Torii Kotondo

Torii Kotondo
Torii Kotondo
Born	21 November 1900
Died	13 July 1976
Movement	Shin-hanga

Torii Kotondo (鳥居言人, 21 November 1900 – 13 July 1976) or Torii Kiyotada V (五代目鳥居清忠) was a Japanese painter and woodblock printer of the Torii school of ukiyo-e artists. He followed his school's tradition of making prints of kabuki actors (yakusha-e) and involvement with commercial work for kabuki theater. His twenty-one bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) are particularly celebrated.

Life and career

Kotondo was born Saitō Akira (斎藤信) in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo. Torii Kiyotada IV [ja], the seventh head of the Torii school of ukiyo-e artists, adopted Kotondo at age 15 and trained him in the school's specialty producing yakusha-e, portraits of kabuki actors. Kotondo studied painting under the yamato-e painter Kobori Tomone [ja] from 1914 and under Kiyokata Kaburagi from 1918. Most of Kotondo's woodblock prints date from 1927 to 1933.^[1]

Kiyokata influenced Kontodo's bijin-ga portraits along with shin hanga designers Goyō Hashiguchi and Itō Shinsui. In 1925 he exhibited some of his bijin-ga at the Inten exhibition. He designed twenty-one bijin-ga prints which were sold in the United States. Seventeen of Kontodo's prints were shown at the seminal shin hanga exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1936.^[2]

Authorities considered Kotondo's print Morning Hair of 1930 provocative and banned it after seventy of its hundred copies had sold and had the remaining thirty destroyed.^[3]

When Kiyotada died in 1941 Kotondo became the eighth head of the school and took the name Kiyotada V.^[1]

Kotondo lectured at Nihon University in Tokyo from 1966 to 1972.^[1] Collectors did not place a high value on Kotondo's prints while he was alive; the prints have since appreciated in collectability and fetch prices comparable to those of the great masters.^[4]