c. 1900
Dragon in Clouds
Kawamura KiyooJapanese, 1852 - 1934
The new Meiji government sent Kawamura and a small group of other young Japanese artists to the United States and Europe in 1871 to study Western painting. Here Kawamura mixes oil paint, a common medium in the West, with sumi ink, used by Japanese artists for over two thousand years, to create a traditional type of Asian art: a pair of folding screens.
Kawamura’s innovation is especially noticeable on this screen, where he overlaid the base layer of sumi ink with thick applications of oil paint, giving the surface a dramatic, almost three-dimensional appearance.
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