Ai Mitsu Centenary Exhibition

Ai Mitsu is often presented and perceived as a tragic figure due to his death in 1946 from a disease contracted in Shanghai after his conscription into the national army two years previously. Famous for his Landscape with an Eye, a clearly Surrealism-inspired work which features prominently on the publicity posters, Ai Mitsu was a restless artist who roamed across genres seeking his own mode of expression. The current exhibition displays 120 artworks, including all his major paintings.

Little actually remains of Ai Mitsu's lifetime output (much was destroyed when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and he is said to have burned other works before he left for the front in 1944). A portrait of his father, apparently drawn at the age of 10 signals Ishimura Nichiro's artistic precocity. (He adopted the name "Ai Mitsu" when he moved to Tokyo in the 1920s and became part of the so-called "Ikebukuro Montparnasse.") A scattering of paintings from the 1920s and early thirties reveal a strong compositional sense and mastery of colour. European influences, Rouault particularly, ring loud and clear in these works. Friends at this time testify to a dizzying eclecticism of style – Van Gogh-like in the morning, Cezanne-like later the same day.

A series of works rendered with wax mixed with mineral pigments, a technique unique to Ai Mitsu, created during a period when he bemoaned his inability to paint, testify to an artist modestly (though agonizingly) reaching towards a style of his own. These works are simply titled: Horse, Thistle, Beggar Musician, Woman, and so on.

Ai Mitsu achieved an artistic breakthrough in 1936 with a series of lion paintings, created after many visits to Ueno Zoo, expressions of mass and presence that paved the way for Landscape with an Eye. Hung adjacent is the emaciated yet humorous Horse clopping its way, appropriately enough, away from the Landscape, rendered in a style that suggests an ancient mural.

Between 1940 and 1942 Ai Mitsu merged genres and styles in a series of still lifes that could just as easily be called still deaths. Critics have detected the influence of Song and Yuan (Chinese) painting in these works, and its easy to see the working through of his own Surrealist-inspired mode of expression. The thick and oppressive presence of Max Ernst is particularly strongly felt.

During this period, Ai Mitsu also worked purely in ink. Some have interpreted his striking Double Portrait as an expression of the artist looking to both East and West for artistic direction, but it is difficult to avoid apprehending this work as a depiction of the effects of imperial aggression at home and abroad on Ai Mitsu himself (the facial blemish below the nose was his own) and humanity at large.

It became impossible, as war continued, to exhibit avant-garde works, and Ai Mitsu, while avoiding themes of war, nevertheless was forced into a more conservative style. In late 1943 Ai Mitsu travelled to northeastern China and subsequently painted the three renowned self-portraits, where, with broad chest, thick neck and narrowed eyes, Ai Mitsu gazes, chin slightly raised, diagonally off to his left. A range of interpretations too broad to summarize have attempted to meet this gaze. Add your own before October 8th 2007.