Matazo Kayama1927~2004 加山又造

Kayama Matazo was a Japanese-style painter and printmaker born in 1927 in the Sokokuji Higashi-monzen-cho area of Kamigyo, Kyoto. He graduated from the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts and the Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts), studying under Yamamoto Kyujin. He fused the traditional decorative beauty of Nihonga with a modern sensibility, inheriting the ornamental aesthetics of the Rinpa school and earning the title “the Rinpa of our time.” From the late 1970s he also took up ink painting, producing a wide-ranging body of work featuring nudes, animals, and landscapes. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1997 and received the Order of Culture in 2003.