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The Painting of Sadness? the Ends of Nihonga, Then and Now Chelsea Foxwell

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The Painting of Sadness? the Ends of Nihonga, Then and Now Chelsea Foxwell The PainTing oF SadneSS? The endS oF NihoNga, Then and noW Chelsea foxwell The notion that Japanese art could at any time become the expression of Western artistic genius or satisfy Western aesthetic demands is so ludicrously unphilosophical that I am surprised you should think it worth refuting.1 SIR FREDERICK LEIGHTON, 1888 The abrupt modernization process begun under foreign pressure caused various sad histories to be etched into this country. Art was no exception. The system by which two types of painting, nihonga (“Japanese Painting”) and yo–ga (“Western Painting”) would come to stand side by side, is none other than a monument to this sadness.2 KITAZAWA NORIAKI, 1999 1 Leighton’s statement appears quoted in Marcus Huish, “Is Japanese Art Extinct?,” The Nineteenth Century, no. CXIII (March 1888): 355. 2 Kitazawa Noriaki, “Kanashimi no kaiga” [The Painting of Sadness] (1999), reprinted in ‘Nihonga’ no ten’i [The Translocation of “Nihonga”] (Tokyo: Brücke, 2003), 80. All transla- tions in this text are the author’s unless otherwise noted. Individuals active primarily in East Asia are identifi ed with surnames fi rst. © 2015 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00104 27 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00104 by guest on 29 September 2021 The cavernous departure lobby of Tokyo’s Narita International Airport is split into two zones. On the ground are the usual harried masses of passengers, ticket counters, and baggage checks; in the air, a fifty-foot- long nihonga mural by Kayama Matazo– (1927–2004) entitled Sun, Moon, and Four Seasons (1992) invokes slower patterns of cosmic change.3 The contrast is almost allegorical. Throughout the tumult of 20th-century art, nihonga (modern Japanese-style painting) often appeared to drift on a different plane, quietly honing its references to past masterpieces and strategies for adapting “tradition” (that loaded word) to modern spaces.4 The attempt to define the concept and the tra- ditions of nihonga—an art form that Sato– Do–shin describes as perpetu- ally undefined and grounded “not in art, but in politics”—has mainly occurred behind the scenes, seemingly without resolution.5 In the midst of over a century of debate, however, one simple visual fact has received little attention: for about one hundred years, from the late Meiji period (1868–1912) through the 1990s, nihonga’s look and style remained remarkably consistent. As a practical matter, most institutions have taken the route of a material definition: nihonga is painting in mineral pigments, ink, and shell white, as distinguished from acrylic, oils, and other forms of so- called Western painting (yo–ga). Yet a glance at any compendium of works reminds us that beyond materials, there is also a dominant nihonga style: as in Kayama’s mural, nihonga is primarily polychrome painting, with precious metals and translucent colors blended with 3 This work is a facsimile image of a nihonga painting printed on large ceramic panels. 4 Ellen Conant’s seminal Nihonga catalog defined the art form as “all Japanese painting . from the late nineteenth century [forward and] executed, however loosely, in traditional media and formats.” Conant, “Introduction,” in Conant, with Steven D. Owyoung and J. Thomas Rimer, Nihonga, Transcending the Past: Japanese-Style Painting, 1868–1968 (New York: Weatherhill, 1995), 14. This volume is essential reading on nihonga; other key English-language overviews include Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004); John M. Rosenfield, “Nihonga and Its Resistance to ‘the Scorching Drought of Modern Vulgarity,’ ” in Births and Rebirths in Japanese Art: Essays Celebrating the Inauguration of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, ed. Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (Leiden: Hotei, 2001), 162–97; and John Clark, “Modernism and Traditional Japanese-Style Painting,” Semiotica 74, no. 1/2 (1989): 43–71. 5 Sato– Do–shin, ‘Nihon bijutsu’ tanjo–: Kindai Nihon no ‘kotoba’ to senryaku [The Birth of “Japanese Art”: Words and Strategies in Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Ko–dansha, 1996), 87–90, 154–56. On the status of tradition (or rather, traditions), see Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Re - inscribing Tradition in a Transnational Art World” (2007), in Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader, ed. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio (Cambridge, MA: MIT artmargins 4:1 Press, 2011), 372–74. 