Taniguchi Fumie
born 1910 Tokyo, Japan Dressed in the latest fashion, a young athletic woman with short, uncoiffed hair strides up a mountain path, emerging into a sea of blooming azaleas. This work celebrates the “modern girl” or modan gaaru モダンガール, also known simply as moga. The Japanese equivalent to the American flapper, moga were independent woman who often worked to earn their own money; hung out in cafes where they smoked and drank; and were sexually liberated. The chic young women depicted hiking and enjoying the “wild” outdoors in this colorful folding screen, albeit shrouded in delicate flowering bushes, embody the fierce independence necessary to forge a career as a female artist in mid-20th century Japan.
A native of Tokyo, Taniguchi Fumie studied at the Tokyo Girls Art School and in 1934 graduated from the Fine Arts division of the Bunka Gakuen—a woman’s university devoted largely to fashion design. She studied with renowned nihonga painter Kawabata Ryushi (1885-1966) and was one of only a very few woman who exhibited with his artist group known as the Blue Dragon Society (Seiryusha). This pair of screens was unveiled in the society’s 1937 exhibition in Tokyo when Taniguchi was only 27, and displays a range of techniques: thick mineral pigments typical of nihonga, western-style watercolor, and pencil used to sketch the composition.