Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Postimpressionism, and the Modern Era (review)

This striking volume, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title held at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, April 8–June 6, 2004, holds an importance far beyond its visual pleasures. The paintings reproduced in this catalogue are grouped according to a logic that governed their purchase and display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In result, French and Japanese paintings are viewed together, not separated as "French" or "Japanese" paintings (as in most catalogues); we see them grouped as did the artists and contemporary viewers. It is an important difference. The primacy that France held for Japanese artists—not just visual—is well known but still insufficiently documented. This collection of essays and reproductions builds on the pioneering work by scholars such as J. Thomas Rimer and comes at a time of renewed interest in this topic in Japan, in the work of Imahashi Eiko, for example, or the recently published comprehensive catalogue of Fujita Tsuguharu's work. The exhibit is organized around pivotal collectors of Meiji- and Taisho-era Japan; the essays and the catalogue entries further stress the synergy and mutual influences Japanese artists and collectors shared with their French counterparts.

The most notable of these collectors include Matsukata Kōjirō (1865–1950), president of Kawasaki Shipbuilding Company. Matsukata purchased thousands of Western paintings, in part according to personal taste, but also as a public service. He wished to provide his fellow Japanese with the opportunity to directly experience Western art. He was unable to erect his own museum, but the collection went on to serve as the core of the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno. Ōhara Magosaburō (1880–1943) is another collector, known for creating the Ōhara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, one of the most important places to view Western originals in the early twentieth century. Ishibashi Shōjirō (1889–1976), founder of the Bridgestone Tire Company, whose collection would form the core of the Bridgestone Museum of Art, also belongs to this group. They collected for complex reasons, civic duty being one, but also as financial investment, for personal enjoyment, and for prestige (here, as a sign of wealth and proximity to Europe).

Christine M. E. Guth's essay, "Modernist Painting in Japan's Cultures of Collecting," elucidates the forces working on these collectors and guiding their choices. It also insightfully explicates how the culture of collecting structured their purchases, in the tradition of connoisseurship, which had, to this point, looked primarily to China for authentication (the primary example being tea ceremony and the collection of utensils). The dynamics and focus of collecting changed radically in the Meiji period, however, as power and prestige no longer followed from heredity, but from wealth. This tradition of connoisseurship facilitates assimilation of artifacts from other nations into Japan's own historical legacy. Thus, as Guth points out, the process by which these Western works now seem almost indigenous to Japan—in the sense that they are now fully part of Japanese cultural legacy—replicates the incorporation of the artifacts from China, Korea, and other places along the Silk Route that had entered Japan as early as the eighth century (one is reminded of the treasures stored in the Shōsōin). The development of the Western art collections attests not only to the business acumen of the collectors, but evidences the imperialist motivations of the nation of which they were a part. Artists and collectors were both deeply concerned about the representations of Japan, and thus of themselves and their work, found in France. As Guth notes, "the impulse to collect art was a common response to the need to negotiate, or renegotiate, their relationship to their own culture" (p. 15). This renegotiation, and the conversations between the French and the Japanese—often exhorting the Japanese to not eschew the practices and vision of their tradition...