Born in 1914, Heiichi Sugiyama has lived through many dramatic changes in the cultural and social landscapes of Japan, from the liberal and lively 1910s and 1920s of the so-called ‘Taisho Democracy’, during which modernism and lyricism blossomed in the art scene, to the militaristic 1930s leading up to the catastrophic defeat in World War II and the post-war decades of ‘miracle recovery’, durin...