Art History 371: Transforming Traditions: Art and Visual Culture in Japan

"The East Asian classical tradition, with its repertoire of ancient narratives and established pictorial themes, was a major force driving cultural development in Japan during the early modern or Edo period (1615-1868). This book offers an in-depth account of three aesthetic concepts - mitate, yatsushi, and fūryū - which influenced the way early-modern popular culture absorbed and responded to this force of cultural tradition. Combining literary, historical, and visual evidence, the book examines particularly how the three concepts guided artistic choices in the context of Floating World prints (ukiyo-e), and how the concepts have shaped the direction of ukiyo-e studies since the Meiji period (1868-1912)." -Summary

"In the spring of 1989 the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas held an exhibition called “The Art of Zen,” curated by Stephen Addiss. It was the first major exhibition of brushwork by Japanese Zen masters of the Edo Period (1600-1800) to be shown in the United States."-Preface

"The MFA's holdings of Japanese art make up the finest and most comprehensive collection outside of Japan. This overview features many of the collection's best-known and much-loved works, including rare and famous paintings such as the eighth-century Buddhist painting Shaka, the Historical Buddha, Preaching on Vulture Peak and the thirteenth-century narrative handscroll Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace. Also included are magnificent examples of woodblock prints, breathtaking sculptures such as the statue of the bodhisattva Miroku by the twelfth-century master Kaikei, plus a representative selection of postcards, textiles, ceramics, lacquer wares, sword-fittings, and other decorative arts. Nor is the modern world neglected, for this volume includes twentieth-century masterworks by such artists as Sugimoto Hiroshi and Murakami Takashi. In all, more than 160 highlights from this staggering collection are illustrated and discussed, divided into the themes of art of the temple, the ruling classes, the town, and Japanese art in the outside world. Ranging from the seventh century to the present day, this engaging book introduces the reader to the variety and brilliance of Japanese arts."--Book Jacket

"Transmitted from China to Japan in the 13th century, Zen Buddhism not only introduced religious practices but also literature, calligraphy, philosophy, and ink painting to Japanese disciples. This elegant book discusses these fields as they combined to encompass the evocative practice of figure painting within Zen Buddhism in medieval Japan. Focusing on forty-seven exceptional Japanese and Chinese paintings from the 12th to the 16th centuries; which together illustrate the story of the; awakening; of Zen arts; the book features essays by distinguished scholars that discuss the life and art within Zen monastic and lay communities. The authors explore the ideology underlying the development of Zen's own pantheon of characters created to imagine the Buddha's wisdom and offer fresh insights into the role of the visual arts within Zen practice as it developed in Japan in close dialogue with the Asian continent."-Book Jacket

"Folding screens, known asbyôbu in Japanese, are treasures within any museums collection and are beloved by the general public. This beautiful publication brings together the very finest screens from the world-renowned collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum. The featured works range from an extraordinary pair of landscapes by Sesson Shukei, a Zen-Buddhist monk-painter of the late 16th century, to daring contemporary works from the late 20th century. The first half of the Edo period is especially well represented, with a dozen screens from the 17th century by such masters as Kano Koi and Tosa Mitsuoki. The contemporary scene is also well covered, with ten examples from the 20th century; proving the longevity of this art form and its currency among modern-day artists. Enlightening essays by important scholars in the field cover topics like the emergence of screens as an art form and a novel discussion of the relationship of Japanese screens to those made in other countries."-Book Jacket

"Following the destruction of Kyoto during the civil wars of the late fifteenth century, large-scale panoramic paintings of the city began to emerge. These enormous and intricately detailed depictions of the ancient imperial capital were unprecedented in the history of Japanese painting and remain unmatched as representations of urban life in any artistic tradition. Capitalscapes, the first book-length study of the Kyoto screens, examines their inception in the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, focusing on the political motivations that sparked their creation. Close readings of the Kyoto screens reveal that they were initially commissioned by or for members of the Ashikaga shogunate and that urban panoramas reflecting the interests of both prevailing and moribund political elites were created to underscore the legitimacy of the newly ascendant Tokugawa regime. Matthew McKelway's analysis of the screens exposes their creators' masterful exploitation of ostensibly accurate depictions to convey politically biased images of Japan's capital. His overarching methodology combines a historical approach, which considers the paintings in light of contemporary reports (diaries, chronicles, ritual accounts), with a thematic one, isolating individual motifs, deciphering their visual language, and comparing them with depictions in other works. McKelway's combined approach allows him to argue that the Kyoto screens were conceived and perpetuated as a painting genre that conveyed specific political meanings to viewers even as it provided textured details of city life. Students and scholars of Japanese art will find this lavishly illustrated work especially valuable for its insights into the cityscape painting genre, while those interested in urban and political history will appreciate its bold exploration of Kyoto's past and the city's late-medieval martial elite."-Summary