28 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00104 by guest on 29 September 2021 white and applied to a stiff surface. The motifs are often few in num- ber, enlarged against a shallow or unfigured background. There is little concern with spatial depth or with bodies in motion. Religious and his- torical subject matter in the Meiji period gives way in later decades to depictions of women, the Japanese countryside, the natural world, and occasionally to abstraction. Of course there are exceptions; in every period, certain works have deliberately tested nihonga’s boundaries and dominant modes while still claiming to be nihonga. The painter Yamazaki Takashi (1916–2004) was one such example. Committed to producing and teaching nihonga even as he used formaldehyde to mold, wash, and abrade shell white (gofun) and mineral pigments after they had been added to the picture surface, he recalls declaring in 1946, “We’ve got to do something about nihonga’s anachronism—and the anachronism of the nihonga groups!”6 The conservative nihonga painters whom Yamazaki called anachro- nistic (that is, out of step with predominant artistic trends and concerns) found ready support in Japan until the 1990s, when, in the midst of Japan’s massive economic downturn, Aida Makoto (b. 1965), Ten - myo uya Hisashi (b. 1966), and several other artists with an ambivalent or antagonistic relationship to the category began to attract global atten- tion far outstripping that accorded to conventional nihonga. Their on- going international success has raised new questions about the health, prominence, and functions of the nihonga category, while no doubt pro- voking fresh fears and fantasies about its death. Is nihonga essentially an “anachronistic” art functioning outside of contemporary art at large and limited to promoting certain stories of Japanese nationhood?7 6 “Rekitei kara Panriaru e: Yamazaki Takashi shi ni kiku” [From Rekitei to Pan-Real: A Discussion with Yamazaki Takashi], Kyo–to shi bijutsukan nyu–su 152 (January 1988): 2. 7 Yamazaki’s 1946 complaint about nihonga’s anakuronizumu—by which he meant the reluctance to explore collage, surrealism, abstraction, and sociopolitical critique (catego- ries that had all been targeted by government officials during the war)—raises broader questions about global temporalities of artistic modernism: by accusing nihonga of being anachronistic or “outside the time” of Western modernism, Yamazaki was disparaging the nihonga groups for avoiding the main trends of Euro-American modernism, whose relevance and appeal he treated as universal. See Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 5–22. Yet there is a further issue in Japan’s case: modernist styles had been targeted by the wartime authorities (Yamazaki offers several examples), while tradition-based nihonga was encouraged as propaganda. Here, rather than positioning Yamazaki’s comment within a discussion of global tempo- ralities of artistic modernism, I will try to stay close to Japan’s historical circumstances while inviting comparison with other cultures and circumstances. For further context, see Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, ed. Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo (Leiden: Brill, 2013). foxwell | the painting of sadness? 29 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00104 by guest on 29 September 2021 Kayama Matazo–. Sun, Moon, and Four Seasons, 1992. Facsimile of a nihonga painting printed on ceramic panels, 3.5 ∞ 39.2 m. Narita International Airport Terminal 2, Narita, Japan. Photograph by atakeK5_7_20d. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00104 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00104 by guest on 29 September 2021 Or is it, as its proponents have always emphasized, an open-ended category defined by its material experiments in mineral pigments and ink?8 Proceeding from the consciousness of nihonga as a historical product, yet aware that many museums in the United States continue to acquire contemporary non-Western art under two, often separate, departments, this article considers the nihonga category’s historical parameters and the terms of its continued existence in the present day. In the roughly one hundred years since nihonga’s solidification as a cat- egory of teaching, sale, and display, certain interlocutors have periodi- cally suggested that it was pointless, even damaging, to maintain nihonga as a field apart from current painting in general.9 In so doing, however, they also provoked the specter of nihonga’s dissolution that had been inherent in the moment of its founding. TradiTion and SegregaTion The romanticized notion of the death of Japanese art did not originate in Meiji Japanese thinking, but reflected the West’s own predicaments of cultural loss along with the self-centered perception that it was the Europeans and Americans who were ruining Japan. In his 1876 book A Glimpse at the Art of Japan, for instance, American art critic James Jackson Jarves claimed that the Japanese artisan worked alone, strove for perfection, and made an “aesthetic unity” of form and function. “But we have changed all this,” he argued, “as we are fast obliterating the ancient Japanese artisan and turning him into a machine-laborer . prompt . caring only for his pay, careless . there is no soul in what is required of him. We may weep over [Japanese art’s] threat- ened extinction.”10 Foreign collectors and connoisseurs first introduced the notion that Japanese painting techniques required preservation.
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