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好子像 (Portrait of Yoshiko) by 河野通勢 Michisei Kono (Japanese) - Oil on canvas / 1916 - 東京国立近代美術館 (The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo) #womeninart #art #JapaneseArt #東京国立近代美術館 #oilpainting #河野通勢 #NationalMuseumofModernArt #MichiseiKono #KonoMichisei #womensart #portraitofawoman #JapaneseArtist #洋画
In Portrait of Yoshiko, Japanese artist Kōno Michisei (河野通勢) frames his friend and first love, Yoshiko (好子), with a Renaissance-inspired golden arch, through which a verdant landscape can be seen. Yoshiko is depicted with a high-degree of verisimilitude, to which Kōno has diligently sublimated common energetic lines. Among the numerous studies of Yoshiko produced as preparatory works for this portrait, a faithful copy of Dürer’s drawing of his mother appears alongside a profile of Yoshiko’s pretty face. Executed and dated within days of one another, in these drawings Kōno explores the limits of Dürer’s detailed but grotesque realism and the relationship between visual fidelity, beauty, and character in portraiture. For Yoshiko’s portrait, Kōno ultimately settled on a compromise between the aesthetic appeal of High Renaissance naturalism, derived from Leonardo’s enigmatic Mona Lisa, and the psychological insight afforded by Dürer’s mannerist approach, to depict a subject whose beauty hovers somewhere between the “splendid” and “majestic.” While Yoshiko is posed in a stately manner before a landscape bathed in golden light like her Renaissance prototype, her features are sharply rendered and somewhat distorted in accordance with the portrait of Dürer’s mother. Yoshiko’s beauty manifests itself as more earthy and therefore more authentic compared to the sfumato-brushed beauty of the Mona Lisa. Through painting Yoshiko, a familiar subject in which he believed a beautiful spirit indeed shone through a beautiful face, Kōno was able to attempt the creation of a sincere and artistically refined expression of personality, at once faithful to the prevailing individualist sentiment of the times and redolent of great old master portraiture. Kōno painted on the fringes of the Tokyo avant-garde to overcome the naturalism advocated by the academy in pursuit of an art more true to the individual during the art revolution from Taisho period yōga 洋画 (Western-style painting).
March 3, 2025 at 3:11 AM