Kitagawa Tamiji's Art and Art Education
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KITAGAWA TAMIJI’S ART AND ART EDUCATION: TRANSLATING CULTURE IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO AND MODERN JAPAN By Copyright 2017 TAKAAKI KUMAGAI Submitted to the graduate degree program in Art History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________ Chairperson: Maki Kaneko ________________________________ David Cateforis ________________________________ Sherry Fowler ________________________________ Elaine Gerbert ________________________________ Amy McNair Date Defended: April 7, 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Takaaki Kumagai certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: KITAGAWA TAMIJI‘S ART AND ART EDUCATION: TRANSLATING CULTURE IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO AND MODERN JAPAN _____________________________ Chairperson: Maki Kaneko Date approved: April 7 2017 ii Abstract This dissertation investigates the life and career of the Japanese painter, printmaker, and art educator, Kitagawa Tamiji (1894-1989), and his conception of Mexico as cultural Other. Today, Kitagawa is widely recognized in Japan as an artist and educator, whose thought and practices were deeply inspired by his long-term residence in postrevolutionary Mexico (1921-1936). Kitagawa left Japan at the age of twenty to study art in the United States. After engaging in several temporary jobs and briefly being trained at the Art Students League of New York, he went to Mexico in 1921, to eventually spend the next decade and a half working as an artist and art educator. Kitagawa‘s conception and narrative of Mexican culture—especially that of the Mexican indigenous population—are noteworthy for an early twentieth-century artist/intellectual. Rather than seeing Mexico in terms of its widespread stereotype as a distant tropical country, he regarded the country as a key locus of the emerging anti-colonial notion of culture. Based on his experience in the utopian political/social milieu immediately after the Mexican Revolution (c.1910-1920), after his return to Japan, Kitagawa took Mexico as a crucial reference point in conceiving the future trajectory of post-1945 Japanese modernity. In this dissertation, Kitagawa‘s career as an artist and educator will be investigated alongside the notion of ―ethnography‖ as addressed by James Clifford in the late 1980s. Beyond the common understanding of the term within academic anthropology as a professional practice of participant observation and writing, Clifford defines ethnography as an omnipresent experience of displacement and cultural encounter in the contemporary global world shared by a variety of subjects such as immigrants, tourists, and ―native‖ iii informants. Clifford emphasizes the experience of travel in ethnography, or a process of moving away from ―home‖ in modern Euro-America, which often leads one to critical meditations on the normative cultural/political values in the West, including those represented by the discourse of nationalism, socio-economic progress and colonial domination over non-Western Other. According to Clifford and others, ethnography is a practice that prompts an alternative understanding of the modern/contemporary global world, in which the conventional boundary between ―civilized‖ Self and ―backward‖ Other has increasingly been blurred. Keeping Clifford‘s notion of ―ethnography‖ in mind, this dissertation argues that Kitagawa‘s experience of travel over the Americas and his long-term residence in Mexico equipped him with an ethnographic perspective of modernity. After his return to Japan, expressing such critical standing on modernity, Kitagawa embarked on a difficult task of cultural translation in order to exercise his Mexican-inspired art and pedagogy within a post-1945 Japanese social context. His activities revolved around knowledge of the cultural Other that emphasized an alternative mode of modernity. In negotiating the dominant West- centered narrative of culture, Kitagawa‘s art and pedagogy dealt with social ethics and worldviews that were inherently incompatible with the dominant ideologies of Western modernity. