Kaii Higashiyama, Vibrant Greens, 1982, paper and Japanese pigments (nihonga), 84 x 116 cm

Courtesy of Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum Higashiyama Kaii Gallery

Why, among all the great Japanese nihonga artists, is Kaii Higashiyama so popular? He is widely considered Japan’s best landscape painter, and as such his exhibitions attract hundreds of thousands of visitors and are guaranteed blockbusters. Surely, his centennial exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) will also draw a massive throng of admirers. Higashiyama’s largest retrospective so far, the show is divided into seven thematic sections, with 101 of his major paintings and 53 sketches on display.

My first up-close encounter with Higashiyama’s work was in 2005 at an exhibition of his famous fusuma (sliding door) mural paintings from the Toshodai-ji in Nara, which were showing at Ueno’s Tokyo National Museum while the temple was being renovated. By chance I was standing next to renowned fashion designer Issey Miyake in front of the sumie work Breeze at Yangzhou (1980), based on one of Higashiyama’s many sojourns to China. I muttered something like, “Isn’t it beautiful,” and Miyake turned to me and said, “You can really feel the depth of his spirit.”

He was right. There is something magnetic about the work—something that reaches out to the viewer—despite the simplicity of the nature themes and flat two-dimensionality.

Much of Higashiyama’s appeal is that simplicity. He purposely focused on the whole of the scene and not on its details, illuminating the shape of an object and how it offsets the space. “This is why our linear sense is so very demanding,” he wrote. In his work there are no people, and few animals. There is an occasional white horse, which the artist said appeared to him like a mystical vision during
a sketching session.

Adding to Higashiyama’s popularity is his soft, rich coloration. Nihonga pigments produce a lush blur effect, especially effective in works with landscape themes. The fusuma murals titled Sound of Waves (1975) and Cloudy Mountains (1975) blend the drama of rolling tides and the silence of drifting mist. For a moment you are there with the artist on a craggy shore viewing that breathtaking seascape. Higashiyama’s bright red and yellow work of Japanese maple trees titled Glowing Autumn Leaves (1968) jolts you with a festival of colors.

The painter traveled abroad for extensive periods and said that European artists greatly influenced his work. After finishing at the Tokyo Art Academy in 1934, he journeyed throughout Europe and entered Berlin University as the first exchange student from Japan. The works titled Window (1971) and Evening Bells (1971) were inspired by his time there. In 1962 Higashiyama traveled throughout Scandinavia, and from 1976 he began his many sumie sketching trips to China.

The artist’s popularity also comes in part from the sheer volume of his work. He passed away at the ripe age of 91 after producing thousands of paintings, sketches, studies and lithographs during a career that spanned almost three generations. Some of his most famous works are among the 900 he donated to the Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, which displays them in its Higashiyama Kaii Gallery. The Kagawa Prefectural Higashiyama Kaii Setouichi Art Museum, meanwhile, houses over 270 lithographs donated by his family after his passing.

In addition to creating art, Higashiyama was also noted for his writings, which include this passage: “Encounters with natural landscapes must always be considered once-and-forever affairs. Nature is alive and constantly changing. The same is true of human beings. We are destined to follow an eternal cycle of growth and decline, life and death. Nature and human beings are forever linked to this cycle.”

On the heels of the cherry blossom season, it’s easy to reflect on the impermanence of nature and our time here on this fragile Earth.

Through May 18, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. See exhibition listings (Ginza/Kyobashi/Tokyo) for details.