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11. Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900: Historiography in Conflict
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115 11 Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900 Historiography in Conflict Inaga Shigemi Because it is a Western product, the concept of art history was alien to the East Asian cultural sphere in the nineteenth century. Art history as an institution was not a native Japanese construct but a new category imported from the West. Neither spontaneous nor indigenous, the art history of Japan was conceived by imitating and duplicating Western models. During the Meiji era (1867–1911), in reaction to Western influences, the young empire made major efforts to implant the legal and social apparatuses necessary for implementing a westernized constitutional monarchy. It was in accordance with this general consolidation of Japan’s cultural identity as a nation-state that the notion of Japanese art history also took shape. Art history was recognized as an entity and as an indispensable tool for the cultural integration of the newly defined “Japanese subject.”1 Several cognitive gaps appeared in the very conception of art history in modern Japan. Recognition of representative masters and masterpieces was by no means an autonomous process. In fact, the masterpieces of Japanese art history were to be selected on the basis of two contradictory criteria. On the one hand, they had to be recognized as fitting into the category of the fine arts, conceived and defined by Westerners as universally valid. On the other hand, the objects could not be reduced to mere imitations of Western art. As things Japanese, they had to manifest their own national characteristics and artistic tradition.2 It was in this narrow margin between compatibility with Western standards and irreducibility to Western products and tradition that the selection was to be conducted, consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, the selection of “masterpieces” creates rejected objects as their inevitable counterparts, objects that fall out of the “fine arts” category. The interplay between the selected and the rejected reveals hidden mechanisms in the formation of masters and masterpieces in the field of Japanese art history. This essay, therefore, does not intend to celebrate the artists and works that survived the historical challenge of selection. Nor does it aim to rehabilitate forgotten masters or disqualified masterpieces. Instead, it questions the underlying conditions that enabled the politics of nomination, celebration, rehabilitation , and even rejection of certain masters and masterpieces. It must be noted that the mechanism of rejection itself tends to be repressed and erased by and in the process of canonizing masters and masterpieces. To create the impression that the selection was conducted according to some irrefutable but invisible principle, any traces of arbitrariness must be effaced from official presentation. Investigations into the formative years of Japanese art history (1880 –1900) must reveal not only the hidden side of this canonization as repression but also the implicit aesthetic value judgments it has refused to recognize.3 1 I will begin with a brief look at the position that Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849) was to assume in the appreciation of Japanese art in the West, that of the most famous Japanese master. “Hokusai is the greatest artist that Japan has produced,” the French art critic Théodore Duret (1838–1927) declares in an article published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1882.4 This view is also directly echoed in Art Japonais by Louis Gonse (1841–1926), published in 1883. For this “old man crazy from drawings” (veillard fou de dessins), Gonse sets aside an entire chapter of his ten chapters on Japanese painting. As for his qualities, Hokusai’s “works rise high in the domain of esthetic Japanese art, and . . . they establish for it a definitive formula. . . . A talent so complete and so original should belong to humanity.”5 However, this enthusiastic appreciation of Hokusai among French art critics was not shared at all by Anglo-Saxon specialists. In his Pictorial Art in Japan , published in 1886, William Anderson (1851–1903), an English surgeon with long experience in Japan as an officer, openly attacks his French colleagues: Hokusai’s memory is perhaps exposed to a greater danger from the admiration of his earnest, but too generous European critics than from the neglect of his countrymen. To regard him as the greatest artist of Japan and as the crowning representation of all that is excellent in Japanese art is unjust to this art, and may react unfavorably against the representation of the man who has suddenly...