Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955 by Bert Winther-Tamaki (review)

Bert Winther-Tamaki’s new monograph on the history of Western-style painting, or yōga, in Japan is a thought-provoking and sophisticated addition to a rapidly growing scholarly literature on modern Japanese art. He addresses head-on the lingering and insidious discrimination against early- and mid-twentieth-century Western-style art with alacrity and reveals its roots in the anxieties of national identity politics and the challenges of demonstrating local authenticity in the increasingly global and hybridized cultural sphere of modernity. This book skillfully communicates the overriding passion that Japanese artists have felt for oil painting over the last century and the significant ideological trials and tribulations they have faced in coping with its inherent “foreignness” while simultaneously avowing its role as a medium of individual liberation and personal subjectivity. Winther-Tamaki makes a compelling case not only for yōga’s important and lasting impact on Japanese artistic production but for its distinctive creative contribution, deeply rooted in the central epistemological debates of the time. This book represents a very welcome third wave of scholarship that moves beyond the first generation of general histories, the second of more focused histories of groups and individuals, to a third, more cross-cutting dimension that addresses broader issues, such as the important thematics of “embodiment” at the core here.

There is no doubt that bodies are pervasive in yōga painting, whether it be the ubiquitous nude or the equally prevalent self-portrait; bodies are abundantly in evidence. However, it is not just depicted bodies to which Winther-Tamaki refers but also the somatic and haptic or sensorial nature of the act of painting and the artist’s engagement with the matière, or material substance, of painting itself. In his rearticulation of yōga, Winther-Tamaki focuses on the theme of embodiment through four main modes of analysis: the materiality or matière of oil paint, the depiction of palpable human bodies, the identification of the act of painting with somatic expression, and the deployment of rhetorical metaphors of social incorporation into the body politic. By concentrating on a group of major artists (Kishida Ryūsei, Murayama Kaita, Matsumoto Shunsuke, Aimitsu, Umehara Ryūzaburō, Yasui Sōtarō, Fujita Tsuguharu, Koide Narashige, Satomi Katsuzō, Fujishima Takeji, Yorozu Tetsugorō, Fukuzawa Ichirō, Asō Saburō, and Kawara On), the book constructs a focused and coherent narrative without making claims to comprehensiveness. Winther-Tamaki displays an impressive mastery of Japanese scholarship in this well-researched field and ably weaves his own trenchant and original analysis with that of major Japanese scholars in this field (Mizusawa Tsutomu, Omuka Toshiharu, Kawata Akihisa, Tan’o Yasunori, Ōtani Shōgo, Kuraya Mika, and Inaga Shigemi, among others), who have taken yōga seriously for a long time.

Where Winther-Tamaki’s previous book looked at art in the encounter of nations, particularly the concept of artistic nationalism, here artistic nationalism is supplemented by erotic nationalism, “a belief in the linkage between national identity and personal predilections of a sexual and aesthetic nature” to produce painting that should, according to Koide Narashige, “accelerate the heartbeat” (p. 66). As with all of the topics addressed in the book, Winther-Tamaki handles with dexterity the sexualization of the act of painting, explicating the underlying eroticism and voyeuristic gaze—often tinged with ethnographic curiosity and racism—that motivated painters as they negotiated an unstable Japanese native identity vis-à-vis the hegemonic culture of Euramerica and Japan’s “primitive” colonial Others. It is true that yōga was a kind of fetish for Japanese artists who came of age in the late Meiji period and thereafter, and this book brings to life how this passion drove their simultaneous sense of superiority and inadequacy. The somatic associations between painting and the artist’s body are vividly described, with Kishida Ryūsei, for example, envisaging paint physically flowing through his living body...