In 1988 when I met for the first time Kojiro Akagi in his studio he was disappointed, no gallery wanted to show him since Sonneberg in 1975. But his Master, the Japanese painter Key HIRAGA who was the first Japanese artist to win the Gold Medal of Salon des Artistes Français had told him “The Gold Medal of Salon des Artistes Français is for you, not for the others. Think of it all your life long. It will help you to meditate on yourself, your work, your fate.”
AKAGI was born in Japan in 1934. Arriving in Paris at the age of twenty-nine, with his spouse, he chose to stay in order to keep painting "his Paris" he loves. Every afternoon he settles down at a site which inspires him. With meticulous care he draws with India ink and finally enriches it with watercolour. Patiently, day after day, during six weeks, he elaborates his work within the frame of his landscape on site. His watercolours, of a unique style, are considered original portrayals of modern Paris as well as his oil paintings.
AKAGI was lucky enough to be helped by French and International institutions, museums and art galleries all his life, although he wished more. We can’t name them all here, they can be found in our list of books on Kojiro AKAGI below.
Akagi was born and died suddenly in Okoyama, Japan, while visiting his family, on February 15, 2021. Without a child, thus his family in Okoyama inherit of all his wonderful works AKAGI left behind him, sadly believing he will be back to his dear Parisian easel very soon.
Akagi had two places in Paris 15th arrondissement de Paris. A flat where he lived with his wife and where he had his art studio surrounded by a beautiful terrace overlooking all Paris, rented for a very low price by the Ville de Paris, as well as a flat he had bought in order to storage his art. They were both fully packed with gorgeous watercolors and paintings. He lent many works of art, left behind him as well because of his sudden death to his “Fonds de Dotation” Non-Profit Association he financed and created on January 31st, 2020 and he kept presiding in 2021 in order to protect his art. We hope for Kojiro his family will take good care of his passion according to his wishes. Rest In Peace Kojiro, far from the hungry spirits of Samsara !
"AKAGI 40 Years in PARIS' Solo Show June 9 - November 24, 2004
Organized by Carnavalet Museum in Notre Dame Museum Parvis
"AKAGI 40 Years in PARIS" Solo Show November December 2004
Galerie Lise Cormery Art & C Group Paris
Book Paris By AKAGI "Paris at the beginning of the 21st Century"
‘To commemorate his forty years of Parisian life a retrospective exhibition will be organized in 2004 on the initiative of the direction of the Carnavalet Museum of the City of Paris. This exhibition will be held in the Museum of the Archaeological Crypt of Notre-Dame de Paris for five months in 2004. This book includes a collection of one hundred watercolors.”
THE PAINTER AKAGI by Jean Marc LERI, Director Carnavalet Museum
“It is no longer necessary to present the Japanese painter, Kojiro Akagi. All Parisians can meet him, round the corner of a street, absorbed in his work, holding his brush in front of his easel. Many times Paris paid a tribute to the most "Parisian" amongst Parisians. His knowledge of the town is immense. It is not only physical, topographical, since he explored this city day after day during forty years, but also historical as well as factual. Indeed Akagi's interest is devoted to the patrimonial history but furthermore to the intrigues that might have occured, the characters inspiring poets and writers and everyday history. As well as life, the way it goes…
Just read to get convinced his texts (and his delicious commentaries) matching the Watercolors and Indian ink of his book Paris day after day – Paris au jour le jour published in 1995. They are witnesses of his active erudition, his thirst to seize intimately and deeply Paris. With his great learning and understanding, the city is now his. So as to offer to his public these authentic views of Paris, precise to the obsessional, in their grandeur as well as in their decrepitude. Reflections of past times, images of present time in his irrepressible acceleration, Watercolors and Indian ink of Akagi recently created are all relating back to the conditions of "remains" and they all have something in common : the testifying of the surprising vitality of the city and its metamorphosises.
As a Paris landscapist, like so many artists before him, Carnavalet Museum is proud to own many of his works. Akagi doesn't demand the artistic freedom to transform reality. Neglecting the Seine's bird's eye views whose predecessors were so fond of, or the beauty of a precise point of view, he prefers the exact description. Sticking his easel in front of the subject, in close-up, as in a movie, or with an angular perspective when conveying a larger point of view.
Once the framing set up, Akagi starts a scrupulous observation of the architecture, with its lines as well as its volumes, its different components, various agregates overloading and often disfiguring. Graffitis, posters, billboards, various descriptives. He takes great care to render with a meticulous manner the cracks in walls, the separation of stones from the mortar, anarchic lining up of pipes, all the flaking that time deposits on walls and which obviously fascinates him.
Important public buildings, monuments, mansions attract him as well. No longer for the ravages of times passing by, far less destructive here than somewhere else, but so as to transcribe with the most complete faithfulness the caracteristics marking succeeding epochs, revealed by different architectural models cropping up.
