Yoshimasa Toba, glazed stoneware screen sculpture, circa 1986

Yoshimasa Toba (鳥羽克昌), born in 1927 in Mukojima (Tokyo), is part of this generation of Japanese ceramists trained after the war, marked as much by tradition as by the emergence of modern Western art.

A graduate in Japanese literature from Hosei University in 1951, he also pursued artistic training at Bunka Gakuen. He built his first kiln in Bokuto in 1952, and exhibited in Shirokiya in 1954, then in Matsuya Ginza. After stays in Kyoto and Shigaraki, he settled in Tomioka (Tochigi Prefecture) in 1975, where he built a climbing kiln. There, he pursued a singular body of work, outside of urban centers, combining formal rigor and graphic freedom. His work was informed by travels to Korea and Southeast Asia (1972), but also by his deep interest in modern European painting—particularly Matisse, whose soft contours, arabesque figures, taste for textiles, and decorative flat tints he adopted.

Toba was an active member of the Sōdeisha group, whose fundamental principles he shared: rejecting utilitarian ceramics, seeking an autonomous expression of form, and affirming the object as sculpture. This collective, founded in Kyoto in 1948, marked the shift in Japanese ceramics towards abstraction and the avant-garde.

Although he was not one of the five founding members of 1948, Yoshimasa Toba joined Sōdeisha in the following decades, alongside a new generation of artists. In the 1970s, he participated in the Sōdeisha group's annual exhibitions. His name appears among the Sōdeisha members who produced a set of eight sake cups in collaboration with figures such as Suzuki Osamu, Kanaegae Kazutaka, and Tsuji Kanji. Toba's inclusion in this collective project, attested by the signature "Sodeisha," demonstrates his active role within the group. Sōdeisha provided him with an experimental framework and a network of like-minded artists. Like his colleagues, Toba asserted the primacy of form and personal creativity over function: he explored unconventional ceramic forms, often abstract, sometimes close to contemporary sculpture. Sōdeisha's influence is crucial in Toba's approach: redefining ceramics as an art form in its own right.

The piece we are presenting, a glazed stoneware screen measuring approximately 30 x 39 x 10 cm, is emblematic of this approach. The pleated volume recalls a traditional screen, but it is a sculpture in its own right, hollowed out in the center like a bas-relief. The female figure, almost sketched, is enveloped in a profusion of patterns reminiscent of fabrics, ancient ceramics, but also the lines and flat tints of Matisse. The work plays on hollowness, thickness, and concealment. Ornament becomes structure. It is no longer a question of containing, but of showing—a stylized, fragmented body, melted into the decorative abstraction where we can guess at other bodies.

Yoshimasa Toba's works are rare outside of Japan. A few major museums hold them, notably the National Crafts Museum in Kanazawa and the Tomo Museum in Tokyo. Some pieces have been exhibited in Sōdeisha-related retrospectives, such as at the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art in 2023, but his name remains little known outside specialist circles, and his work, although essential for understanding the evolution of 20th-century Japanese ceramics, remains largely undiscovered in the West.

Tomobako signed.