On Oil painting Production in the Early Showa Period as seen in Handwritten Materials of KIMURA Shohachi: The 11th Seminar Held by the Department of Art Research, Archives and Information Systems for the 2025 Fiscal Year
Materials in the collection of the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (TOBUNKEN) are open to researchers and broadly used, but in fact, there are not many items that shed light on the process of their collection itself. In this seminar, focusing on “Handwritten Materials of KIMURA Shohachi” in the collection of TOBUNKEN, Mr. TANAKA Jun (Visiting Researcher, Director of the Okawa Museum of Art), who was in charge of the collection of those materials while in office, and Ms. ARAI Yumi (Associate Professor, National Institute of Technology, Nara College), who has been conducting research on the materials based on literary studies in recent years, took the stage to elucidate the significance of those materials and report on the results of their research.
First, in his presentation titled “On the History of Collecting Materials of KIMURA Shohachi in TOBUNKEN,” Mr. TANAKA reported on how he had been collecting, transcribing, and researching those materials in collaboration with other institutions for nearly three decades, and introduced the testimony of a former collector of those materials who had interacted with KIMURA, in which he stated that KIMURA was a compulsive notetaker who kept a notebook with him in every room at home and wrote in it randomly.
Next, in her talk titled “On Issues Related to the Making of “Gathering for Pan” ― focusing on a “Production Note by KIMURA Shohachi from Showa 5th to Showa 11th” in the collection of TOBUNKEN,” Ms. ARAI focused on diaries from the early Showa period among those materials, sorted out the situation of materials in a complex chronological order, and discussed descriptions related to painting production, focusing on one of his representative works, the oil painting “Gathering for Pan,” 1928, in the collection of the Kitano Museum of Art.
The image of the “random notetaker” as described by Mr. TANAKA, and KIMURA’s writing style as described by Ms. ARAI, in which the contents were written at different times in the same diary, were matched perfectly. Guided by such episodes, opinions were actively exchanged on the human image of KIMURA while looking at the real materials during the Q&A session.
This seminar was a valuable opportunity for researchers of art history and literature studies to come together to exchange opinions on situations of the early Showa period through documents of a painter.