Hiroshi Nakamura (artist)

Nakamura attended Nihon University and was involved in many artist groups and social movements such as the Zen'ei Bijutsu-kai (Avant-garde Art Society) and the Seinen Bijustuka Rengō.

[1] He is often associated with Reportage Painting, the movement that sought to report on the social issues that arose out of the postwar context by engaging first-hand with the local peoples and their struggles.

Into the 1960s, in collaboration with Kōichi Tateishi, Nakamura devised the concept of Kankō geijutsu (sightseeing art) and, as an extension, he individually developed a painting style centering around trains and female students in uniform situated in an eerie surrealistic dream-like world.

Among other influences, he was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's montage theory and Akira Kurosawa's films which contributed to his signature distortion of perspective that he developed through his career.

[2] At the age of nineteen, he left his hometown of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka and moved to Tabata, Tokyo, where he enrolled in the Asagaya School of Art and Design.

[3] After a few months, Nakamura transferred schools to Nihon University to study in the Art Department where he was introduced to the history of the Russian Revolution and the thinking of Karl Marx by fellow students.

[2] Going once a week to teach basic painting skills, in return he witness the lives of the workers and saw parts of the railway facilities that were not open to the public.

[2] Developed in the wake of the war and American reconstruction in Japan during this time, a foundational aspect of what has been called Reportage painting was going to a site to research and observe the social struggles occurring there in order to depict them.

[5] Socialist and anti-imperialist in spirit, many of Nakamura's early works of Reportage art, like "Sunagawa No.5" (1955) "Coal Storage" (1955) critiqued the U.S. military presence in Japan.

The painting is a two-point perspective scene showing the clashing between Japanese authorities and a coalition of workers, women, buddhist monks and other protestors.

[17] A 1964 photograph taken by Minoru Hirata, for example, shows the two in front of a shinkansen, stopped on the elevated tracks of Tokyo Station, holding up two paintings amid the bustle of pedestrian traffic.

"[20] As Justin Jesty writes, the "tableau machine" was "a concept that foregrounds the way the painted surface manufactures visual interest and instigates a process of attraction that pulls the viewer in.

[21] As Yoshiko Shimada notes, "For Nakamura, a painting should come out of the conflict between outside, the political or objective, and inside, the personal and subjective, and establish itself as an autonomous entity independent of even the artist himself.