Toshio BANDO
Tokushima 1895 - Boulogne-Billancourt 1973
Biography
Born into a prosperous family on Shikoku Island in Japan, Toshio Bando displayed a particular talent as an artist from an early age. At the age of eighteen he moved to Paris to study with the painter Takeji Fujishima, who introduced the young artist to the modernist trends of European art. After exhibiting in Tokyo, Bando arrived in Paris in 1922, quickly becoming associated with the artists of the School of Paris based mainly in Montparnasse. At the beginning of his time in Paris, between 1922 and 1924, Bando shared a studio with his compatriot Tsuguharu Foujita, who had settled in the city several years earlier. Although the two Japanese painters were often compared by French critics, Foujita was arguably more interested in drawing while Bando concentrated on painting, exhibiting his work at the Salon d’Automne. In 1925 Bando began to be represented by the Galerie Chéron in Paris, which already showed the work of Foujita, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine, and his inaugural exhibition at the gallery found favour with both critics and collectors. Between 1925 and 1938 Bando lived away from Paris, at Pierrefitte sur-Seine and Villette-en-Yvelines. and, after the death of his gallerist Georges Chéron in 1931, chose not to have a contract with any one dealer. Bando was to spend most of his career in France and was particularly appreciated for his ability to bridge seamlessly between Western art and his Japanese roots, as expressed in portraits, landscapes, nudes, studies of animals (particularly cats and dogs), flowers and other still life subjects. His daughter Kimie, born in 1944, was trained by Bando and became a talented artist herself, once exhibiting her works alongside those of her father. Declining health reduced Bando’s activity from the late 1950s onwards, however, and for the last fifteen years of his life his work was rarely exhibited in Paris. Nevertheless, Bando is today recognized, alongside Foujita, as the most significant 20th century Japanese artist working in the modern European tradition.
