Tamiji kitagawa biography channel

Japanese artist (1894–1989)

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 postrevolutiona