Kawanabe Kyosai

KAWANABE KYOSAI (Japan, 1831 - 1889)
"Shoki, the destroyer of demons".
Woodcut print.
Measurements: 30 x 20 cm; 37 x 26 cm.(frame).

Kawanabe Kyosai was a Japanese artist, considered the last great expert in traditional Japanese painting. He lived through the transition from the Tokugawa Period to the Imperial Period, and witnessed the transformation of Japan from a feudal to a modern country, a change that he captured in his satirical political cartoons.

Kawanabe was born in the city of Koga, and was the son of a vassal samurai. After working for a short time in his youth with the painter Utagawa Kuniyoshi in 1831, he received his artistic training at the Kan? school of Japanese painting in 1840, but then abandoned formal traditions in 1858 to form a style of his own, publishing his first cartoons and drawings as an independent artist.

During the country's political upheaval leading up to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Ky?sai had a special reputation as a caricaturist as he had been arrested three times and imprisoned by the Tokugawa Shogunate authorities. With the restoration of imperial power, a large congress of painters and men of letters was held, among whom was Kawanabe. He again expressed his criticism of the new government in a cartoon, which was a great popular success, but he was also imprisoned again by the police in 1870.

Ky?sai is considered the great successor of Hokusai (although he was not his pupil), and as the first political cartoonist in Japan. Both his life and his work were in some ways wild and rebellious.

There is a collection of his works in the British Museum, and there are others in the National Art Library in Sotuh Kensington and in the Musée Guimet in Paris. There is also the Kawanabe Ky?sai Memorial Museum, established in 1977, in the city of Warabi, Saitama Prefecture, Japan.