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Profile Takehisa Yumeji 竹久夢二  (1884-1934), was a leading figure in the Taisho Romanticism movement which combined Western romanticism with native Japanese styles during the Taisho Period (1912-1926).  He was a painter, writer, poet, bookbinder and illustrator whose drawings of women with thin bodies and large eyes filled with melancholy were known as Yumeji Bijin-ga.  During the height of his popularity he was called the “modern Utamaro” and the Japanese “Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch”.  His prints epitomized the relationship between popular art and the woodblock.1  He is the printmaker "who best exemplifies the Taisho era."2 1 Modern JapaneseWoodblock Prints - The Early Years, Helen Merritt, University of Hawaii Press, 1998, p.23. 2 The Japanese Print: A Historical Guide, Hugo Munsterberg, Weatherhill, Inc., 1982, p. 160.

Biography

Sources:  British Museum website http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=143481; Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints - The Early Years, Helen Merritt, University of Hawaii Press, 1998,p. 23-31 and as footnoted.

Born Sept. 16, 1884 in the Okayama Prefecture village of Honjo to the son of a sake wholesaler, Yumeji had no formal art training.  It is said that while still a teenager he learned the art of line while working with a brush-maker. In 1901 at the age of seventeen his father sent him to Tokyo to study business at the private Waseda School where he developed a wide circle of friends that included Christians and leftists.  While a student, Yumeji began submitting illustrations to magazines and by 1905 he had left Waseda, finding that he could make a living selling his art. 

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After leaving Waseda he lived with socialists, sharing their sympathy for the working class and creating a number of political drawings. These drawings were published in the socialist paper Shukan chokugen (Weekly Plain Speaking) and he subsequently made drawings (under a pseudonym) for the socialist magazine Hikari and the socialist newspaper Heimin Shinbun.  When Heinmin Shinbunwas closed down by the government in 1907, Yumeji retreated from activepolitics “and turned to the expression of poetic feelings.”   He was,however, to remain deeply interested and effected by social issues theremainder of his life. In January 1907 Yumeji married Kishi Tamaki, who ran a postcard shop inTokyo. Thereafter he did a lot of design for postcards and other ephemera.Their relationship was extremely turbulent from the start and soonended in divorce in May 1909, though they remained attracted to eachother and continued to work together.

1910 poster from first solo exhibition

In 1909 his first book of sketches and poems was published, Yumeji Picture Collection – Spring Volume (Yumeji gashu - Haru no maki). About these sketches hesaid “I am going to write a poem using pictures instead of words.”  The emotional images he created were rife with nostalgia of thefloating world found in traditional ukiyo-e prints.  In 1910 he had hisfirst solo exhibition.  (The poster from the exhibition is shown on theleft.) The large-eyed, thin, sad beauties he created, based on his wifeTamaki and on subsequent mistresses, became the standard romantic imagefor his generation and they were eagerly bought by both young men andwomen. His style was heavily influenced by German 'Jugendstil' (as Jugendstil was itself influenced by ukiyo-e) and he studied the German magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus along with the works of the German Jugendstil artist Heinrich Vogeler (1872-1942).  Yumeji was also heavily influenced by the painter Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943)whose paintings captured the romantic spirit of the times. In 1913 his celebrated book of poetry Dontaku (Holiday) was issued, with book design by Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955) who had become a friend. It included the poem Yoimachi-gusa (Evening Primrose) which was set to music in 1918 and became a big national success. I wait even though I know she will not return. My heart sinks in melancholy like the evening primrose. It seems that the moon will not appear tonight - Evening Primrose by Takehisa Yumeji

Between 1914 and 1916 Tamaki and Yumeji founded and ran the Minato-ya shop in Tokyo which sold moku hanga (woodblock prints) and other paper goods which he designed.  Yumeji created drawings specifically designed to be turned into prints.   The blocks may have been carved by Igami Bonkotsu or Okura Hanbei and were printed by Hirai Koichi. Minato-ya attracted a “sophisticated clientele and became something of a gathering place for Tokyo’s more progressive artists” and Onchi’s Tsukubae group held an exhibition there soon after the shop opened.¹

In 1914 he met Kasai Hikono, who became his mistress, but who died early and tragically in 1920 at the age of twenty-four. In 1916 he became chief editor of illustrations for the Shin-shōjo (New Girls), a magazine by the publisher of the nation's oldest women's magazine, Fujin no tomo (Woman's Friend).²  (See the heading "The Shōjo Girl" below for a discussion of the shōjo

phenomenon.)  In 1917 he started creating covers for song sheets for the Senow Company.³ (See Yumeji's Song Sheet Designs below.) In 1919, after Hikono had gone into hospital, he met the third great female model in his life, Oyo, but this relationship ended in 1925. In the decade 1920-30 he constantly traveled to hot-spring resorts and continued to paint and to design. His most celebrated paintings included the series Nagasaki junikei (Twelve Views of Nagasaki, 1920) and Onna judai (Ten Female Subjects, 1921). These were watercolors, but he also worked in oils brush and ink and nihonga techniques.
Despite the popularity of his work, Yumeji was ignored by the increasingly conservative government art exhibitions the Bunten and Teiten.  This was not surprising as he was an outsider, with a Bohemian lifestyle, shunning the artist associations that brought publicity to their members.  He was also an outsider to the literary establishment.

