Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images by Chelsea Foxwell (review)

Chelsea Foxwell's Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: by what process did Japanese painters in the early-to-mid-Meiji period (1868–1912) decide what to paint? Her extensive and convincing response, unfolding over six chapters, demonstrates the true complexity of the problem by engaging an array of issues related to image and identity, domestic economic development, international relations, visual and cultural indoctrination, and the politics of exhibition. Specificity of these discussions to the artistic context of Meiji Japan is achieved through extensive visual and contextual analysis of the paintings and craft works created to represent the country in contemporaneous domestic and international expositions.

Of particular focus are efforts in the 1880s by Japanese artists and arts administrators to realize a new mode of painting, one requisitely distinct from naturalistic oil painting as practiced in the West, as well as from traditional styles of painting composing Meiji's received pictorial legacy. If there is a motif echoed throughout the text, it is that this new art form, dubbed Nihonga (Japanese painting), became vital to Japan's modern artistic identity precisely because it was unable to completely eschew either of these points of reference. The figure named in the title, painter Kano Hōgai (1828–88), is best understood not as the subject of the study but rather as its linchpin, drawing together disparate aspects of the national "search for images." We learn about Hōgai's life through specific artworks from his oeuvre, carefully selected by Foxwell to illustrate specific historical problems and issues. She also calls into question some of the myths about Hōgai, many dating to his own lifetime, while both affirming and problematizing the centrality of his role in the invention of Nihonga.

Chapter 1 explores the impact of international expositions, especially how "the positive and negative associations of exhibitionary culture in the nineteenth century shaped modern Japanese-style painting" (p. 17). As Japan became more egalitarian, painters and patrons of art came to accept the display of works in dedicated exhibition spaces as the final stage of the art-making process, normalizing the category of "exhibition art." It is here, Foxwell argues, that Japanese painting really began to change, as Japanese artists and exhibition promoters worked to fulfill the demands they projected onto a Western viewership. Some Western contemporaries condemned the intrusion of foreign influence as threatening Japan's traditional authenticity, but Foxwell notes that Japanese painting was already in a state of stylistic flux prior to the arrival of Western influence, pointing to proto-modernist qualities in the work of later Edo-period professional painters operating outside or on the fringe of the iemoto system of elite style-schools. These artists, she argues, grew "increasingly reliant on novelty and topicality" to interest patrons, reflecting a fast-growing cognizance of newly introduced, realistic styles of Ming-dynasty painting. This discussion of lesser known pre-Meiji artists, their followers, and their stylistic referents is offered without much visual representation (around 30 Edo-period artists are discussed, with only five illustrated), but it convincingly makes the case that growing stylistic eclecticism in later Edo-period painting conditioned artists and viewers alike for the even greater flux awaiting painting in the Meiji period.

Past studies have characterized Japan's participation in domestic and international expositions as either catalytic to or indexical of historical and cultural transition; in chapter 2, Foxwell suggests exhibitions in the 1880s played both roles and were thus simultaneously instrumental to and evidence of Japan's burgeoning modernism. The metaphor of "doubling" appears several times in the chapter; for example, Foxwell uses it to explain a two-tiered structure of viewing objects created for exhibition, whereby they were exhibited first in Japan, then repackaged for viewing in Europe, thus serving double...