Westerly - paintings of women and girls by Enomoto Chikatoshi

 

Spring by a Pond, 1932.

 Lady with Terrier on Leash, two-panel screen, circa late 1930s.

Ski, for the Ministry of Railroads, 1938.

The set of six paintings comprising the "Florida" series, circa 1935.

The Ballroom Florida - its name taken from a Parisian nightclub - first opened 1928, and was one of Japan's foremost jazz-age dance halls.

The young women pictured are believed to represent the elegant "taxi dancers" who were employees of the establishment and/or some of the club's chic clientele.

A Thousand Needles to Support the Troops, circa late 1930s.

Silver Mountain, 1939 - or - Snow-Capped Mountaintop, 1942.

Another version of the above.

Beauty Under the Cherry Blossoms, circa early 1930s. The only figure, here, to be portrayed in traditional Japanese attire.

Winter Scene of a Young Beauty Adjusting her Skis, two-panel screen, circa 1936-40.

Aquarium, 1939.

Playing Yo-Yo, 1933.

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that the "noise" evident in the detail images of this piece is actually the weave of the silk used as the ground for the painting. 

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Garden, 1934. Frustratingly, I couldn't find a larger image of this painting - I tried!

But the detail of the shoes, which I did find, was too delicious not to share. 

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Enomoto Chikatoshi (榎本 千花俊; 3 March 1898, Tokyo - 30 March 1973), Japanese painter and printmaker. In 1916, he began to study painting under Kaburaki Kiyokata, and graduated from the Nihonga Department of the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1921. In 1922 he first had a painting accepted at a government-sponsored exhibition, the 4th Teiten. In 1930, his Teiten work won the tokusen or grand prize. He subsequently exhibited annually at the Teiten, and afterwards at nearly every Shin-Bunten with non-vetted status (mukansa). During his career, he frequently exhibited his work in both Japan and in the United States. Beginning in the early Thirties he became well-known for his “modern” (modan) paintings of beautiful women, continuing in the traditional Japanese genre of bijin-ga, but portraying his subjects dressed in up-to-the-moment Western fashion. After WWII, he became a committee member of the Nitten. Today, examples of his art are included in such major collections as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.

Youth, forever - sculpture and photographs by Karl Geiser

 

Three photographs of Maurits Onderbeke, model and bicycle racer, circa 1937.

Head, portrait of Maurits Onderbeke, 1937. Three views.

Other models photographed by Geiser.

Two studies of Fritz Morgenthaler, the son of the artist's friends, Sasha and Ernst Morgenthaler, and future psychoanalyst.

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Karl Geiser (22 December 1898, Bern - 5 April 1957, Zurich), Swiss sculptor. The son of a lawyer and university professor - his mother died when he was eleven years old - he rented his first studio in his home town of Bern in October 1918. The following year he received a federal scholarship and traveled to Munich and Berlin in April 1920. After having returned home due to his father’s ill health, he moved to Zurich in 1922. From 1926 he frequently had a studio in Paris, as well as traveling to other European cities. But he mostly lived and worked in Zurich, where he would frequent bars in the industrial district, locations where workers liked to spend their days off, and where he found numerous models to photograph. In 1923 he met a married couple, Sasha and Ernst Morgenthaler, with whom he developed a lifelong relationship. But as early as 1925 he was having sexual encounters with young men, often those who modeled for him; he speaks quite openly in letters of "boy love." And in 1929, he was arrested for the first time for his relationship with an eighteen-year-old. He was awarded important commissions throughout the 1930s, his success only hampered by his extreme perfectionism that resulted in projects being drawn out over years. After another lengthy stay in Paris, he returned to Switzerland in 1939; his Paris studio was taken over during the war, and his art was lost. He was called up for active service in 1940, but continued to produce work throughout the war and beyond. He struggled with depression throughout his life and, from 1944, he suffered from arthritis. He was found dead in his studio at the age of fifty-eight. An autopsy showed that he had taken his own life with sleeping pills about two weeks earlier. 

Two photographs of Karl Geiser, circa 1920s-30s.