NB: The artwork here has an ominous, surreal beauty; and it touches the soul. To me, it reflects what is happening in Gaza today, where ordinary people are burnt like grass and the world looks away. Hiroshi is now 92 years old, and was 12 when the firebombing destroyed Hamamatsu, his native town. Salute.DS
Nakamura Hiroshi (1932– ) was trained as a reportage painter by the Japan Art Alliance, a postwar art group that advocated politically-themed realist painting. As he recalled:
In the early 1950s, socialist realism was spreading throughout the world as an art movement and many art students were influenced by it. The Alliance’s basic premise was that our paintings had to be readily understood by anyone who saw them. We were encouraged to persuade the viewer.
Nakamura Hiroshi (center) is photographed at one of the 1960 demonstrations against renewal of the security treaty. He is standing next to Yoshimoto Ryūmei, a philosopher whose writings and speeches encouraged many artists and intellectuals to join the protests.
In the mid 1950s, Nakamura became deeply involved in depicting the protests against U.S. military bases that were beginning to rise to a crescendo. One such locale was Sunagawa, where farmers were protesting plans to confiscate their land to extend the runways at Tachikawa Air Force Base. The farmers, whose ancestors had cultivated their land for centuries, were vociferously opposed, and their demonstrations became a magnet for members of student groups and labor unions from nearby Tokyo. In his own mind, Nakamura was a “reporter at the frontlines” of these confrontations, brandishing not a camera but a sketchbook and pencil. Several of these sketches now belong to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo…..
After the truth-shower 