dokuraku

独楽 dokuraku hitori de tanoshimu 熊谷守一 Kumagai Morikazu （1880―1977） to enjoy his garden all by himself - to enjoy life

Kumagai Morikazu
is mostly recognized as a representa-tive painter of the Japanese modern age. Kimura Teizo (1913-2003), a Nagoya art collector, first discovered Kumagai's talents and assisted him in various ways throughout his life. When they first met, Kumagai was 25 and Kimura, 59 but they formed a bond that lasted a lifetime. Many of Kumagai's works are simple and offer the viewer a calm and nostalgic feeling.

Although Kumagai is known generally as a western-style painter, he left behind various styles of artwork, including Japan-ese paintings and calligraphies. Kimura bought more than 100 pieces of his work and his ability to identify authentic talent was amazing. Even after Kumagai's death, Kimura's collection of Kumagai's paint-ings grew year by year.

Kimura and his wife donated the collection to the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. This collection consists of about 50 oil paintings, 100 Japanese-style paintings, 40 calligraphies, and 20 sculptures and paintings on pottery, which gives the entire picture of Kumagai's artistic output, offering an interesting insight into the diversity of Kumagai's world.





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For the last thirty years of his life, after loosing two children to disease, he lived in a home in Tokyo, with a small garden, that turned out to become his paradise. He put up tree stumps in six locations to enjoy the view, spending hours to observe the animals, from the smallest ants to the bigger birds and the cats in the neighbourhood.





He could stare at a puddle
until he had grasped
the essence of raindrops.



He could lie on his back on the earth, watching the sun pass through the trees and observe the changes of shadows, the bees and the butterflies, the little flowers and the weeds.






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. . . Read my Haiku Archives 2010

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