"The complex and coherent development of Japanese art during the course of the 19th century was inadvertently disrupted by a political event: the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Scholars of both the preceding Edo (1615-1868) and the succeeding Meiji(1868-1912) eras have shunned the decades bordering this arbitrary divide, thus creating an art-historical void that the former view as a period of waning technical and creative inventiveness and the latter as one threatened by Meiji reforms and indiscriminate Westernization and modernization. General texts, academic studies, biographical dictionaries, and exhibition catalogues continue to reinforce this prejudicial chronological divide. Challenging past and present, to the contrary, demonstrates that the period 1840-1890, as seen progressively rather than retrospectively, experienced a dramatic transformation in the visual arts, which in turn made possible the creative achievements of the twentieth century."-Book Jacket

"The Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto has long been revered as a cloistered meditation centre, a repository of art treasures, and a wellspring of the "Zen aesthetic." Gregory Levine'sDaitokujiunsettles these conventional notions with groundbreaking inquiry into the significant and surprising visual and social identities of sculpture, painting, and calligraphy associated with this fourteenth-century monastery and its enduring monastic and lay communities. The book begins with a study of Zen portraiture at Daitokuji that reveals the precariousness of portrait likeness; the face that gazes out from an abbot's painting or statue may not be who we expect it to be or submit quietly to interpretation. By tracing the life of Daitokuji's famed statue of the chanoyu patriarch Sen no Riky-u (1522-91), which was all but destroyed by the ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98) but survived in Rash-omon-like narratives and reconstituted sculptural forms, Levine throws light upon the contested status of images and their mytho-poetic potential. Levine then draws from the seventeenth-century journal of K-ogetsu S-ogan, Bokuseki no utsushi, to explore practices of calligraphy connoisseurship at Daitokuji and the pivotal role played by the monastery's abbots within Kyoto art circles. The book's final section explores Daitokuji's annual airings of temple treasures not merely as a practice geared toward preservation but also as a space in which different communities vie for authority over the artistic past. An epilogue follows the peripatetic journey of the monastery's scrolls of the 500 Luohan from China to Japan, to exhibition and partial sale in the West, and back to Daitokuji. Illuminating canonical and heretofore ignored works and mining a trove of documents, diaries, and modern writings, Levine argues for the plurality of Daitokuji's visual arts and the breadth of social and ritual circumstances of art making and viewing within the monastery. This diversity encourages reconsideration of stereotyped notions of "Zen art" and offers specialists and general readers alike opportunity to explore the fertile and sometimes volatile nexus of the visual arts and religious sites in Japan."-Book Jacket

"Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614) was a famous calligrapher and head of a high-ranking aristocratic family. Nobutadas contributions to the art and culture, have frequently been overlooked, largely because of the common misperception that aristocrats were too outdated, impoverished and powerless to be worthy of discussion. Dismissed as Elegant Fossils seeks to reinstate aristocrats as key players in the competition for political and artistic supremacy by examining Nobutadas calligraphy and painting, his turbulent relationship with Tokugawa Ieyasu, and his familys role in marital politics."-Book Jacket

"Drama and Desire presents sixty-nine masterpieces of ukiyo-e painting by such renowned artists as Hokusai, Utamaro, Harunobo, and others, all depicting aspects of the so-called "floating world" - the licentious demi monde of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) where actors and courtesans, rich patrons and bohemians cavorted. While woodblock prints of the floating world have long been a favorite of art lovers, far less known and much less available have been the remarkable paintings of the period, rendered by some of Japan's most renowned artists with a rare freedom of expression. In Drama and Desire, wistful interiors of courtesans at rest and onstage panoramas of actors in their finery jostle with explicitly erotic scenes of lovemaking and outrageous fantasies. Essays by American and Japanese scholars, including Howard Hibbett and Kobayashi Tadashi, set the context with discussions of Udo society and culture, the ways in which "high" and "low" arts mixed in ukiyo-e painting, and the prominent roles played by courtesans, geishas, and male prostitutes in the subculture of the "floating world.""--Book Jacket

