FAH262H1 Chap.10 Painting, Politics and War
Painting, Politics and War
Two start dates for one week
The syllabus schedule sets Week 10 at about 1931 to 1945, but the term calendar in the same document gives 1937 to 1945. Both are defensible.
The earlier date begins with the Manchurian Incident of September 1931, which Robertson describes as the moment Japanese militarism took the upper hand, and with Manchukuo, which the sample aid sheet dates 1932 to 1945. The later date begins with the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937 to 1945. The assigned readings are Asato Ikeda's introduction to The Politics of Painting and Mark Sandler's 1996 article on Matsumoto Shunsuke, with Mao's Yan'an Talks as the primary reading for the second half.
Sandler's case anchors the Japanese half of the week.
How the Japanese state reached into the art world
Sandler argues that for most of the decades after 1868 artists and officials argued over the role of art without strong coercion. The state's tools were institutional: art schools, the official salon, juries, purchases and honours.
The suppression of left-wing groups from 1928 and the forced recantations known as tenko changed the climate first. In 1935 the Education Minister Matsuda Genji reorganised the Teiten salon to bring independent groups inside it, a plan that largely failed. War in China from July 1937 and the State Total Mobilization Law of 1938 then gave executive agencies legal power over civilian expression, the arts included.
Under Prime Minister Konoe's New Order of 1940, the Cabinet Information Bureau took charge of mass media and the visual arts.
The officers' roundtable of 1940
On 27 November 1940 three staff officers of the Army Information Section and two civilians met to discuss what artists should do for the National Defense state, and the art magazine Mizue printed the transcript in January 1941. No painter took part; Araki Hideo, a critic of French painting, was meant to stand in for them.
Major Suzuki Kurazo dismissed pure art as a pretence, attacked the Western-style painters of the Nikakai and compared abstract art to the drawings of psychiatric patients. The decisive point was supplies: art materials were ammunition, and the state could stop rationing them to artists it judged unacceptable and halt their exhibitions.
The published text even records laughter when Suzuki said no nation had ever perished for lack of art.
Matsumoto Shunsuke's reply in print
Matsumoto, born in 1912 and deaf from meningitis since his school years, was a member of the avant-garde Room Nine group inside the Nikakai. His essay The Living Artist appeared in Mizue in April 1941 after censors and the Special Higher Police had read it.
It defended freedom of expression and intuition as roots of classical Japanese culture, pointed out that the officers' own isms were European, and argued that a nation could not lead Asia without a culture others admired.
Sandler records that the stand won few supporters; Matsumoto turned to sombre self-portraits and cityscapes, and died in June 1948 at 36. His title also echoed The Living Soldiers, a 1938 war novel by Ishikawa Tatsuzo that censors suppressed.
Looking beyond Tokyo
The week covers China and Korea as well.
The syllabus dates Mao's Yan'an Talks on literature and art to 1943, while the aid sheet lists 1942; quote the date with its source, since the two course documents disagree. Craig Clunas, writing about later art, describes the Talks as prescriptive in theory yet notoriously vague.
In Seoul, Joan Kee shows the colonial salon removing works in 1943 and 1944 and Korean painters such as Yi Yu-t'ae taking on propaganda commissions while making pictures that sit awkwardly beside them. Aid sheet terms to recognise include sensoga, war painting, and Fujita Tsuguharu (1886 to 1968), whose circle helped form the Army Art Association in 1939.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The Manchurian Incident, Manchukuo and the war in China
- 02
State control of art through schools, salons and supplies
- 03
The 1935 Teiten reorganisation
- 04
The Army Information Section roundtable in Mizue, 1941
- 05
Matsumoto Shunsuke's essay The Living Artist
- 06
War painting and the Army Art Association
- 07
Colonial Korea and the wartime Sonjon
- 08
Dating Mao's Yan'an Talks
Worked example · free
Explain how rationing paint became a censorship threat
- 2Identify the claim: paint and canvas were treated as war materials, so the state could decide who received them and could halt exhibitions of unacceptable art.
- 2Contrast it with earlier control: the 1935 Teiten reform worked through salon membership and juries and affected a few senior painters, whereas rationing reached every working artist.
- 2Show the outcome: supplies were later distributed through the Japan Art Patriotic Association, the art press was merged into one journal and independent exhibitions ended in autumn 1944.
Key terms
- Sensoga
- Japanese for war painting, the category covering the large patriotic canvases that army-sponsored painters such as Fujita Tsuguharu produced in support of the war.
- Tenko
- Public recantation of left-wing beliefs, often following arrest, pressed on Japanese writers and artists after the suppression of proletarian groups began in 1928.
- National Defense State
- The New Order vision, current by 1940, of a radically reorganised and unified Japan in which art and every other activity would serve the nation.
- Inner Emigration
- A withdrawal from public protest into private work; Sandler applies it to Matsumoto's dark wartime self-portraits and cityscapes after 1941.
Painting, Politics and War FAQ
Why did the Japanese army attack abstract and Surrealist painting?
The officers linked abstraction with rootless cosmopolitanism and mental illness, echoing Nazi talk of degenerate art. They held up healthy nudes and narrative realism as models, and said art for the nation was no luxury in wartime.
Did Japanese artists resist wartime propaganda painting?
Very few did so publicly. Sandler names Matsumoto Shunsuke as the only painter whose objection to the 1940 army roundtable was printed. Most artists complied, from conviction, career interest, fear or conformity, and Japan's early victories after December 1941 produced near-universal patriotic elation.
What did Matsumoto Shunsuke do after the war?
On 1 January 1946 he circulated a self-published proposal for an independent national union of artists, and his ideas fed left-wing art groups of the late 1940s. He died on 8 June 1948 of heart failure.
Exam move
Draw a timeline from 1931 to 1945 and add five art-world events with month and year, then write two sentences explaining how each changed what painters could show. Finish by stating both dates given for the Yan'an Talks with their sources.
