26 Facts About Ichiro Fukuzawa

Ichiro Fukuzawa was a Japanese modernist painter credited with the establishment of Surrealism in Japan's artistic communities during the early 1930s.

Since he was associated with Surrealism's progressive ideas, Ichiro Fukuzawa's art became a contentious issue for the Japanese State that led to his subsequent imprisonment and forced him to pursue pro-Imperial subjects during the Second World War.

Ichiro Fukuzawa's career was not limited to the Japanese islands as he traveled extensively across mainland Asia, Europe, the United States, and Australia where his exposure to key socio-political events and artistic styles influenced his later periods of creativity.

Ichiro Fukuzawa was born in Tomioka-machi, Kitakanra-gun, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, to a wealthy family that owned multiple businesses within the silk and banking industries.

The affluence of Ichiro Fukuzawa's family permitted him to study European art in France between 1924 and 1931.

Paris was the nexus from which Ichiro Fukuzawa found inspiration in European Surrealism, mainly through Max Ernst's collage series La Femme 100 Tetes and the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

Ichiro Fukuzawa exhibited 37 paintings under a "Special Submission" category to which he received a positive reception from both audiences and critics.

Subsequent to this success, Ichiro Fukuzawa then became a regular participant in future installments of the Dokuristu Bijutsu.

In tandem with painting, Ichiro Fukuzawa penned numerous books and essays in Surrealism, a component of Kindai bijutsu shicho koza, a seminal six-volume book series authored by Japan's leading artists on the latest developments in Japanese modernism.

In 1939, Ichiro Fukuzawa left the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyokai and founded Bijutsu Bunka Kyokai, an alternative arts organization exclusively devoted to Surrealism.

Ichiro Fukuzawa retained his anti-Imperial political beliefs and maintained support for Surrealism through paintings whose content was either thematically ambiguous or neutral in tone.

Ichiro Fukuzawa found inspiration in the vastness of the area's landscape, and he incorporated subtle criticisms pertaining to Japan's control of Manchukuo within romanticized scenes visually acceptable by the government for public arts consumption.

Oxen is one of the large-scale oil paintings Ichiro Fukuzawa utilized to address the contradictions between Japan's idealization of "Manchuria" versus the social realities of poor Chinese and Korean peasants who resided under colonial rule.

The incident occurred after authorities deemed Ichiro Fukuzawa's art had violated the Peace Preservation Law, a national policy designed to suppress political demonstrations or creative expression that espoused anti-imperial and pro-Western beliefs.

Ichiro Fukuzawa resumed his pre-1945 stylistic approach, but his paintings evolved into a thematically somber amalgamation of Surrealistic and Expressionist attributes.

Dante Alighieri's 14th Century narrative poem The Divine Comedy contributed to this change as Ichiro Fukuzawa incorporated violently disfigured bodies caught amid chaos, bloodshed, and misery.

Ichiro Fukuzawa's visit to the United States in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement left an indelible mark on the thematic content of his later paintings.

Ichiro Fukuzawa's paintings underwent yet another metamorphosis when he proceeded to lampoon modern society, albeit with more outlandish imagery and comical undertones.

Dante's concept of Hell remained a recurring theme; Ichiro Fukuzawa utilized the Buddhist monk Genshin's 10th Century text Ojoyoshu to lament his view of contemporary Japanese society as a physical manifestation of Hell.

Ichiro Fukuzawa equates this oil scarcity with the toilet paper as a humorous and anarchically critical position of Japanese consumerism.

Ichiro Fukuzawa conceived this painting as an indictment of Japan's mid-1980s economic crises, Cold War tensions, and contemporaneous social and political inequalities.

Art historians have interpreted this image as a continuation of the agonized nude subjects Ichiro Fukuzawa produced after Group of Figures Defeated in Battle.

Ichiro Fukuzawa died on October 16,1992, at 94 years old.

Ichiro Fukuzawa's art influenced and inspired other Japanese artists, including: Kikuji Yamashita, Ebosi Yuasa, Shimizu Toshi, and Suzuki Yashinori.

Ichiro Fukuzawa gained stylistic and thematic influence primarily from Western artists and movements that ranged from Classical Antiquity to 20th Century Modernism.

The artists who profoundly impacted Ichiro Fukuzawa's paintings include: Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Abraham Rattner, Jackson Pollock, and Rico Lebrun.