyo where he became active as a leading painter until the end of his life.1
His works entered the Bunten exhibitions six times and the Teiten twelve times, in addition to a number of other exhibitions.2 In time, he also became an exhibition judge and was accorded special status. He submitted a large-scale work Ryūkyū Flowers, a pair of screens depicting tropical plants from Okinawa, to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, where it received a prestigious gold medal.3 Eugen Neuhaus, then a professor at UC Berkeley, highlighted the work in his book on the exposition:
The two sixfold screens by Taisei Minakami …are probably the most magnificently daring examples of modern Japanese art. … Acutely observed … very daring in color …exhaustingly beautiful. The spacing of the design, the relative distribution of the few daring colors against a gold background of wonderful texture, combine in a picture of great vitality.4
These qualities of acute observation, daring display, and great vitality can also be seen clearly in Melting of the Snow. The screens with their exciting display of forms and colors highlight the expressive powers of a superb artist at the peak of his powers. They never fail to excite and reward the viewer who gives them yet another look, from up close or from afar.
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