In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

163 Epilogue The Collapse of Yōga Embodiment The urge toward maximum disembodiment in Yōga painting between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s was to be the last chapter of the Yōga movement. The four interrelated components of Yōga embodiment—the illustrated body, oil-pigment matière, the sense of the painter’s somatic presence , and bodily metaphors of social incorporation—ceased to define a major contemporary movement of Japanese art. Dismal assessments of the attainment of Yōga painting were common throughout the development of the movement, but by the end of the war many felt that Yōga was in a state of crisis. In 1948, Asō Saburō lamented that younger painters had “no connection to the flesh or lack the ability to think with the flesh.”1 Asō’s colleague the painter Tsuruoka Masao rejected the fiction of animation inhering in the painted body in the mid-1950s, but in 1949 he had already pronounced the previous century of Japanese Yōga painting a pathetic failure: “One thinks of the all but useless toil of countless painters and all the materials they wasted. It seems that they imported nothing but the materials of oil painting.”2 Another route to the demise of Yōga painting is illustrated by the career of Hasegawa Saburō, who first studied oil painting under Koide Narashige in the 1920s and whose turn to nonfigural abstraction in the mid-1930s was mentioned in the Introduction. By the early 1950s, even the materials of oil painting came to seem reprehensible to this painter. Convinced that “oil painting did not suit the disposition of the Japanese people” and critical of the “colonial mentality of painting a certain way in Japan because that is how the French paint,” Hasegawa renounced the medium and turned to abstract calligraphy in black ink on paper.3 Though the abstractionist Okamoto Tarō continued using oil on canvas, by the mid-1950s he also associated Yōga with the “colonial” status of past Japanese imitations of European culture and instead advocated new formalist abstraction that, in his view, held universal EpiloguE 164 appeal: “Since new things are international, their occurrence [in Japan] is not an imitation. It is Japanese Yōga and Meiji colonial architecture not abstract painting and International Style architecture that are imitations. You cannot say that a geometric triangle is French or American.”4 Despite all the ingenious methods Yōga painters had devised for bringing this foreign medium into alignment with Japanese bodies, sensibilities, and political ideologies, the very idea of oil-on-canvas figuration had become a signifier of debased Japanese imitation of European culture. The new critique of Yōga was confirmed by an institutional restructuring of the art world. By the mid-1950s, notes Amano Kazuo, Yōga had “lost its validity” and, together with Nihonga painting, “was suspended in brackets as the old art world, while contemporary art was foregrounded.”5 Newer waves of avant-gardism were now diverted into the new category of “contemporary art” (gendai bijutsu), which included work in media such as installation and performance as well as oil-on-canvas abstraction. The demise of Yōga, Amano maintains, was institutionalized in the late 1950s, when public submission exhibition societies such as the Second Section Society and the Free Artists Association lost their predominance in the Japanese art world. In their place, the framework of international exhibitions, which provided no special category dedicated to “Yōga,” was adopted as the structure of Japanese art. The sidelining of Yōga (and Nihonga) in the 1950s in favor of “contemporary art,” was conspicuously apparent in the selections of art representing Japan in international exhibitions. From 1960 on, for example, nothing referred to as “Yōga” or resembling Yōga embodiment as defined in this study would be featured among the Japanese submissions to the Venice Biennale.6 Two events of the mid-1950s serve as benchmarks of the decline of Yōga—the Mexico Boom of 1955 and the Informel Whirlwind of 1956–1957. A groundswell of enthusiasm for contemporary and ancient Mexican art was triggered by a large exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum in 1955, accompanied by a rash of Japanese publications about Mexico and a wave of Mexican influence in contemporary Japanese art. Kawara On became interested in Mexican themes in the late 1950s, and he was but one of many Japanese painters (including Fukuzawa Ichirō) who would travel to Mexico and consider the relevance...

Share