Akagi is interested by everything, from the implantation of the building within the urban landscape (we discover here and there a bit of greenery), the imbrication of volumes, the articulation of parts with one an other, the stylistic choices adopted. They are real plans with accurate technical proposals, his sense of line is meticulous.
No human being are shown in his views, no man, no animal. Certainly so as to keep its powerful evocation of architecture.
Street furniture only find favour with him, certainly because it is somehow self-containing, some kind of a very particular architecture, obeying to the rule of its kind and subject to the same restrictions (I think in particular to Rochechouart Boulevard, his Watercolor and Indian ink of the last public urinal of Paris.)
His sensibility can be deeply perceived in remote places, far away from urban atmospheres, in humble not to say crumbled districts, where life is deeply engraved within stone, where successive additions and destructions are themselves creating some kind of a reverse architecture.
They certainly are tributes of times passing by, but as well stories of lives and stories piled up under these stones. The artist is not afraid they might overload his work, invading the paper, underlying his vision.
This is why the painter is so unique and attaching. We owe him, on top of his great talent, the offering to our perception of a new interpretation of Paris. Probably, only a foreigner madly in love with Paris, can create it.
This new collection of Watercolors and Indian ink, the fourth of the series, includes like the previous ones, a hundred works of art. This is a summa, in the sense of the Ancient, and nevertheless still unachieved.”
Jean-Marc Léri, General Curator, Director of Carnavalet Museum
AKAGI, forty years of Love and Art for Paris, Lise Cormery
From ephemeral to intemporal
“On March 16, 1963 Kojiro AKAGI and his wife Kayo embarked from Okayama to France where they arrived on April 16, 1963 for what they believed an "ephemeral" stay. Forty years have passed by since then.
In April 1988, twenty-five years later, I met him in his studio so as to organize a show for him. He was twelve years without a Parisian gallery, indeed figurative art was no longer fashionable. Nevertheless, my admiration for him and his art, that I first thought ephemeral, has continued to grow to this day. This, in spite of the aesthetically correct styles, art fashions and as my respect for the @rt at the end of the late XXe century, in fashion and out of fashion, happening and disappearing one after the other, ephemeral. AKAGI doesn't even rely on a new technology somewhat ancestral, photography. Indeed, it might betray his eagle sharp-eyed view, so acute to be able to see without a thread counter the printing flaws.
Nevertheless, his huge body of work is still to come. Indeed Akagi is a Stakhanovist, he creates free hand, without a ruler, as yesteryear masters did. The present reference book, the tenth on Akagi's, with its 102 watercolors is just a tiny part of his drawn, engraved and painted work. A body of work where the ephemeral meets the intemporal.
Ephemeral are the buildings built for eternity, already vanishing into the aleatory of time passing by. Ephemeral is the attention of visitors swallowed up by screens.
Intemporal is Akagi's art escaping the swift passage of time thus becoming transcendental.
Intemporal art despite its contemporaneousness. I think of this classical subject of Paris suddenly ablaze by Akagi's red, energy in Feng Shui. Even his Canaletto urban landscapes where, a contrario no humanity is interfering, confers to its art a superb austerity. Thus the bourgeois taste is somehow unsatisfied. Indeed they are usually attracted by flowers, pretty ladies, finery, flesh, fashion. For instance, how many times did I hear : "Why are you painting the "no-entry sign" of Rue de Lanneau ? In art you are supposed to ignore it ! " Good taste, art conventions, even conceptual or minimalist artists think it should disappear. Still, in the most scabrous performing art some sort of aesthetics should prevail ? But Akagi doesn't make concession to his art. He remains faithful to his artistic quest. His Paris remains refined. He'll leave intemporal traces of this late XXe century where confusion rivals with the profusion and ephemeral with the intemporal.”
Lise Cormery, Paris, le 16 avril 2003, Phd Paris Diderot University Symposium Art & @rt
AKAGI was exhibited permanently from 1988 until 2066 in Lise Cormery Gallery Paris,
with a Solo Show every two years so as to offer to the public a large view of his art.
Some Art Critics Texts Pierre Granville, Curator Dijon Museum, Lise Cormery
The Magic of AKAGI The Magic of PARIS
"AKAGI is a magician. With a stroke of his "magic brush", he immortalizes or transforms Paris and its women.
Iron Parisians, Stone Parisians, Flesh Parisians...
Parisiennes de Fer. His sumptuously jagged Eiffel Tower, all in white or on the contrary "natural", standing above Paris, well planted on its four feet, inevitable, majestic, luminous.
Parisian of Stone. Multiple statues, squares, monuments of Paris... monumental as the work of AKAGI, who, during 30 years of life explored, searched with a magnifying glass, like an anthropologist, the city. Living from one month to one and a half months on each site, in order to better transcribe the reality, painting to perfection, this moment of the stone city where no inhabitant is lost.
