FAH262H1 Chap.5 Self-Expression from Meiji to Taisho
Self-Expression from Meiji to Taisho
Two titles for the same week
Week 5 carries two names. The syllabus heading reads Self and Expression, Meiji to Taisho (1912 to 1926), while the term calendar and the course site use Authority and Autonomy. The pairing is useful for revision because it names both sides of the argument.
On one side stand the institutions that ranked and rewarded art, above all the government salon founded in 1907. On the other stand young artists and writers who claimed that a work was valuable because it came from a particular person. Most questions about this week ask you to place an object, a group or a text somewhere between those two poles.
Schoneveld's essay on Shirakaba and Rodin makes the strongest case for the self; the optional print readings by Smith and Volk carry the same argument into the woodblock.
From rival societies to a state salon
The key-term list gives a sequence of venues.
The Meiji Fine Art Society (1889 to 1901) was, in Matsushima's account, the older camp of Western-style painters; the White Horse Society, led by Kuroda Seiki from 1896, brought in a brighter, French-derived manner. The Ministry of Education tried to settle the feuding by launching the Bunten, which also used the medal system of the international fairs and labelled its honoured entries works of art.
After 1912, Matsushima adds, new art organisations multiplied, including the Nikakai of 1914 and the Kokugakai of 1918. Schoneveld adds that the Bunten favoured styles useful to nation-building, which younger artists came to see as stale.
Shirakaba and the cult of the personality
Erin Schoneveld describes Shirakaba as the project of a privileged circle, among them Yanagi Soetsu, Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya and Arishima Ikuma, who used print to bypass the literary and art establishments.
She frames their individualism as a second wave of Western influence, a turn away from state-led modernisation towards the self. Yanagi's long manifesto The Revolutionary Artist appeared in January 1912, and between 1910 and 1922 the group organised twenty exhibitions that hung Japanese originals beside reproductions of the Europeans who inspired them.
Not everyone was convinced: the critic Kinoshita Mokutaro charged the group with a shallow grasp of Post-Impressionism in 1911 and 1912.
Takamura Kotaro and the green sun
Takamura's 1910 essay is assigned as a primary text. The readings report its claim rather than reprinting it.
Ajioka summarises it as a demand that artists be entirely free to express themselves, and notes that Takamura opened the Rokando gallery the same year, showing craft and fine art without ranking them. Weisenfeld says the essay asserted the unlimited authority of the artist's personality over faithful copying of nature, and Volk quotes its central image of a painter who sees the sun as green.
Takamura, still little known in 1910, also wrote the opening tribute in Shirakaba's Rodin issue that November; Schoneveld gives his dates as 1883 to 1956. Treat each summary as a report and name the reading that makes the claim.
Sculpture and prints as vehicles of the self
Matsushima links Shirakaba's promotion of Rodin to a change in Japanese sculpture from wood to bronze and towards works that carried inner feeling.
Prints changed as well. Alicia Volk shows Yorozu Tetsugoro carving rough, single-block woodcuts after 1912, treating the visible marks of hand and knife as proof of sincerity, and using a road leading to the sun as an emblem of the artist's own path. Volk also quotes the painter Okamoto Kiichi, who wrote in 1913 that a block cut by someone else keeps only a distant tie to the artist's self.
After 1918 Yorozu took up prints again and likened the spontaneous manner of literati painting to the creative print's amateur look.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Exhibition societies from 1889 to 1918
- 02
The Bunten as a state salon
- 03
Shirakaba magazine and its exhibitions
- 04
Rodin's gift of three bronzes in 1911
- 05
Takamura Kotaro's Green Sun as reported in the readings
- 06
Creative prints and revival prints compared
- 07
Yorozu Tetsugoro's woodcuts as self-expression
Worked example · free
Classify Shinsui's Before the Mirror within the print debate
- 2Identify the production system: an artist's design realised by a publisher's carvers and printers, the traditional ukiyo-e division of labour Watanabe revived from 1906.
- 2Contrast the creative-print ideal, in which one person conceived, carved and printed the block, as Yamamoto Kanae claimed for his 1904 fisherman.
- 2Conclude on value: revival prints located quality in the finished image for collectors of Edo prints, whereas creative prints located it in the maker's own marks.
Key terms
- Shirakaba
- A literary and art magazine (1910 to 1923) that championed individualism and introduced Rodin and the Post-Impressionists to Japanese readers.
- Rodin Boom
- A press label for the surge of Japanese interest in Rodin between 1904 and 1912, visible in Rodin-like sculpture at the Bunten.
- Nikakai
- An exhibiting society founded in 1914, the Association of the Second Section, which Weisenfeld names as the artistic counterpart of the Shirakaba writers.
- Hanga
- A word for the art print, coined by the painter Ishii Hakutei; the course key terms date it to 1905.
Self-Expression from Meiji to Taisho FAQ
Why did the Shirakaba group send ukiyo-e prints to Rodin?
In 1911 the members pooled savings to buy thirty prints, including works by Hokusai, Utamaro and Hiroshige. Schoneveld reads the choice as a shrewd appeal to Rodin's romantic image of old Japan, shaped by Japonisme; he replied with bronzes and asked for a Tokyo show of his drawings.
Why did plans for a large Rodin exhibition in Tokyo fail?
Arishima Ikuma sought to stage it at the 1914 Tokyo Expo with the People's Art Society. Officials said the government had never mounted such a show and did not know where to hold it or how to insure the works, so the request lapsed.
Who founded the Japanese Creative Print Society?
Smith credits Yamamoto Kanae with proposing it after his return from France. It was founded in 1918; Volk records that Yorozu Tetsugoro was invited to join and was one of twenty-six artists in its first exhibition in January 1919.
Exam move
Redraw the timeline of societies from memory with dates, then mark where Shirakaba and the Rodin bronzes sit against the Bunten. Finish by writing one sentence each on Yamamoto's 1904 print and Shinsui's 1916 print, naming who carved each.
