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xiii Acknowledgments My early impressions of Yōga, the “Western painting” of Japan, were far from positive. When I worked on the curatorial staff of the Seibu Art Museum in Tokyo in the early 1980s, my enthusiasm for the avant-gardes of the day eclipsed sympathy for Japanese oil paintings of the early and midtwentieth century, which seemed monopolized by the nostalgic feelings of conservative members of the Japanese art-viewing public. But one of the distinct challenges and pleasures of the discipline of art history is shining a bright light on that which one previously dismissed too hastily as déclassé and thereby rekindling through sympathy the long-dormant passions of past generations while retaining a spirit of critique. It is to the organizers of the landmark exhibition Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting, which I saw at the Japan House Gallery in New York in 1987, that I owe my first spark of interest in Yōga painting. I have deeply enjoyed subsequent conversations with three of the authors of the important catalogue that accompanied this exhibition: J. Thomas Rimer, Donald F. McCallum, and Yamanashi Emiko. I could not have written this book without the friendship, stimulation, and assistance of the following scholars of twentieth-century Japanese art history. Although modern Japanese art history is just one of John Clark’s fields, his trenchant research and creative critical analysis have opened up new territory for me and scores of scholars in this field, and I have been honored by his friendship. The originality and range of Kawata Akihisa’s approach to Japanese art history never fails to intrigue me, and I have benefited enormously from my exchanges with him. Kojima Kaoru has been incredibly generous to me with her endless and detailed knowledge and fascinating insights into modern Japanese art history. I am no doubt among many art historians who are indebted to Omuka Toshiharu at the University of Tsukuba xiv Acknowledgments for his prolific scholarship, resourcefulness, practical advice, and organizational skills. Alicia Volk’s scholarship on Yorozu Tetsugorō has transformed the understanding of Yōga outside Japan, and I am grateful to her for the standards of her tireless research and analysis as well as her generous friendship . Toshio Watanabe is the much-loved dean of Anglo-American studies of modern Japanese art history, and I have grown to regard any academic conference without his presence as less than satisfying. In addition to Miriam Wattles’ extremely helpful responses to a draft of Chapter 1, I am also grateful to her for the remarkable experience of collaborative work in the Japanese Arts and Globalizations workshop. I cannot adequately acknowledge my debt to each of these individuals in the study of modern Japanese art history. For my foray into Chinese topics of Japanese art in Chapter 3, I obtained valuable advice from numerous individuals, including Xiaomei Chen, Kirk Denton, Joshua Fogel, Joshua Goldstein, Judith Green, Eric Hayot, Judy C. Ho, Daphne Lei, and Sheh William Wong. I am grateful to Ted Fowler for reading a draft of this manuscript, not to mention his irrepressible supply of wisdom and wit. Other friends and colleagues whose warm voices and wonderful insights echoed through my thoughts as I wrote this book include Debashish Banerji, Partha Mitter, Karen Cordero Reiman, Kuiyi Shen, Doug Slaymaker, Kim Youngna, and Aida Wong. I am also indebted to my past and present colleagues in the Art History Department and at the University of California, Irvine, for their warm encouragement, uncommon collegiality, and the stimulating models of their own various practices of art history. My graduate and undergraduate students at UCI have earned my appreciation many times over for fathoming the cultural conflicts at the heart of this study of Yōga. Many of the ideas and analyses in this book were devised for and tested in academic presentations and invited lectures. I owe many thanks to organizers of panels at meetings of the Asian Studies Conference Japan, Association for Asian Studies, College Art Association, and Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art. I also want to thank the hosts and audiences of my lectures on Yōga topics at the Brigham Young University; Cambridge University; Scripps College; Harvard University; Musashino Art University; Stanford University; Universidad Iberoamericana; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Kentucky; University of Sydney; and Yale University. A critical catalyst in bringing this book together was the opportunity to participate in a four-year...

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