The choice of the places is not only an aesthetic bias, but also sociological and historical. Each place is the subject of a specific and thorough study. Many Parisians can thus learn about their past, their present, and a certain future. This was my case thanks to the book Mon Paris I and Mon Paris II published by Ko-dan Sha.
AKAGI, most often, dates the end of each investigation, of each gestation, the moment when the research ends. Thus, L'Opéra. Place de la Bastille. 25.01.1989... The child, the beloved painting was indeed born on this precise day.
This search is done in several phases. The first, called "nature", fundamental, is that of the ground, where the artist transposes line for line the model with Indian ink and watercolor... For many, this splendid work would be satisfactory, which often makes some uninformed amateurs say that what he does is the fruit of a lineage: Buffet, Oguiss, ... what do I know! No, this vision is superficial and inaccurate, because Akagi goes further, by declining his works in oil on canvas, such as La Rue François Ier, which is transformed as if by magic, an unreal, spatial, sacred vision of Paris which, then, no longer belongs to us. Surrealist vision, Notre-Dame de Paris, declined in red.
Red, linked to happy childhood memories by the mother's words or the grandfather's clothing, red, like its name which translated in Japanese means "red tree". But also red blood, like the one that runs in our veins and makes us afraid when it spurts out.
AKAGI's works, whether they are "natures", "reds" or "whites", all have in common this line which delimits, underlines and also encloses...
Paris locked up, naked Parisians locked up in their envelopes, animals locked up in their cage, alone, terribly alone, unique, wonderfully unique.
Parisians of flesh. AKAGI, the philosopher and the wise man, seeks to go beyond appearances. Appearances that the color transforms. Envelope whose color deceives on what we are deeply. His Parisian women are only an envelope very finely drawn on a white background, only the sex, a face without concession are drawn. And the work is such, that the model becomes hyperrealist, terribly present on these whites, so detached from the world and the things. Model facing the painter, who faithfully gives them life. Models facing their destiny, like this self-portrait where AKAGI paints himself face to face with a puppet. Puppet, that we are all, led with the liking of the wind, with the liking of time by the events, one day nature, one day blood red, one day pure white."
Lise Cormery, Paris, 1990, Solo Show AKAGI "Paris I love you", Lise Cormery Gallery
"A Paris with a Japanese eye" by Pierre Granville
"Kojiro settles everywhere as a voyeur of Paris, curious about general views where the most sumptuous monuments erect their domes and towers. On the other hand, he gives us a street corner as narrow as it is modest. Thus, as a spectator we fly over the dome of the Invalides, the spire and the towers of Notre-Dame. When we pass from one canvas to another it is a sordid corner, a street of Lappe, although he makes us discover the small synagogue of the 15th district, surrounded by anonymous buildings. Kojiro transmits his views - dryer than impressions - to us by the means of oil on large canvases or that of watercolor which prevails in the execution. An interesting attempt of a happy hand makes us see such a site on two opposing scales: we see it treated in a dominant of a flaming red or in the candor of a more welcoming white. Thus, side by side, Paris is red with flames, on the other it is delivered to us in a network made almost of white lace and it is the day. See the Eiffel Tower, and its neighborhood of nameless buildings, and the viewer's hand is tempted to run his fingers through this lace.
Kojiro has also taken the risk of introducing into his paintings female nudes with plump flesh, where the pink of the breasts almost gives the illusion of immobile headlights.
Pierre Granville, Curator Dijon Museum.
1994, Solo Show Galerie Lise Cormery, Paris
AKAGI ART BOOKS
1979. Mon Paris. Éditeur Kodan-Sha. Tokyo, anglais, japonais.
1983. Parallèles, Éditions Tokyo, en français, anglais, japonais
1986. Mon Paris II, Éditions Kodan Sha, Tokyo, anglais, japonais.
1989. Kojiro Akagi, 25 ans à Paris, Éditions Arts Guild. Monaco, français
1992. Le Paris d'Akagi. Éditions Ueno Royal Musem, Tokyo, japonais, anglais.
1994. Paris au jour le jour, Éditions Dohosha Publishing, Kyoto, japonais.
1995. Paris au jour le jour, Éditions Martelle, en français.
1997. Quand j'étais journaliste de mode, Éditions Kindabungei-sha, Tokyo, japonais
1998. Paris 1993-1997, Éditions Quotidien Sanyo. Okayama, en ja-ponais
2000 Catalogue Raisonné n°1, Estampes de 1974 à 1999, Français, anglais, japonais, Lise Cormery et Kojiro AKAGI, Français Anglais Japonais.
2003 Le Paris d’Akagi Paris au début du 21ème siècle. Pour Musée de Notre Dame 2004
2004 Catalogue Raisonné n° 2 Les Tableaux de Paris de 1969 à 2004, Lise Cormery et Kojiro AKAGI, Français Anglais Japonais.
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