Tamiji Kitagawa information

Tamiji Kitagawa (北川 民次, Kitagawa Tamiji, January 27, 1894 – April 26, 1989) was a Japanese painter, printmaker and art educator.

Kitagawa's work, ranging in media from oil and tempera paintings to woodcuts and copperplate prints, to mosaic and ceramic murals, depict not only everyday-life scenes of urban and rural working people, but also political events. He synthesized traditions of postimpressionist, expressionist, Cubist and Surrealist painting with Mexican modernist painting, particularly Mexican muralism, and such Japanese artistic traditions as Nihonga, ink wash painting, and ceramics.

Having encountered such socially aware artists as the US-American realist painter John Sloan and the Mexican modernist painter Alfredo Ramos Martínez during his years in the United States and Mexico from 1914 to 1936, Kitagawa became involved in Ramos Martínez’ Open Air Art Schools of Painting, which, as part of the Mexican postrevolutionary social reforms, provided children and adolescents in rural areas with access to art to foster their emancipation.

After returning to Japan in 1936, Kitagawa was accepted by the Japanese art world for his unique painting style inspired by Mexican muralism. He became a member of the Nika Art Association and began engaging in art education as a jury member of children's art exhibitions and as a publisher of children's books in collaboration with art critic Sadajirō Kubo. Kitagawa became a seminal figure for the progressive art education movement in Japan in the postwar years. Inspired by the Mexican Open Air Art Schools, he organized an open-air summer art school for children and adolescents at the Higashiyama Zoo in Nagoya, founded his own art school, and was involved in the Sōzō Biiku Kyōkai (Society for Creative Art Education), a network of artists, teachers, and parents advocating for a child- and life-centered approach in art education.

With his cross-cultural experiences and knowledge of social, racial and cultural representations of painting,^[1]: 205 his compassion for disadvantaged social and cultural minorities, and his lifelong social commitment to art and art education as essential for the advancement of a democratic society, Kitagawa was a key figure in establishing a new understanding of art as an essential part of human development in Japan.