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Mikiko Hirayama Japanese Art Criticism The First Fifty Years 10 Japanese art theory underwent significant changes during the modern period. Treatises on art had proliferated in Japan from the seventeenth century onward, but they were essentially appropriations of Chinese art theory written for and by artists.1 Critical commentary on contemporary art for the mass audience did not arise in Japan until the 1880s. In the absence of professional critics, artists, novelists, and other intellectuals were recruited to fill the void. These early practitioners needed to develop new critical terminology for evaluating contemporary Japanese art. By the early twentieth century, rising interest in European avant-garde art movements boosted the demand for more specialized critics who could offer analytical commentary on these new artistic trends. Some of the younger critics active in the 1930s began to call for a more objective, scientific approach to art criticism, which they hoped would shed light on the relationship of art to its sociopolitical backgrounds. This chapter investigates the growth of modern Japanese art criticism from the 1880s to the late 1930s, with a particular focus on the discourse on yōga. Studies of art criticism cultivate uncharted territory within the field of modern Japanese art history by revealing the hitherto unknown context of critical commentaries within the larger framework of contemporary art and intellectual histories. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the studies of Japanese art criticism are still at the inceptive stage today. Following the pioneering works by Takeda Michitarō and Nakamura Giichi,2 there were a few sporadic attempts to analyze the work of individual critics. After the second half of the 1990s, however, more thorough, critical investigations began to appear. Three essays by Ōkuma Toshiyuki, which were published between 1996 and 1997, were the first to challenge some of the long-held assumptions originally presented by Nakamura and Takeda.3 More recently, in November 2002 Kindai gasetsu, the journal of the Meiji Art Society (Meiji Bijutsu Gakkai), had a special feature on art criticism that included articles on six individual critics.4 In July 2010, Bijutsu hihyōla chosaku senshū, the first anthology of major critical texts in twenty volumes, began publication. However, basic research tools such as anthologies of major critical texts or biographical information about many of the important critics are not yet available,5 nor has there been any English-language research on this subject. In view of this situation, the present chapter surveys some of the major issues in modern Japanese art criticism for an English-speaking audience. Although such an approach could present too linear a picture, I contend that the current absence of English-language scholarship makes a historical overview more useful than minute 258 | MIkIko HIrAyAMA analyses of the polemics within this nascent field. This survey of the first fifty years of modern Japanese art criticism offers an insight into the birth of art criticism as an institution and delineates the complex dynamics that existed between artists, critics, and audiences . Such an understanding of the byplay of critics, artists, and the public since the 1880s into the early 1940s is crucial to us today, as it ties into the present practice in art criticism.6 Tripolar Typology of Art Criticism The history of Japanese art criticism reveals a highly complex trajectory of development, especially when seen against the analytical model used in the study of French art criticism. Art historian Dario Gambioni explains the historical development of French art criticism in terms of the “tripolar typology.”7 Gambioni recognizes two major types of art criticism in France—“scientific” and “literary”—each with its own “publications, socially defined collaborators, and distinct market positions.” Supported by connoisseurs, teachers, and art administrators, scientific criticism sought “objectivity and precision” and was often carried in prestigious journals. Literary criticism, on the other hand, claimed “a right to subjective expression in the tradition of Baudelaire” and was mostly practiced by young authors who wrote for “small, self-financed and mostly ephemeral symbolist periodicals.”8 In the second half of the nineteenth century, changes in the distribution system of art objects and the growth of journalism caused French art criticism to become more professionalized . As a result, a third category, “journalistic” art criticism, came into being. This new type of art criticism was “developed in particular by professionals of the press in the daily newspapers.”9 The other two categories of criticism subsequently bifurcated, and “the scientific pole [of art criticism] evolved into art history and the literary pole...

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