Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan by John D. Szostak (review)

In late 1918, the Kyoto-based painter Tsuchida Bakusen (1887–1936) exhibited a pair of two-panel folding screens entitled Bathhouse Maiden (Yuna zu) at the inaugural Tokyo exhibition of his new art group, the Kokuga Society (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai). In the work, cloudlike clusters of pine needles and wisteria part to reveal a sensual woman in a red yukata who fingers the opening of her robe, one hand on her bare breast. According to John D. Szostak in his new book, critics “heaped praise on the painting,” hailing it as a successful synthesis of traditional Japanese screens and modern art trends from the West (p. 133). Szostak adds that the display of this and other Kokuga Society paintings likely precipitated the cancellation of the Bunten, the annual government-sponsored national salon for contemporary Japanese art. This amazing outcome for a fledgling group of progressive painters not only revealed the power of provocative, well-made works to challenge the Bunten’s conservatism and mediocrity, but also prompted fresh discussion about the possibilities of nihonga, Japanese (-style) paintings in ink and mineral pigments.

Painting Circles is an accomplished, carefully researched study of Bakusen and several other Taishō-era artists who fought for the sake of unrestricted “freedom of creativity” and “irrepressible individuality” (as phrased in the Kokuga Society’s manifesto, translated and cited by Szostak on page 234). The book challenges the prevailing image of nihonga as an art form dedicated to conservative artistic and social agendas. Covering the period roughly from 1910 to 1927, the study avoids approaching nihonga from the usual angles of tradition versus modernism, nihonga versus yōga (Western [oil] painting), or Kyoto versus Tokyo; instead it focuses on the issue of the individual versus the artist’s collective (gadan), a tension that dogged the funding-deprived world of twentieth-century Japanese high art regardless of medium or creed. Rather than argue in support of one side or the other, Szostak reveals the almost insurmountable expectations and contradictions that restricted the options available to artists. Many late-Meiji and Taishō patrons expected their commissions to embody the “traditions found in old paintings” or to at least represent a reservoir of Japaneseness that would distinguish them from Euro-American cultural imports (p. 61). Thus the expectations placed on Kokuga Society artists differed from those faced by their antiestablishment contemporary Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–1927), who focused mainly on oils. Bakusen and his Kokuga Society fought such assumptions and defended “the right of Nihonga practitioners to express their affinity for Western artistic modernism” (p. 215).

They faced many hurdles. Shortly after the dissolution of the Bunten, the government announced the formation of a new national salon juried by the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) under the authority of the Imperial Household Ministry. Greater stylistic and thematic innovation was permitted, but only beneath a more aggressively inscribed imperial presence that implied the need for restraint and decorum. Funding remained a continual struggle. Szostak documents the ensuing tensions between personal artistic ambition, collaborative artistic ventures, government officials’ efforts to sponsor and contain Japanese-style painting, and popular anxieties over modernity and the subjectivities of women, rural residents, and those at the margins of urban Japan.

Painting Circles provides a welcome complement to existing studies of early- to mid-twentieth-century Japanese art, especially Alicia Volk’s In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010), Gennifer Weisenfeld’s MAVO (University of California Press, 2002) and Imaging Disaster (University of California Press, 2012), Bert Winther-Tamaki’s Maximum Embodiment (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), Ken Oshima’s International Architecture in Interwar Japan (University of Washington Press, 2009), and the edited volume Art and War in Japan and Its Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Lucid, insightful, and well-documented by primary sources, Painting Circles covers art in Taishō and early-Shōwa Kyoto with unprecedented depth and rigor...