© Association of Art Historians 2012 662

Reviews

Art as a Portrait of the Modern State: The Development of Art History in JapanMajella Munro

Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty by Doshin Sato, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2011, 416 pp., 17 col. and 19 b. & w. illus., £50.00

Doshin Sato’s historiographic account of the

emergence of Japanese modernism focuses on the

unprecedented institutionalization of art directed by

the government during the late nineteenth century.

During those decades, military rule was overthrown

in favour of the establishment of a constitutional

monarchy based on Western models, a development

accompanied by an unparalleled infl ux of Western

cultural infl uence. Concurrently, Japanese art and

antiquities were freely exported to the West for the

fi rst time, motivating modernist experimentation and

Japonisme. A confl uence of international exchange,

rapid industrialization and new support for education

provoked a reappraisal of the position of Japanese

culture in global terms for both ideological and

economic reasons. Sato articulates how the Japanese

scholars and policy makers codifi ed art history in

response to Western interest and domestic political

concerns, arguing that the development of art history

as an academic discipline in Japan was therefore not

spontaneous but ideological. Sato’s history is thus not

concerned with works of art per se, but with their

presentation and reception, working towards what he

terms a ‘theory of the social environment of art’ (33),

an intention that demands discussion of a broad range

of material, including government policy, the history

of museums and the academy, and the oeuvres of a

number of signifi cant artists and collectors.

Chelsea Foxwell’s introduction provides the

reader unfamiliar with Japanese art history with

the co-ordinates by which to navigate Sato’s hefty

text, ably clarifying the problematic paradigm that

he identifi es: that Japanese modern art was and is

seen as derivative of that of the West. However,

Sato’s text perpetuates rather than challenges the

well-worn trope of an authentic modernity as the

preserve of the Western world by implying that while

artistic modernism was a spontaneous development

in Europe, in Japan it was determined by and

depended on ‘policy-level’ decisions. Sato recounts

anecdotally how the marginalization of Japanese

art fi rst came to his attention during a study trip to

the US, when he observed that examples of Japanese

modernism were absent from museum collections,

in sharp contrast to the proliferation of canonical

examples of Western modernism in Japanese national

collections. It is interesting that he encountered this

marginalization of modern Japanese culture in the

US, which had occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952,

and thus had its own ideological investment in the

construction of ‘modern Japan’, a circumstance on

which Sato, regrettably, does not refl ect. Given Sato’s

avowed aim to explain the ideological, political, and

historiographic agendas and assumptions that have

informed the creation of ‘modern Japanese art’ as a

category in discourse, it is curious that the context of

his own writing does not fi gure more prominently

in his appraisals of the Western response to Japanese

art, particularly in view of his assertion that the

articulation of a history of modernism itself (and by

extension his own work) belongs fully to the post-

Occupation period.

By contrast, Sato’s analysis of the political and

economic assumptions underlying Meiji modernization

is relentless, arguing that the institutionalization of art

history in the academy and museum during the later

nineteenth century was concomitant with economic

and social modernization projects engineered by the

state, an observation that raises the question of agency.

Sato rightly resists characterizing the Meiji state as a

monolith, since it comprised competing bureaucracies

and was led by a coalition of burgeoning career

politicians, newly emergent capitalist magnates, and

an ancient Imperial house. However, insofar as the

interests of these groups coalesced in the reinstitution

of the Emperor as a constitutional monarch, the

consolidation of modernity across industry and culture

can (perhaps paradoxically) be agreed to have been a

project legitimating Imperial rule. That the Japanese

Art Association (1887) was at its foundation headed by

a prince of an Imperial family proves Sato’s forging of

this connection, as does the formation of the national

art Academy – renamed the Imperial Academy in

1911 – a national exhibition body that determined

modern cultural expressions. The Academy’s division

© Association of Art Historians 2012 663

Reviews

of contemporary Japanese production into yoga (painting in modern Western styles) and nihonga (painting in Japanese styles) had a polarizing effect, as

the progressive modern idioms of yoga came to be less

valued than ‘traditional’ Japanese art (in both Japan and

the West).

