Kuninosuke Matsuo and the Yomiuri Independent Exhibitions (Part I)
From fall 2010 through May this year, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum has held a series of two exhibitions of works from its collection titled “MOT Collection Chronicle 1947-1963: Days of Independent Art Exhibitions.” The exhibitions, which focused on the two “independent” exhibitions that were launched soon after the end of the Second World War, included a wealth of material and were well worth seeing. The Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions (initially titled the Nihon Indépendent Exhibitions) in particular are essential subject matter for anyone interested in Japan’s post-war avant-garde art. However, the matter of who planned the Yomiuri Indépendent and brought it to fruition was not even touched on at the MOT shows. So for the next few installments of this column I intend to depart from the usual review format and write about one particular figure. The name of this figure is referred to extremely casually in Haha no tegami (Mother’s letters), compiled just before the war by Taro Okamoto, who would have turned 100 this year. The following is just a short postscript from one of these letters, sent by Okamoto’s mother Kanoko from Berlin to her son in Paris, where he remained when his parents left to return to Japan.
“Taro, how are Mr Fujita and Mr Matsuo? Kanoko”(1)
And below is an extract from a letter sent to Taro in far off Europe by Kanoko after she and her husband, Ippei, had arrived in Japan.
“Tell me what you want me to send from Japan, won’t you now. I’m worried about the tax, so make sure you let me know about that, too. I also want to send some things to the people helping you there, but I can’t at the moment because I’m worried about the tax. Ask Mr Matsuo if there’s anything he wants, and I’ll send it by all means.”(2)
And below is yet another extract.
“I heard they charge a high tax on food, so I didn’t send it directly to Mr Matsuo. I’ve sent it to you in a single parcel, so please deliver it as is. It’s similar to the food I sent to you in a separate parcel. Don’t forget to deliver it, now!”(3)
Judging by these accounts alone, it’s impossible to tell exactly what kind of figure this “Mr Matsuo” was. But for now it’s enough. All we need to know is that like Tsuguoharu Foujita, who was a contemporary of Ippei’s at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, this mysterious figure was asked by Kanoko to keep an eye on her son; that, judging from the regard she pays him in numerous letters, he had become a benefactor of sorts; and that in appreciation of this she sent him food (probably Japanese food of some sort) through Taro despite her concerns about the tax. At the least, it seems Taro met this “Mr Matsuo” numerous times during his time in Paris and was looked after by him in one way or another.
The man’s full name was Kuninosuke Matsuo, and at the time he was a correspondent for the Yomiuri Shimbun in Paris.
For most people he is an unfamiliar figure, so why is he so important to me and other critics interested in post-war Japanese art? To begin from the conclusion, it’s because we suspect this same Kuninosuke Matsuo was actually the instigator of the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions, which became a bastion of avant-garde art in post-war Japan.
According to the commonly accepted theory, the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions owed a great deal to the efforts of Hideo Kaido, a good friend of Taro Okamoto’s who worked at the Culture Desk of the Yomiuri Shimbun. In fact, reading Genpei Akasegawa’s Han-geijutsu anpan (Anti-Art Indépendent), one gains an appreciation of the importance of Kaido’s role in the neo-Dada and anti-art movements that are now practically synonymous with the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions. As well, referring back to Taro Okamoto as an example, the recreation of Wounded Arm (1936), which is still regarded as one of the artist’s most important works, along with several other works from Okamoto’s Paris period that were destroyed by fire during the war, was undertaken by Okamoto at the suggestion of Kaido.
