FAH262H1 Chap.6 Taisho Avant-Garde and Commercial Art
Taisho Avant-Garde and Commercial Art
A second generation of individualists
Week 6 picks up where the Shirakaba story stopped. Gennifer Weisenfeld traces a long Japanese debate about the individual: early Meiji leaders prized personal ambition in the service of the nation, and after the Russo-Japanese War artists began to treat self-expression as the centre of art.
By the early 1920s the leftist critic Kato Kazuo separated two attitudes, an older subjective individualism (kojinshugi) and a socially conscious egoism (jigashugi). Mavo belongs to the second. The syllabus dates the week c. 1923 to 1931 and pairs this avant-garde with Taisho chic. Weisenfeld notes that officials saw danger in any subject whose goals parted from the state's.
Murayama arrived with fresh authority, having exhibited in Berlin in 1922 through Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm circle.
Boom, unrest and the leftist turn
Weisenfeld sets the art against a changing society. Japan prospered as a supplier to the Allies in the First World War, people moved from the countryside into cities, and both an industrial working class and a salaried middle class grew.
Inflation and a postwar depression bred discontent, and the Rice Riots of 1918 were put down harshly. Anarchism, voiced most attractively by Osugi Sakae, led the labour movement until late 1922, and it shaped Mavo's taste for destruction as the first stage of building something new.
Yanase Masamu had helped launch the leftist journal Tanemaku Hito in 1921, and Murayama, like the anarchists, took from Nietzsche the idea of individual will as the source of value.
Mavo in print and in public
Mavo artists wrote for newspapers and courted publicity, aiming, in Nakamura Giichi's phrase as Weisenfeld quotes it, to put hypocrisy on the front page.
Weisenfeld counts seven issues of Mavo magazine, July 1924 to August 1925, while Bourgogne analyses a collage by Hagiwara Kyojiro in what she calls the ninth issue, of 1925; cite the count with its author.
In April 1924 the group took a whole room at an exhibition of plans for rebuilding the capital, where Murayama showed an anarchic model for a Mavo headquarters and Kato Masao argued that architecture spoke most directly to the public; Murayama called it the ultimate art.
Yabashi Kimimaro's 1924 linocut Self-Portrait, ringed with words such as kill and death, shows the tone of crisis.
Soviet models and the proletarian movement
Andrea Bourgogne follows the artists who moved left.
Umbrella bodies such as the NAPF, formed in March 1928, linked artists to the Japanese Communist Party, and the critic Kurahara Korehito, who studied in the Soviet Union in 1925 and 1926, published his call for proletarian realism in 1929. Nagata Isshu painted him holding Pravda in 1928, and Terashima Teishi's Komsomolka of 1930 shows how Soviet imagery entered painting.
The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 and mass arrests in 1928 and the early 1930s broke the movement, and in 1933 hundreds of prisoners renounced their commitments in the conversions called tenko, Murayama among them.
Okamoto Toki's 1933 painting of the death mask of Kobayashi Takiji, who died after police torture, marks that crisis.
Commercial art, Surrealism and the image
The key terms close the week with commercial art (shogyo bijutsu), the 24-volume Complete Commercial Artist of 1928 to 1930, Hamada Masuji (1892 to 1938), Surrealism and the painter Koga Harue (1895 to 1933).
Hamada's 1930 conclusion to his introduction to commercial art is the assigned primary reading, and Roland Barthes's Rhetoric of the Image is the conceptual reading, dated 1977 in the syllabus and 1964 on the course site. Read those texts beside Mavo magazine, whose photomontage and advertising cuttings already placed avant-garde art inside mass print.
Weisenfeld also lists posters and book illustration among Mavo activities, so design for the market and the avant-garde were never far apart.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Individualism from Shirakaba to Mavo
- 02
Murayama Tomoyoshi and conscious constructivism
- 03
Mavo after the 1923 earthquake: barracks and cafes
- 04
Sanka and protests against the Nikakai
- 05
From avant-garde to proletarian art
- 06
Class and nation in proletarian art
- 07
Commercial art and the Complete Commercial Artist
Worked example · free
Trace Murayama's route from Mavo to proletarian theatre
- 2Start point: in 1923 Murayama's conscious constructivism mixed found and industrial materials to bring the whole of life into art, while keeping the artist's individual will central.
- 2Turn: around the end of 1925 he questioned the destructive, expressionist side of his work, looked to Soviet Constructivism, left Mavo and joined the proletarian theatre and arts movement.
- 2Judgement: Bourgogne treats the shift as a continuation, the avant-garde's ambition redirected into politically engaged art, which his 1926 book on constructivism makes explicit.
Key terms
- Conscious Constructivism
- Murayama Tomoyoshi's theory of 1923, an art taking in the whole of modern life through found objects, industrial materials and reproduced images.
- Sanka
- An exhibiting society, the Third Section, formed with Mavo members to challenge the Nikakai; Bourgogne dates it to 1924, the course key terms to 1925.
- Barrack Decoration
- Post-earthquake work building and decorating temporary structures (barraku) for Tokyo businesses and homes after September 1923; the key terms list a Barrack Decoration Company.
- Proletarian Realism
- A late-1920s doctrine, voiced by Okamoto Toki and Kurahara Korehito, that art should depict living people in class struggle from a Marxist standpoint.
Taisho Avant-Garde and Commercial Art FAQ
How did Mavo protest against the Nika exhibition?
When the jury rejected all of the group's entries, Mavo set up an open-air show of rejected works in Ueno Park outside the exhibition hall, alerted the press and planned a band-led procession to Shinbashi, which police stopped.
Why did Mavo artists perform in women's clothing?
Weisenfeld explains that eroticism and blurred gender roles were a form of resistance to official morality. Censors treated open sexuality as harmful to public morals, so dances in women's shoes challenged family and national norms, and critics called the members hedonists.
Who introduced Russian futurism to Japan?
Bourgogne credits David Burliuk, who reached Japan in October 1920 and organised a first Tokyo showing of Russian art. He worked with the critic Kinoshita Shuichiro, who later wrote What is Futurism? We Answer, before Burliuk left for the United States in 1922.
Exam move
Draw a dated line from 1923 to 1933 and pin Mavo, Sanka, the proletarian league, the NAPF and tenko to it from memory. Then explain Yanase's 1924 collage in four sentences and check each claim against Weisenfeld.
