Ryōkai Ōhashi (fin XIXe s. première moitié XXe s.)

Ryōkai Ōhashi belongs to that generation of Japanese painters whom the ferment of interwar Paris drew irresistibly to France, attracted not by the picturesque of Europe but by the conviction that modern painting was being played out there, that it was there that the decisive questions were being asked about colour, brushstroke and the relationship to the motif. His biography remains, to date, insufficiently documented in the sources accessible in Western languages: a gap that says, paradoxically, something essential about the reality of these artistic circulations, for dozens of Japanese painters passed through France in the 1920s and 1930s, some of whom left traces only in the works themselves.

What we know with certainty is his presence in the Grand Morin valley in 1928, within the group of Japanese painters who gravitated around Saeki during his last excursions into the Brie. The work that places him in the Villiers-sur-Morin corpus is a depiction of the village church, a recurring motif among visiting painters, from Saeki to Serveau, as if the religious building embodied the permanence of the place in the face of the fleeting gazes that rest on it one after another. That this motif crosses cultures, that a Japanese painter and a French engraver should choose the same bell tower as the anchor of their vision, says something universal about the structuring function of vertical architecture in pictorial composition.

These notes draw on a combination of institutional, documentary and local sources: the artist directory of the Musée d’Orsay; the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs (Gründ); art market databases (Artprice, Drouot); the catalogues of the Salon des Artistes français and the Salon d’automne; the Satet-Menon collection relating to the painters of the Grand Morin valley; local sources relating to the Vallée des peintres (the commune of Villiers-sur-Morin, Coulommiers Pays de Brie Tourisme); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Madame Lili Grenier, portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1888); the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (work by Yuzō Saeki).