Fireworks

In this painting, we see a steamboat decorated with a series of small lights, a sailboat with sails unfurled, a Western-style house, a red lantern, and a house plant. When one puts this together, one gets a shower of fireworks falling over landscape that looks like it might be that of some foreign country. In this painting, one finds a concise evocation of a mysterious, dream-like world of quietude and splendor. Koga found nourishment for his own artwork in the art of others. He was influenced by many contemporary artists, including Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), Cezanne (1839-1906), Picasso (1881-1973), and Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), as well as current artistic movements like Futurism. In Fireworks, one can clearly see his intoxication with the work of Paul Klee (1879-1940). He has also used motifs that reflect his interest in contemporary customs, modern science, machinery, and other ideologies, but it is Koga’s rich artistic sensibility that brings these elements together in a way that makes the painting seem fresh even now, decades later. This work appears to be a variation on another painting, also called Fireworks, which he submitted to the fourteenth Nika Exhibition in 1927 and which is now in the collection of the Kawabata Yasunari Memorial Society. Both paintings are roughly of the same size, and both share the hallucinogenic, childlike composition, the motif of the ship, and the houses with latticework on the walls.