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Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–2000 ed. by J. Thomas Rimer

2015; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2015.0014

1549-4721

Yukio Lippit,

Chinese history and philosophy

Reviewed by: Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–2000 ed. by J. Thomas Rimer Yukio Lippit (bio) Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–2000. Edited by J. Thomas Rimer. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2012. x, 516 pages. $60.00, cloth; $28.00, paper. The history of modern art in Japan becomes more difficult to tell with every passing year. The prodigious amount of newly excavated material, museum exhibitions, and specialized commentary of recent years continues to open up new and compelling ways of narrating the cultural production of the modern era. For this reason, the appearance of a volume that assesses the sweep of artistic activity over Japan’s modern era is highly welcome. Since Meiji addresses its unwieldy subject by committee, offering 17 essays on [End Page 208] various aspects of Japanese cultural production from the domestication of art and its institutions in the Meiji period to the end of the millennium. Although it does not purport to be a survey, the sum of its “perspectives” offers a compelling combination of concepts and coverage that effectively offers a dynamic overview of modern Japanese art. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Japan was not unique in the manner in which it mobilized art and its institutions to serve the needs of an emerging nation-state. For centuries in early modern Europe, art had served the purposes of the state through its beaux-arts academies and annual salon exhibitions, and during the modern era this system had been embraced by regions of the world as disparate as Latin America and North Africa. John Clark’s essay, “Okakura Tenshin and Aesthetic Nationalism,” uses the thought of Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) as a conceptual basis for exploring how the practices and protocols of art were related to nation-building; in some ways, this essay represents an elaboration of Clark’s earlier work on modern Asian art as a whole. This essay is nicely balanced by Ellen Conant’s “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji: Rhetoric and Reality,” which contests the centrality accorded Okakura and Ernest Fenollosa in accounts of Meiji art, and by extension painters closely associated with them such as Kano Hōgai and Hashimoto Gahō. Conant stresses instead continuities in the cultural production of the late Edo and Meiji periods by focusing on figures such as Kikuchi Yōsai, Shiokawa Bunrin, and Shibata Zeshin, all of whom were influential and in many ways equally revealing of the contingencies of artistic practice in their time. The opening of the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō) in 1876 as part of the Imperial College of Engineering and then the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō) in 1889 introduced to Japan a European art curriculum and helped to entrench a beaux arts–based hierarchy of art forms centered upon painting, sculpture, and architecture. The fates of each of these three art genres are explored in separate essays. Emiko Yamanashi’s “Western-Style Painting: Four Stages of Acceptance” divides the history of Western-style painting (yōga) in Japan into four stages: artists who acquired oil painting technique through the study of books, as with members of the Akita Ranga school; artists who were able to study oil painting by directly examining Western painting materials; artists who traveled to Europe to acquire expertise in oil painting; and artists who undertook formal training in Japan after the establishment of art academies. Although it is unclear why the oil painting of the Momoyama-period Jesuit seminarios is left out, this schema is highly coherent and offers a useful way to follow, through similar patterns of artistic formation, the otherwise heterogeneous unfolding of oil or oil-like painting in Japan. Yamanashi’s essay is usefully paired with Mikiko Hirayama’s “Japanese Art Criticism: The First Fifty Years,” which studies the development [End Page 209] of art criticism in Japan, with a special emphasis on yōga, from the 1880s to 1930s. Because early Japanese oil painters had very few clients outside of the state, the history of Western-style painting is inseparable from efforts to educate the public and establish a discursive foundation for the...