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  • Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan by John D. Szostak
  • Alice Y. Tseng (bio)
Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan. By John D. Szostak. Brill, Leiden, 2013. x, 290 pages. €103.00.

“Art is something born, not produced by mechanism or institution. When fostered deep within the spirit, art reveals the true qualities of humanity; when permeated with the senses, it brings to the surface the flow of life” (p. 234). So declared the opening of the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai manifesto of 1918. In this document and an accompanying statement of purpose, the authors, a group of five Kyoto-based Nihonga artists, publicized their pursuit of a pure art, free from the sway of factional biases and myopic ideations impairing the nation’s dominant art exhibition sponsored by the Ministry of Education (popularly referred to as the Bunten). By establishing an alternative venue for exhibition, these idealistic objectors believed they were protecting their right to artistic autonomy while propelling the development of national art. Their inaugural call for artistic freedom rang so potent that the Tokyo police conducted a raid to confiscate copies of the potentially incendiary manifesto. The spirited launch notwithstanding, in less than a decade the same rebellious collective fell victim to the very accusations its members had hurled at the leadership of the national exhibition: uncritical conservatism, ideological discordance, and, worst of all, artistic suffocation.

John D. Szostak’s book investigates the rise and fall of the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai, or the Kokuga Society for short, focusing on the principal founding member Tsuchida Bakusen. Szostak’s painstaking research into the intellectual drive of the society members and systematic analysis of their artistic production, publicity, and fundraising make a substantial scholarly contribution to the study of neotraditional modes of painting in modern-period Japan. For readers acquainted with the general history and major examples of Nihonga presented in the formative catalogues Nihonga: Transcending the Past (St. Louis Art Museum, 1995) and Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions (Seattle Art Museum, 1999), Szostak’s book is a long-overdue and deeply gratifying monograph that amplifies the scholarship through deep probing of a substantive case study. In this book, Bakusen may claim the central role, [End Page 152] although the author justly devotes considerable attention to the other four Kokuga Society founders: Ono Chikkyō, Sakakibara Shihō, Murakami Kagaku, and Nonagase Banka. As suggested by the book title, Szostak emphasizes the dynamic of the painting collective, as a body formed by core members to mutually stimulate creativity while also continually responding to a wider web of senior mentors, junior followers, like-minded yōga (oil) painters, and art critics.

Szostak organizes his investigation of Bakusen and the Kokuga Society chronologically, structuring each of the seven chapters and the conclusion closely around paintings that the artist and his colleagues created for exhibition in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1905 and 1933, the years that bookend Bakusen’s first and last public submissions. Szostak’s meticulous visual analysis is supported by high-quality reproductions of the works that account for the book’s generous 150 illustrations; nearly all the paintings under discussion are printed in color, excluding the small number that are no longer extant, which are reproduced in black and white from the pages of contemporary catalogues and art journals and from archived photos. Drawing the reader into the full process of artistic creation, the book effectively furnishes preparatory sketches and mock-up drawings (shita-e) for Bakusen’s major paintings as well as reference works by other Japanese and European painters.

Chapters 1 through 3 present Bakusen’s pre-Kokuga-Society years, from his childhood on Sado Island where he self-trained in brush painting, followed by his move to Kyoto that precipitated successive study under art luminaries Suzuki Shōnen and Takeuchi Seihō, and culminating in his graduation from the Kyoto Municipal Specialized School for Painting where he met his future Kokuga Society collaborators. Even as neophytes, the five painters achieved moderate to high success at the national Bunten from 1911 to 1917: their submissions were selected for exhibition...

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