Having encountered such socially aware artists as the US-American realist painter John Sloan and the Mexican modernist painter Alfredo Ramos Martínez during his years in the United States and Mexico from 1914 to 1936, Kitagawa became involved in Ramos Martínez’ Open Air Art Schools of Painting, which, as part of the Mexican postrevolutionary social reforms, provided children and adolescents in rural areas with access to art to foster their emancipation.
After returning to Japan in 1936, Kitagawa was accepted by the Japanese art world for his unique painting style inspired by Mexican muralism.
In 1918, while working as a day-laborer, he took night classes from painters John Sloan and George B. Bridgman at the Art Students League of New York.
[4]: 12 In New York, Kitagawa was introduced to European and American art developments, such as the work of Paul Cézanne, but also about the writings of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche.
: 195 [3] As part of postrevolutionary social reforms implemented to enlighten and emancipate disadvantaged populations, these Open Air Schools offered children and adolescents from rural and indigenous communities the opportunity to express themselves freely through painting without formal instruction or constraints, while being treated by the teachers as comrades, instead of as subordinates.
Works by the Open Air Schools’ students became internationally recognized, particularly after an exhibition in Madrid, Paris and Berlin in 1926 received praise from renowned artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Tsuguharu Fujita.
[3] In 1932, Kitagawa was appointed director of a newly founded Open Air School in Taxco, a position he held until his return to Japan with his family in 1936.
[3]: 200 Kitagawa's oil and tempera paintings, watercolors and linocuts from this time were recognized by the Japanese art world, particularly for his unique style that showed influences of Mexican muralism.
His paintings from this time depicted portraits, rural and urban landscapes, and scenes of the everyday lives of working people, but also allegorical motifs that included suffering, for example, contorted human bodies.
Drawing from his experiences abroad, Kitagawa conceived of painting as a tool of subjective observation and interpretation of the everyday world that should nourish the individual's urge for freedom.
[9]: 25 The school offered children and adolescents between the age of 7 and 15 years the opportunity to freely express themselves in an unconventional amusing setting, distinct from their stressful everyday life and conventional education environment, to release their creativity.
[7]: 176–177 To foster the creativity and development of personalities of the students, the teachers encouraged them to explore their environment playfully and to express themselves freely in oil paintings, gouaches, and woodcuts, without intervening by giving them instructions.
[10]: 148 Rejecting reproductive hierarchic and interventionist teaching practices as a legacy of prewar and wartime authoritarianism, they considered themselves to be facilitators of free development through art, which would ultimately foster children's autonomy and capacity to resist repression and submission.
In the late 1960s, Kitagawa began to shift towards less overtly political subjects in his paintings and etchings, by depicting images of human relationships, such as mother and child or couples, or landscapes of his native region Shizuoka.
In 1978, Kitagawa was appointed president of Nika, but quit shortly after, lamenting that the association had become an “arena for fights that were unrelated to the art movement”.
[3]: 211 Kitagawa's oil and tempera paintings, woodcuts and copperplate prints, mosaic and ceramic murals were dedicated to the figurative depiction of the everyday lives and environment of urban and rural working populations and allegorical renderings of central social and political problems of his time, such as war and death, anti-war protests and pollution.
[7]: 188–198 Impressed by the works of French artist Fernand Léger, which he saw in Paris in 1956, Kitagawa soon introduced bold dark contour lines and geometrically abstracted tubular human figures and architectural elements in his paintings of industrial factory scenes and landscapes.