Starting as an amateur, self-taught artist in his teens, Yorozu Tetsugorô entered a preliminary course for the Western Painting Faculty of the Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1906. In 1910 he formed the Absinthe Group with a number of fellow classmates. In 1911 he graduated, and his graduation painting, Nude Beauty, won much critical acclaim.
In the early stages of his career Yorozu was influenced strongly by the European Avant-garde movement, and he began to experiment painting in this style. He attempted to develop his own personal style through the language of Cubism, painting a variety of self-portraits, landscape and still-life paintings. He was quite successful as a painter, and his career was cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis on May 1st 1927.
