Japanese Modern Art/Painting from 1910 to 1970. - Review - book review

Art in America, July, 2000 by Janet Koplos

Japanese Modern Art/Painting from 1910 to 1970, edited by Irmtrand Schaarschmidt-Richter, New York, Edition Stemmle and the Japan Foundation, 2000; 208 pages, $65.00 cloth.

This book is both a thrill and a disappointment: a thrill because it adds to the limited information available in English about early 20th-century painting in Japan, and a disappointment because it doesn't go nearly far enough in introducing the 26 artists and the specific works that are presented in 109 excellent color plates.

Most useful is its historical account and its general theorizing about the influences and origins of modern painting in Japan. For both personal and institutional libraries it will supplement Washington University's 1987 Paris in Japan catalogue, which covers the period from the 1890s to the 1930s, and in particular addresses the strain experienced by the first generations of Japanese artists to study in France--not only in the culture shock of life abroad but in the irreconcilable oppositions they endured when trying to integrate their new ideas and attitudes into Japanese life when they returned.

Japanese Modern Art: Painting from 1910 to 1970 is based on the German-only catalogue for an exhibition presented in Chemnitz and Frankfurt in 1999-2000. Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter, who conceived the exhibition, wrote the principal essay (which is accompanied by four Japanese contributions) and edited the book, has been a critic, curator and author on Japanese classical, modern and avant-garde art since the mid-'50s. Here she makes little of such nitty-gritty issues as the dilemmas of the returnee painters. She is more interested in noting abstraction in traditional Japanese arts, which far predates abstraction in the West. She asserts that, by the 18th century at the latest, "thinking in non-representational images" was recognized as an option in a wide range of Japanese visual art including painting, calligraphy and architecture, as well as such applied arts as lacquerware. It took the form of dynamic line, asymmetrical composition and the flatness that fascinated the Post-Impressionists.

She offers numerous and sometimes convincing explanations for some Japanese practices that trouble Western observers, such as what is perceived as copying. She notes that "style" does not have a restrictive definition in Japan and diverse approaches may be utilized simultaneously. (This is an attitude that supports Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian's 1989 Postmodernism and Japan, a picture of Japan as the original postmodern country.) Neither, she says, is "the new" held in highest esteem. Focus and adaptation have been regarded as equally important. Thus imitation, absorption and eventual revision have long been a Japanese practice in every field from business to religion.

Schaarschmidt-Richter asserts that the first modern nonrepresentational or abstract painting was created in Japan as early as 1912. The evidence is Mu dai (Untitled) by Yorozu Tetsugoro (names in the book appear in Japanese order, family name first). I would describe this work as a heavily brushed field of colors that seems to pulse and shift. There is a sense that space deepens from a light-blue lower-left foreground to an airy purple and yellow upper-right background; in between are an ocher projectile and thick red arcs and crests that look like fragments of a landscape or an agitated sea. It's an interesting painting, and quite surprising for its time--and even surprising in Yorozu's oeuvre. Possibly it is simply an unfinished work (as another essayist points out). But Japanese innovation, even precedent, is the heart of Schaarschmidt-Richter's argument, and if another example--Yorozu's 1913 Landscape of Mental Conception--is less visually compelling, the author can bolster her case with early works by others (Onchi'Koshiro's 1915 Bright Time, Nishimura Isaku's 1916 Abstract Image [Wave-shape] and Kambara Tai's 19-19 Currents of Life, Musical Creation, Symphony No. 35--all of which combine intense color with a sense of motion in the absence of representational imagery). However, she is probably on stronger footing when she cites traditional Japanese esthetics applied to the new Western oil medium, or Western ideas applied to the traditional woodcut (in this modern approach, woodcuts were conceived, cut and printed by the artist).

This mix is, in fact, the focus of Sakai Tadayasu in his essay, "An Exception." He largely agrees that in the teens and '20s, modernism in Japan was synchronous with the West, but he avers that the real Japanese innovation was incorporating the past into modernism and retaining a feeling of closeness to nature. Mizusawa Tsutomu, in the most straightforward and seemingly impartial of the essays, observes that those first modernist abstractions did not fall on fertile soil but remained isolated events. Other essayists look briefly at Japanese Surrealism in the '30s and at the upheaval in art following the war.

The translation of the texts is smooth and unobtrusive, but there are some funny word choices in the subsidiary material, especially the biographies: e.g., referring to an artist's "Christian name" (not likely in Japan!), the American "Foreign Ministry," and the "California University of Art and Applied Art." It's also a little odd that SchaarschmidtRichter says that most Japanese artists "have concentrated upon themselves" (rather than upon external factors such as social or political problems). The terminology is unfortunate considering the extreme rarity of the artist's image or biography in Japanese modern and contemporary art, compared with the more narcissistic Western practice. And one might also wonder why, in a book about modern painting, the cover art is a wooden relief (painted, but does that make it a painting?) and nearly a third of the plates present one artist's series of etchings.