Sato describes modern art and the avant-garde

as concepts imported from the West and thus

discontinuous with pre-Meiji art, thereby deeming

all art produced before the mid-nineteenth century

‘ancient’, and articulating a problematic disjunction of

indigenous culture and the imported modern which

continues to inform discussions of ‘emerging’ art.

Sato’s insight that modern Japanese artists working

in yoga styles were thus ‘forgotten’ is signifi cant (31),

but this situation is exacerbated rather than addressed

by studies such as Sato’s which excise the history of

the avant-garde in Japan (plate 1). Japanese art from

the 1920s onwards was concerned with negotiating

this tension between the imported modern and the

indigenous pre-modern, resulting in a synthesis that

disrupts Sato’s terms of analysis. His discussion of the

institutionalization of art necessarily marginalizes

these experiments and the avant-garde, which is

justifi ed as this is neither his object of study nor

within the period under discussion. Yet his dismissal

of early twentieth-century culture as dominated by

‘wartime Imperialism’ receives no further justifi cation

in the text, making this a potentially problematic

oversight (165).

Sato’s analysis depends on binaries: East and West,

traditional and modern, public and private, which

make his arguments easy to follow but also engender

problems of their own. He maintains that these

binaries are not oppositional, but complementary; for

instance, Sato’s description of changes in the social

status of artists such as the Kano dynasty, former

retainers to the shogunate who became art teachers in

the new academies, allows some continuity between

modern Meiji and ‘ancient’ Edo to be reconstructed,

which is signifi cant. By contrast, the ‘East/West’

pairing exposes the limitations of his model.

Though Foxwell claims that Sato ‘vividly describes’ a

‘multidirectional exchange’ (19), he reduces Western

interest in traditional Japan to a paradox, asking ‘why is

it that Japan’s history of art ... which is assumed to have

indexed the West, gives such low marks to the ukiyo-e

... and Japanese traditional crafts that were highly

valued as part of Japonisme in the West?’ (31).

Sato provides a list of early Western books on

Japanese art, an extremely useful source for students of

the impact of Japan on Western art, and incorporates

a history of Japan’s participation in International

Expositions and the World’s Fairs. He also writes in

detail about the foundation and impact of the Tokyo

School of Fine Art, an institution where he is now

a member of staff, and the role of the infl uential

American collector Ernest Fenollosa in its foundation.

Yet Sato’s analysis does not extend beyond the

observation that Westerners preferred ‘traditional’

Japanese art to yoga, a circumstance he deems ironic

given that the Academy specifi cally promoted

yoga in order to appeal to Western tastes (134). It is

interesting that yoga paintings did not excite Western

collectors, while the export of craft wares drawing on

indigenous prototypes under the aegis of the Ministry

of Commerce was hugely successful, suggesting that

industrial bodies had judged the market better than

the Academy. Sato thus concludes that policy-level

differences account for divergences between Western

and Japanese evaluations of Japanese art, but this

negates the role of Western agency, and is contradicted

by Sato’s own description of the outfl ux of Japanese

antiquities in the years immediately following the

confusion of the civil war, to the dissatisfaction of the

Japanese government.

1 Kishida Ryusei, Portrait of Reiko at Five Years Old, 1918. Oil on canvas, 45.3 × 38 cm. Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 664

Reviews

Thus Sato presents a Japanese modernism that is

consciously based on that of the West, yet fails to appeal

to Western tastes; and a West exclusively interested in

tradition but ignorant of contemporary production,

a situation that he feels has remained unchanged

(37). His assertion that conceptions popularized by

Japonisme are still current in Western discussions of

Japanese art and have failed to be revised reveals the

utility of Sato’s study, since this ‘gap’ in perception

continues to be a ‘hindrance at international cultural

exchange events’ (37). It indicates an urgent need for

Western readers to become better informed about

Japanese modern art and the historical, intellectual and

social constellations that impacted its development, a

task that has previously been diffi cult on account of a

lack of texts in translation: this new volume thus goes

a long way towards addressing this problem. Whether

we agree with Sato’s conclusions or not, his will be a

standard text in the fi eld, ably exposing the problematic

dynamics of cultural exchange and the pitfalls of

cultural modernity, an important cautionary note given

the increasing prominence and value of Asian art.