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Large wood carving, Woman with a Basket of Flowers - Kakuoka Akimitsu, Japan 1930-40
Description
Woman with a Basket of Flowers – Kakuoka Akimitsu, Japan, circa 1930–40
Woman with a Basket of Flowers, Kakuoka Akimitsu, carved wood, Japan, circa 1930–40
This majestic sculpture carved from a single block of whitewashed wood, created by Kakuoka Akimitsu around 1930–1940, depicts a standing woman delicately holding a basket of flowers in her left hand against her hip. Light plays subtly across the numerous facets left by the chisel, emphasizing the refined treatment of the surface. The softly draped garment contrasts with the figure’s hieratic posture, combining fluidity with stillness.
Although Japanese, the work reveals a strong Western classical influence.
Beyond the international Art Deco movement, philhellenism—the admiration for Greek culture—significantly marked Japanese sculpture between 1920 and 1945. Still little known in the West, this phenomenon contrasts with the greater familiarity of Japanese Buddhist sculpture and okimono.
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To understand this movement, the research of Michael Lucken, Director of the Centre for Japanese Studies at INALCO, is essential. Lucken has shown that this Greek influence was not merely superficial admiration, but a profound assimilation of ancient culture during a period of Japanese ultranationalism. Rather than simply emulating German Neoclassicism, the adoption of Greek aesthetics offered a means of distancing Japanese culture from Chinese influence and placing it in a lineage connected with ancient Greece.
The opening of Japan during the Meiji era brought intensive study of Western artistic techniques and subjects. The first art school, founded in 1876 by the Ministry of Industry, was intended to train young artists capable of supporting the country’s emerging industries. Italian artists, including the sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa, were invited to teach and introduced plaster casts as models for study. Training based on classical sculpture endured, and collections of plaster casts became standard in Japanese art schools.
From the 1890s onward, art schools throughout Japan assembled collections of casts, and students were expected to master drawing and modelling from these examples before entering the most prestigious institutions. Japanese sculptors working in a Neoclassical idiom in the 1930s and 1940s therefore emerged from this rigorous academic training.
This engagement with Greek art enabled Japanese artists to reconsider their relationship with the Chinese cultural legacy and to imagine a more direct connection with classical antiquity. The art historian and poet Aizu Yaichi wrote in 1922 that Nara represented, within world art history, the final glow of magnificent Greek sculpture.
Works produced in this context are rare and remain scarcely represented in Western collections. Their production was limited by the upheavals of the wartime period and by the desire for artistic renewal that followed.
This paulownia sculpture, measuring 130 × 60 × 30 cm, is an important testimony to this distinctive moment in the history of Japanese art.
Large wood carving, Woman with a Basket of Flowers - Kakuoka Akimitsu, Japan 1930-40
