Artist Information

Chizuko Yoshida

Contemporary
Japan
1924 - 2017

View objects by this artist.

Yoshida Chizuko was born in 1924 in Yokohama, Japan. She was the daughter of an art collector and was very active in the arts as a child, though she started out in music and dance. Her practice with fine arts began when she studied watercolors at Sato Girl’s High School in Tokyo. After graduating high school in 1941, she went to study oil painting and printmaking under the printmaker Kitaoka Fumio. During this time, she also took classes at the Hongō Art Institute -- it, however, was destroyed during the air raids of WWII, and at this time Chizuko was evacuated to Aoyama.

After the war, Chizuko returned to Tokyo and resumed oil painting. She also joined two art associations: the Pacific Painting Society (Taiheiyō-Gakai), which was established in 1902 by Yoshida Hiroshi, her future father-in-law; and the Vermilion Leaf Society (Shuyōkai), which was established by Fujio Yoshida and others in 1920 as an artist group for female oil painters. It wasn’t until the late 1940 that Chizuko became involved in more abstract work, in part due to her joining the Century Society (Seiki no kai), a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals. This was also reinforced by her attendance at a few Ichimokukai (First Thursday Society) gatherings in 1950.
At this time, Chizuko began showing abstract paintings, and in 1951 she began exhibiting works with Yoshida Hodaka, whom she had met in the Pacific Painting Society. She and Hodaka would be married in 1953, and she would begin to do more printmaking than painting. From this time forward, she became an active member of printmaking societies and societies for women in the arts, even co-founding one: the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai (Women’s Print Association) in 1957, an association of nine professional female printmakers. Chizuko created and maintained a brand for herself as one of the most innovative print artists in Japan. She died in Tokyo, Japan, in 2017.

Madison Duran ‘20
March 2019

Sources
“Yoshida Chizuko.” Portland Art Museum Online Collections,
www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id.
“Yoshida Chizuko (1924-2017).” The Lavenberg Collection of Japanese Prints,
www.myjapanesehanga.com/home/artists/chizuko-yoshida.