Spring

Harkening back to Japan’s classical past, the artist Yamamura Kōka depicted two court women on a springtime outing to gather flowers. However, the scale of the figures, and the bold compositional effect of their repetitive forms is distinctly modern. This painting was shown at the ninth Bunten in 1915. Kōka then took a twenty-year break from these government-sponsored exhibitions until a last entry in 1936. Of the six paintings selected for government-sponsored exhibitions, this is the only work whose whereabouts is presently known.