However, when it comes to the questions of precisely when and from whom the proposal came to realize in Japan – at a time when the authority of “painting circles” was unchallenged – an exhibition “without prizes or judges and in which anyone could exhibit freely,” or in other words, an extremely anarchic exhibition completely free of any hierarchy with respect to expression, and how it came to be officially sanctioned by the Yomiuri Shimbun, absolutely no material from the time survives (even at the newspaper concerned). At the least, it is difficult to imagine that Kaido, who had narrowly avoided dismissal as a result of his involvement in the immediate post-war period in the Yomiuri dispute (1945-46), which broke out after employees put forward demands for internal democratization of the newspaper and the acceptance of war responsibility by the newspaper’s president, Matsutaro Shoriki, and other executives, but who had only just been transferred from the Economics Desk to the Culture Desk after being ordered to take leave as punishment, was capable of such a feat. So although it is undeniable that Kaido made a considerable contribution to the later cultural endeavors undertaken by the Yomiuri Shimbun, it is almost certain that he was not the actual instigator of the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions.
So, just what kind of figure was Kuninosuke Matsuo? Let us start by addressing this question.
Matsuo was born in 1899 in Shizuoka. After graduating from the French Department at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, he found employment at the Ministry of Communications. In 1922 he landed in Marseille, France, having left Japan to study abroad. By this time Foujita was already in France.
In France, Matsuo single-handedly published Revue Franco-Nipponne, which could be described as the starting point of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange. He also founded the Franco-Japanese Cultural Liaison Association and mingled with the likes of the aforementioned Foujita, Keishichi Ishiguro and Mitsuharu Kaneko. It was in 1930 that Taro and his parents Ippei and Kanoko arrived in Paris having disembarked at the port of Marseille, and the family may have been introduced to Matsuo by Foujita. But leaving aside the matter of who was friends with whom, the thing that needs to be noted before anything else when considering Matsuo is that he was not simply an international man of culture, but a strong-minded individual who fervently supported anarchism. In fact his relationship with the Yomiuri Shimbun came about as a result of his following in the footsteps of Jun Tsuji, the famous anarchist poet of the Taisho period, to become the Yomiuri Shimbun’s Special Correspondent in Paris. Matsuo subsequently became a foreign correspondent for the Yomiuri Shimbun (it is thought that he came into contact with Taro Okamoto at around this time) and then Paris bureau chief.
During his service the Second World War broke out, but unlike Okamoto and others who returned home on the last repatriation ship bound for Japan, the Hakusan Maru, and Foujita and others, who returned slightly earlier on the NYK Line Fushimi Maru, Matsuo stayed on in Europe. He remained at the Paris bureau until the city fell to the Germans, after which he was dispatched to Istanbul. In 1943 he became the Madrid bureau chief, a position he held until the end of the war. It was not until January 1946, well after Japan’s surrender, that he returned to Japan. Upon his return he resumed working at the Yomiuri Shimbun, rising to become an editorial writer in July and then deputy editor. Matsuo retired in 1957, and died in 1975 in Tsujido, Fujisawa City.
As mentioned above, Matsuo was influenced by the nihilist and anarchist thought of the Taisho period, so much so that upon his return to Japan he revived the journal Kyomu shiso kenkyu (Studies on nihilist thought), which had been founded in 1925 by his hero, Jun Tsuji. In fact, Matsuo himself mentions in his writings how on one occasion he delivered outside supplies to Sakae Osugi – perhaps the first figure whose name comes to mind when Taisho period anarchism is mentioned – when Osugi was imprisoned while engaging in political activities in Paris. Matsuo, who had a passion for art and literature, was a particularly close friend of Foujita’s and had a detailed knowledge of, and a network of contacts in, the art world in France. It would come as no surprise if there were a connection between the chosen form of the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions, which has its origins in the civic spirit of independence that has existed since the French revolution, and Matsuo’s anarchist ideas.
Incidentally, the first Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibition opened in January 1949, several years after Matsuo’s return to Japan.
(To be continued)
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- Letter dated September 1, 1931. Taro Okamoto.
Haha no tegami: haha kanoko, chichi Ippei e no tsuiso
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- (Mother’s letters: memories of my mother Kanoko and father Ippei). (Tokyo: Chikuma Shuhansha, 1993) p.89.
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