Fujio Yoshida: Yellow Canna Lily (Sold)

Artist: Fujio Yoshida 吉田ふじを (1887-1987) Title: Yellow Canna
Date: 1954

The artist takes us deep inside the flower of a yellow canna lily, to the point where we question our orientation. Intimate and sensuous, this work straddles the line between abstraction and realism. For this dealer it brings to mind some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous depictions of flower anatomy and is one of the most compelling works from the series.

Fujio Yoshida was the wife of Hiroshi Yoshida, and this series of semi-abstracted floral works from the 1950s show her final artistic flowering, following decades spent focusing on her family instead of her art.  Most of the works from this series were printed by the artist herself, but this work seems to be one that was produced in collaboration with  professional carvers and printers.

When Fujio Yoshida married Hiroshi Yoshida in 1906, she also founded a female lineage of artists, something exceptional and atypical in Japan, where male printmaking lineages were certainly the norm. 

Oliver Statler in 1956  wrote this about her: “She has been an active artist all of her life, managing ot exhibit even in the years when she relegated art to a hobby in order to raiser her children, but only in recent years has she seriously tackled prints” She was trained as and became a highly skilled western-style painter, accomplished in pencil drawing,  watercolor and oil painting. As Laura Allen notes in “A Japanese Legacy: Four Generations of Yoshida Family Artists” (page 154): “From a historical perspective, she was a trailblazer, one of the few women in Japan to enter the male-dominated arena of early Western-style painting”. Although her early style was closely aligned with her famous husband Hiroshi’s, she became more and more daring in terms of creating abstract instead of realistic compositions following his passing in 1950. Fujio’s artistic training began early, at about age eight. When she was twelve she was enrolled in Hiroshi’s own alma mater, the Fudosha, where she trained in western-style painting. Fujio traveled with Hiroshi (who at that time was her adopted brother) to the United states, and was able to garner much positive press and sell quite a few of her watercolor paintings. After their return to Japan in 1907 as husband and wife, Hiroshi continued to encourage her to paint, leading her to exhibit three paintings at the first Bunten. In 1910 she was awarded an honorable mention for one of her paintings, Called “Spirit Grove”. In 1911, she stepped away from focusing on painting to focus on raising her children, which at that time included Toshi Yoshida, who had contracted polio. She did not return to printmaking until after the passing of Hiroshi in 1950, after a hiatus of almost 30 years. She based most of her prints on her abstract oil paintings. 

Her daughter Chizuko (1924-2017) and granddaughter Ayomi (born 1958) became talented printmakers whose recognition and acclaim continue to grow. Ayomi’s works have recently been acquired by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam; she was commissioned to create a site-specific installation there in 2024. The Museum also just concluded in October of 2024 an exhibition of all three generations of the Yoshida female printmakers.

Condition:  Excellent impression, color and condition.  Dimensions: 40 x 27.6 cm
Publisher: Self-published  Signature: Fujio Yoshida (in pencil, bottom right). Also titled "Yellow Canna" and dated "1954" in pencil by the artist. It is also dated in the block, left margin, 1-9-5-4 hitsu.

References: Oliver Statler, Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn, 1959, pp. 171-172, illus. p. 178, no. 96; Laura W. Allen, ed., A Japanese Legacy: Four Generations of Yoshida Family Artists, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2002, pp. 154-159; p. 169, cat. no. 119; Yoshida Fujio: A Painter of Radiance, Fuchu Art Museum and Fukuoka Art Museum, 2002, p. 100, no. 146.

SKU: YSF012