Noboru Kitawaki

Kitawaki Noboru (Japanese: 北脇昇; June 4, 1901 – December 18, 1951) was an avant-garde Japanese painter and writer.

Biography Kitawaki was born in Nagoya, but spent most of his life in Kyoto. He took a nine-year hiatus from his artistic career when he was drafted into the military. During this time he also got married. In 1951, he died from tuberculosis.

Career Kitawaki began studying yōga at a private art school under Kanokogi Takeshiro in 1919.

In 1930, he studied at another art school run by proletarian painter Seifū Tsuda, where he further practiced western-style painting, landscape, and figure painting. For Kitawaki, this style served two main purposes. One was to give insight to his own experiences. Through surrealism, he could offer critique on a society that had undergone the effects of both world wars. The other was to understand and interpret the order and structures of natural phenomena that already existed within reality. For this he painted surrealist diagrams in which he included information from areas of science and philosophy that he believed to best give an explanation for these things. These included morphology, physics, mathematics, color theory, and Chinese divination.