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation project would never have been possible without insightful advice and generous assistance from a number of individuals. I would first like to express my gratitude to the faculty members of the Department of Art History, University of Kansas, who patiently guided my study prior to and throughout my dissertation writing. My advisor Maki Kaneko is the great mentor whose comments and suggestions were genuinely indispensable to this dissertation. Without her constant advice based on her deep knowledge of scholarly research and writing, my dissertation would have fallen into a desperately endless and fatally unsuccessful attempt. I also thank Sherry Fowler, who encouraged me to start my career as an art historian in my second year at the University of Kansas. For me, as a graduate student without any art history background, Dr. Fowler‘s words were a truly warm invitation to the field of East Asian art. I would like to acknowledge invaluable support from David Cateforis, Elaine Gerbert and Amy McNair, who kindly joined my comprehensive examination as well as dissertation committee, providing penetrating feedback for my academic endeavor. Their advice on this dissertation will be vital to my future research and publication on Kitagawa Tamiji. In addition to the faculty members, I also thank Kris Ercums and Mark Olson. While I worked as his intern, Kris gave me an exciting opportunity to explore and investigate contemporary art venues in Mexico City. Mark, in addition to the great friendship I enjoyed with him during my time as his GRA, kindly hosted me in his home in Lawrence, Kansas while I defended my dissertation. Finally, I would like to mention my fellow art history graduate students, to v name only a few, Sooa Im McCormick, Yen-yi Chan, Junghwa Park McGee and Janet Chen for their academic and personal support while I lived in Lawrence. In addition to the people I met in Kansas, many assisted and played an important role in the course of my research. Bert Winther-Tamaki and Michiko Tanaka warmly invited me to present my paper on Kitagawa at the international symposium ―Sano Seki and Kitagawa Tamiji: Japanese artists from the 1920s to 1960s‖ held at El Colegio de México and Teatro Coyoacán in November 2011. On this occasion, I met several prominent scholars working on Kitagawa‘s art and career, including Satoshi Yamada and Yuko Kikuchi. Beyond a series of inspiring conversations I had with them in Mexico City, during my visit to Japan in the summer of 2015, Mr. Yamada generously spared his time to be interviewed. Mr. Yamada not only took me on a tour around the museum‘s storage room, but also introduced me to several key museum curators in the Nagoya area, including Masahiro Murata, Takaaki Miyama and Tsuyoshi Kamiya. Mr. Murata shared his memory of his Kitagawa-related activities almost two decades ago, especially his undertaking of the first and largest exhibition of Kitagawa Tamiji in 1996. Mr. Murata‘s vivid narrations in the Toyota City Museum of Art enabled me to proceed in my writing with confidence and a real sense of Kitagawa‘s past presence in the Nagoya region. Mr. Miyama, the curator of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, openmindedly answered some of my basic questions about the museum‘s artwork while we were in the storage rooms. Mr. Kamiya‘s assistance in the Kariya City Art Museum was vital to my project as he allowed me to study some of Kitagawa‘s key paintings. Moreover, in Kariya, I learned that these paintings had been acquired by the museum during the past few years. It was an experience that decisively vi updated my research at that stage. I also would like to mention Hiroko Kamiya, the curator of the Kamiya Museum of Art, the charming museum in the countryside Chita Peninsula, which has a large collection of Kitagawa‘s important works. Despite my unforeseen visit to the museum in October 2011, Ms. Kamiya warmly shared her firsthand knowledge of Kitagawa‘s personality and artistic practices. My research in Mexico City from 2012 to 2013 was financed by the Scholarship for Foreigners from the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, Mexico. While I was a visiting graduate student in Colegio de México, I received constant support from Satomi Miura, Michiko Tanaka, and my advisor Amaury García Rodríguez. Dr. Tanaka gave continuous feedback about my inquiries into Kitagawa and introduced me to Shinzaburō Takeda, a former student of Kitagawa and highly regarded painter currently residing in Oaxaca. In spite of his busy schedule, Maestro Takeda kindly took time to meet me to talk about his activities in Mexico and memories of Kitagawa. I also thank Misayo Tsutsui, artist and maestro Takeda‘s assistant, who I enjoyed great conversations with about Latin American art and culture. Finally, Laura González Matute is the key person who guided my research and writing about Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre. Without a series of meetings we had at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, the second chapter of this dissertation would never have been written. During my most intensive period of dissertation writing, I lived in Bogotá, Colombia, the city of immense possibilities in terms of contemporary art, literature and cultural exchange. I am grateful to many people for their friendship and inspiring conversations, including my partner Valentina López Castrillón, my friends Carlos Eduardo vii Torres, Andres