Obscure Japanese Sarcasm by Chimei Hamada (b.1917)

Special thanks to Hiro Gallery in Tokyo and Izukogen for this great biography of the artist:

• 1917 Born in Kumamoto Prefecture.
• 1939 Graduated from Tokyo School of Fine Arts.
• 1956 Exhibited by invitation at The 2nd Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan. Ghost Brought Back to Life and Vice-Principal Mr. D. received an award.
• Exhibited at the ? Mostra Internazionale di Bianco e Nero 1956-Lugano. Elegy for a New Conscript: Sentinel received the second prize.
• 1960 Exhibited by invitation at The 4th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan. A Group of the Blind won the award of excellence.
• 1962 Received The 2nd Fukushima Award for Deranged Man.
• 1964 Visited Europe.
• 1965 Returned from Europe.
• Became an honorable member of the Florence Art Academy, Prints Division
• 1975 Chimei Hamada Copper Print Exhibition held at Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art. All the works from 1938 through 1975 shown.
• 1979 Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art held “CHIMEI HAMADA” copper print exhibition. All works shown.
• Albertina National Museum of Art, Vienna, Austria organized Chimei Hamada Exhibition where self-nominated 100 copper prints were displayed. Exhibition also shown at Graz State Museum of Modern Art, Graz, Austria.
• Traveled to Europe for the opening at Albertina National Museum of Art.
• On the way home, visited Paris.
• 1980 The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura organized “Chimei Hamada Copper Prints?From Elegy for a New conscript to Deal”. All copper prints exhibited.
• 1989 On occasion of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, awarded Grade de Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
• 1993 Exhibits at the Japan Gallery of The British Museum, London. Self-nominated 100 copper prints and 16 sculptures shown.
• 1994 Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art held “CHIMEI HAMADA” exhibition. All copper prints and sculptures shown.
• 1996 Held an exhibition, All About Chimei Hamada, which traveled from the Odakyu Museum of Art to the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama; the Shimonoseki City Art Museum; and the Itami City Museum of Art. (Produces by The Asahi Shimbun Co.)
• 2000 Held Chimei Hamada: Satire through Sculpture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura. All 52 sculptures and 25 prints shown.
• 2001 Held an exhibition, Chimei Hamada: Exploring Humans through Print and Sculpture, at Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art.
• Works displayed with Goya’s at the exhibition at Komagane Kogen Art Museum.
• 2005 Held an exhibition of new works and sculptures at Hiro Gallery, Tokyo, Gallery Nii, Osaka and Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto.
• 2006 Held Chimei Hamada exhibition at Homma Museum of Art, Yamagata.
• 2007 Held an exhibition, Chimei Hamada-Infinite Human Love, at Okawa Museum of Art, Gunma.
• 2008 Works placed at Uffizi Gallery in Florence and became the first Japanese Artist whose works were placed there.
• Uffizi Gallery organized Chimei Hamada exhibition which is the first Japanese artist’s one-man show.
• 2009 Held Chimei Hamada exhibition at Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art.
• 2010 Held “The World of HAMADA Chimei -Elegy and Humor in Prints and Sculpture-“ at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama in Kanagawa.

More on Flowers

Van Gogh painted several versions of landscapes with flowers, including hisView of Arles with Irises, and paintings of flowers, including Irises, Sunflowers,^[174] lilacs and roses. Some reflect his interests in the language of color, and also in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

He completed two series of sunflowers. The first dated from his 1887 stay in Paris, the second during his visit to Arles the following year. The Paris series shows living flowers in the ground, in the second, they are dying in vases. The 1888 paintings were created during a rare period of optimism for the artist. He intended them to decorate a bedroom where Gauguin was supposed to stay in Arles that August, when the two would create the community of artists van Gogh had long hoped for. The flowers are rendered with thick brushstrokes (impasto) and heavy layers of paint.^[176]

In an August 1888 letter to Theo, he wrote,

"I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when you know that what I'm at is the painting of some sunflowers. If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so quickly. I am now on the fourth picture of sunflowers. This fourth one is a bunch of 14 flowers ... it gives a singular effect.

A special sauce

n his final letter to Theo, Vincent admitted that as he did not have any children, he viewed his paintings as his progeny. Reflecting on this, the historian Simon Schama concluded that he "did have a child of course, Expressionism, and many, many heirs." Schama mentioned a wide number of artists who have adapted elements of van Gogh's style, including Willem de Kooning, Howard Hodgkin and Jackson Pollock.^[192] The Fauves extended both his use of color and freedom in application,^[193] as did German Expressionists of the Die Brücke group, and as other early modernists.^[194] Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s is seen as in part inspired from van Gogh's broad, gestural brush strokes. In the words of art critic Sue Hubbard: "At the beginning of the twentieth century Van Gogh gave the Expressionists a new painterly language that enabled them to go beyond surface appearance and penetrate deeper essential truths. It is no coincidence that at this very moment Freud was also mining the depths of that essentially modern domain—the subconscious. This beautiful and intelligent exhibition places Van Gogh where he firmly belongs; as the trailblazer of modern art."^[195]