"Beginning with the claim that the popularization of Buddhism in the medieval period was a phenomenon of visual culture, Explaining Pictures reexamines the history (and historiography) of medieval Japanese Buddhism. With theoretical sophistication and a full appreciation of the power of imagery to convey and control religious meaning, it investigates a range of aspects of etoki, including the particularly active role of itinerant nuns, whose performances were especially edifying to female audiences, as well as the visual hagiography of the reputed founder of Japanese Buddhism, the pictorial projections of Buddhist paradise and hell, and the explanation, through visual imagery, of sacred mountains." "Explaining Pictures is the first book-length study in English devoted to the phenomenon of Buddhist art as religious propaganda and pictorial storytelling as a form of popular culture in medieval Japan. A truly interdisciplinary study, it suggests fruitful avenues of discussion between art historians and historians of Japanese Buddhism. Scholars and students with an interest in Japanese Buddhism, art, and social and cultural history will find its examination of significant issues fresh and stimulating. It will also find an appreciative audience among those concerned with the relationship between art and religion, the mechanics of proselytization, and Asian visual culture."--Book Jacket, Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

“Part I of the volume continues and expands on issues raised in Hokusai Paintings by focusing on paintings by the artist and his pupils. Part II looks at aspects of Hokusai’s accomplishments as an innovator in print design and book illustration – topics relatively untouched at the first international conference.”- Preface

"Featuring a splendid variety of exquisite Japanese works of art from the Kobe City Museum, Japan Envisions the West provides a rare and intriguing window into interactions between Japan and the West from the sixteenth through nineteenth century. The book examines the fascinating process of reception, synthesis, and transformation by which Japanese artists adapted Western conventions into their traditional aesthetic."-Book Jacket

"The exhibition, “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky,” is an interpretive survey of the last fifty years of Japanese avant-garde art. It is a great pleasure for The Japan Foundation to be co-organizer of the American tour, which travels to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York and the San Francisco Museum of modern Art in association with the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens."– Preface

"Catalog of an exhibition held at Sebastian Izzard LLC, New York, in association with London Gallery LTD., Tokyo, March 23-30, 2004."-Notes

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Sept. 11-Nov. 16, 2008." -Notes
Thoughts on the Terry Welch collection / Uchiyama Takeo -- Collector's view : east of the moon / Terry Welch -- Artists in the exhibition -- The meeting of Chinese and Japanese literati : Hu Gongshou, Yasuda Rozan, and the controversy over national style / Paul Berry -- The transformation of Japanese literati painting in the twentieth century / Michiyo Morioka.-Contents

"Lyric Journey focuses on the influence of poetry in Chinese and Japanese paintings."-Kelton Rockett

"Catalog of an exhibition held Mar. 28-Apr. 7, 2006 at Yoshii Gallery, New York."-Notes

"The importance of this wide ranging investigation into the origins, conceptualization, and ideological deployment of Japanese modernism, as practice and theory, becomes obvious within moments of opening Modern Japanese art and The Meiji State... With its unrelentingly global perspective, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State will contribute much to the destabilization of modernism as an exclusively Euro-American project. This English translation will also encourage examination of the intellectual conditions that have allowed Japan to remain outside the modernist conversation in most writing on art history."-Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University

"In Optical Allusions: Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800-1200), Joseph T. Sorensen illustrates how painted screens and other visual art objects contributed to the development of some of the essential characteristics of Japanese court poetry."-Summary

"Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan is the first book-length study to focus on short-story small scrolls (ko-e), one of the most complex but visually appealing forms of early Japanese painting. Melissa McCormick's history of the small scroll tells the story of its emergence and highlights its unique pictorial qualities and production contexts in ways that illuminate the larger history of Japanese narrative painting."--Book Jacket

"The study of the Akita Ranga movement has long been neglected by Western academics. This is also the case among art historians in Japan. One of the reasons for this neglect may have been the fact that although the movement originated in Edo the name Akita refers to a remote region in the northern part of Japan. The significance of Akita Ranga painting has however been long recognized by local scholars and artists in Akita."-Introduction