Fireworks, woodblock print for cover of the magazine "The Ladies' Graphic" 1924	Autumn tune, woodblock print for cover of the magazine "The Ladies' Graphic" 1924	Wind of Snow, woodblock print for cover of the magazine  "The Ladies' Graphic" 1924

In 1931 Yumeji traveled to the United States and Europe, largely to escape the stifling effect of rising militarism in Japan.  In Berlin he delivered a lecture in which he called lines the “essence of art” because they express inner life.  Lines, he said, are not to depict objects but to transmit the artist’s spirit.  He returned to Japan in 1933, troubled by the rise of Nazism and the parallels he saw with Japan’s militarism.

Shortly after his return he checked into a sanitarium in Nagano.  He died there at the age of fifty. Yumeji Takehisa is buried in the Zoshigaya cemetery in Tokyo.

Yumeji’s influence on both shin hanga and sosaku hanga were considerable, as well as on graphic design and literary illustration in general. Having passed out of popularity by 1940, his reputation began to make a dramatic come-back in the 1970s, going hand in hand with renewed interest in the Taisho era of which he is now considered the representative figure.
1 Images of a Changing World: Japanese Prints of the Twentieth Century, Donald Jenkins, Portland Art Museum, 1983, p. 55.
² Website of Kodomo no kuni The International Library of Children's Literature / National Diet Library http://www.kodomo.go.jp/gallery/KODOMO_WEB/authors/takehisa_e.html
³ Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Elise K. Tipton and John Clark, University of Hawaii Press, 2000, p. 204.

The Shōjo Girl

Source: "Yoshiya Nobuko, Out and Outspoken in Practice and Prose," Jennifer Robertson, appearing in The Human Tradition in Modern Japan, edited by Anne Walthall, Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books, 2002, p. 157-158
In 1915, Yumeji collaborated with Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973), one of Japan's most successful woman novelists, illustrating a number of her stories. Nobuko serialized novels appearing in various women's magazines were immensely popular, as was Yumeji's work, with a new audience, the shōjo, or girl. (Literally, a “not-quite-female female.”)

A “really real” female was a married woman with children. The so-called shōjo perioddefined the emergent space between puberty and marriage that began togrow into a life-cycle phase, unregulated by convention, as more andmore young women found employment in the service sector of the newurban industrializing economy. Included in the shōjo category were the “new working woman” and her jaunty counterpart, the flapper-like “modern girl,” or moga (modan garu), who was cast in the popular media as the antitheses of the “good wife, wise mother.”

Yumeji's Song Sheet Designs

Cover for Yumeji's composition Evening Primrose (Yoimachigusa), 1918 Designed by Takehisa Yumeji

In 1910 the music publisher Senoo (Senow) Ongaku Shuppansha began issuing musical scores, the majority of them by Western composers.  Over 1000 scores for  classical and popular music, including children’s music, were issued, many under the titles “Senoo Gakufu” (セノオ楽譜) and “Senoo Shin-kouta.”   From 1916 until 1929, Yumeji designed over 280 covers  for Senoo’s published scores and contributed the lyrics for 24 songs of his own, the most famous of which is “Evening Primrose” (Yoimachigusa), published in 1918, and seen on the left.  The scores became very popular although few people could read or play the scores.  They were bought because of their cover art. Siz Yumeji-designed score covers make up part of this collection, IHL Cat. #s 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 2253.

Yumeji’s Prints

While Igami Bonkotsu and Okura Hanbei both worked as block carvers for Yumeji, it is not clear, according to Merritt, who carved the prints of the Minato-ya period (1914-1916).  Hirai Koichi was Yumeji’s printer during this period and Hirai reported that Yumeji closely supervised his work.  Prints from this period carry the Minato-ya seal and are quite rare. With the closing of Minato-ya, the blocks were sold to Yanagi-ya, a bookstore in Osaka, which issued prints from them as well as from Yumeji’s paintings and illustrations.  Kato Junji (aka Kata Junzo) of Nihon Hanga Kenkyusho (Kato Print Institute) also published many prints of Yumeji’s works after his death and in 1963 issued a set of six or seven woodblock prints titled Legends of Snowy Nights as a collection of small works by Yumeji. (See IHL Cat. 344, 357, 358.) Posthumous prints were also published by Kyoto Hanga-in and in the 1980s by Matsunaga.  The printer Naotaro Nagao (1920-?) was reprinting Yumeji's work into his 80s.  He relates that Yumeji and his wife Tamaki visited his workshop when he was a apprentice and instructed him on how to create the colors Yumeji was after.¹

Smith states that "technically excellent prints" were produced after his paintings and drawings both during and after his lifetime.  He goes on to say: "In themselves these prints represent a further conflict, for they are on the one hand reproductive and on the other genuine and successful attempts to convey the flavour of a most individual artist."²