In 1957, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) based a series of paintings on reproductions of van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, the original of which was destroyed during World War II. Bacon was inspired by not only an image he described as "haunting", but also van Gogh himself, whom Bacon regarded as an alienated outsider, a position which resonated with Bacon. The Irish artist further identified with van Gogh's theories of art and quoted lines written in a letter to Theo, "[R]eal painters do not paint things as they are...They paint them as they themselves feel them to be".^[196] An exhibition devoted to Vincent van Gogh's letters took place in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from October 2009 to January 2010^[197] and then moved to the Royal Academy in London from late January to April.^[198]

In the Fields

Failing to find a vocation in ministry, Van Gogh turned to art as a means to express and communicate his deepest sense of the meaning of life. Cliff Edwards, author of "Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest" wrote: "Vincent's life was a quest for unification, a search for how to integrate the ideas of religion, art, literature, and nature that motivated him."^[1]

Van Gogh came to view painting as a calling, "I feel a certain indebtedness [to the world] and... out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures -- not made to please a certain taste in art, but to express a sincere feeling."^[2] When Van Gogh left Paris for Arles, he sought an anecdote to the ills of city life and work among laborers in the field "giving his art and life the value he recognized in rural toil."^[3]

In the series of paintings about wheat fields, Van Gogh expresses through symbolism and use of color his deeply felt spiritual beliefs, appreciation of manual laborers and connection to nature.

As a young man Van Gogh pursued what he saw as a religious calling, wanting to minister to working people. In 1876 he was assigned a post in Isleworth, England to teach Bible classes and occasionally preach in the Methodist church.^[4][5]

When he returned to the Netherlands he studied for the ministry and also for lay ministry or missionary work without finishing either field of study. With support from his father, Van Gogh went to Borinage in southern Belgium where he nursed and ministered to coal miners. There he obtained a six-month trial position for a small salary where he preached in an old dance hall and established and taught Bible school. His self-imposed zeal and asceticism cost him the position.^[5]

After a nine-month period of withdrawal from society and family; he rejected the church establishment, yet found his personal vision of spirituality, "The best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something - whatever you like - (and) you will be on the way to knowing more about Him; this is what I say to myself. But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence."^[5] By 1879, he made a shift in the direction of his life and found he could express his "love of God and man" through painting.^[4]

Drawn to Biblical parables, Van Gogh found wheat fields metaphors for humanity's cycles of life, as both celebration of growth and realization of the susceptibility of nature's powerful forces.^[6]

• Of the Biblical symbolism of sowing and reaping Van Gogh taught in his Bible lessons: "One does not expect to get from life what one has already learned it cannot give; rather, one begins to see more clearly that life is a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not here."^[7

• 

  The Sower, June 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Inspired by Jean-François Millet Van Gogh made several paintings after The Sower by Millet
  The image of the sower came to Van Gogh in Biblical teachings from his childhood, such as:

"A sower went out to sow. As he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty fold, and sixty fold and a hundredfold.(Mark 4:3-8)^[7]

• Van Gogh used the digger and ploughman as symbols of struggle to reach the kingdom of God. ^[8]

• He was particularly enamored with "the good God sun" and called anyone who didn't believe in the sun infidels. The painting of the haloed sun was a characteristic style seen in many of his paintings, ^[9] representing the divine, in reference to the nimbus in Delacroix's Christ Asleep During the Tempest.^[10]

• Van Gogh found storms important for their restorative nature, symbolizing "the better times of pure air and the rejuvenation of all society." Van Gogh also found storms to reveal the divine. ^[11]

 

I love fields!

Contemplating Sunflowers

Sunflowers (original title, in French: Tournesols) are the subject of two series of still life paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The earlier series executed in Paris in 1887 gives the flowers lying on the ground, while the second set executed a year later in Arles shows bouquets of sunflowers in a vase. In the artist's mind both sets were linked by the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Paris versions. About eight months later Van Gogh hoped to welcome and to impress Gauguin again with Sunflowers, now part of the painted décoration he prepared for the guestroom of his Yellow House where Gauguin was supposed to stay in Arles. After Gauguin's departure, Van Gogh imagined the two major versions as wings of the Berceuse Triptych, and finally he included them in his exhibit at Les XX in Bruxelles.

Little is known of Van Gogh's activities during the two years he lived with his brother Theo in Paris, 1886-1888. The fact that he had painted Sunflowers already is only revealed in spring 1889, when Gauguin claimed one of the Arles versions in exchange for studies he had left behind after leaving Arles for Paris. Van Gogh was upset and replied that Gauguin had absolutely no right for this request: "I am definitely keeping my sunflowers in question. He has two of them already, let that hold him. And if he is not satisfied with the exchange he has made with me, he can take back his little Martinique canvas,^[1] and his self-portrait sent me from Brittany,^[2] at the same time giving me back both my portrait^[3] and the two sunflower canvases which he has taken to Paris. So if he ever broaches this subject again, I've told you just how matters stand."^[4]