Journal ARS 47 (2014) 2

Helena ČAPKOVÁ

The Japanese Cubist Body – mapping modern experience in the pre-WWII Japanese artistic network

(Summary)

The transnational flow of Cubist inspiration reached Japan in 1911 and continued to spread through numerous networks of Japanese avant-garde art scene over some decades. This article will test the idea of Cubism transgressing the dualistic paradigm of the East and the West and as such creating “a cubist body” for local, and in this case Japanese, artists to experience modernity. (WINTHER-TAMAKI, B.: Asian Possessions of the Cubist Body: 'Home from Home'. In: Cubism in Asia; Unbounded Dialogues, International Symposium Report. Ed. Y. FURUICHI. Tokyo 2006, pp. 304-311). The research for this study was shaped by transnational and network theories. This methodology allows for analysis from a broad, interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, addressing the issue of parallel histories by stressing the extensive travel and exchange among different artists’ networks and institutions which ultimately formed hybrid outcomes poorly understood within a linear conception of art history. Věra Linhartová identified clearly the conflicting ideas that were boiling together in the kettle of Japanese modern art, namely in her analysis of Japanese surrealist movement. (LINHARTOVÁ, V.: Soustředné kruhy: články a studie z let 1962-2002. Praha 2010, pp. 351-354). These ideas were on one hand, ideas of avant-garde nature, which were new and which were formed according to the contemporary local cultural climate, and on the other hand, we can find some ideas that served as a time capsule, that helped Japanese artists to recover some indigenous, traditional concepts that seemed to have disappeared for while in history. In terms of Asia, Japan was the only Asian country to assimilate Cubism in the 1910s, the decade in which it was being conceived in Paris. With significant delay, Cubism appeared in China, and it was not received elsewhere in the region until the ’30s to the ’50s – dates that, ironically, often corresponded to these countries gaining independence from colonial rule, periods in which they often actively suppressed local artistic activity that was contemporary and modern. (In 2005 Japan Foundation organized an international symposium on Cubism in Asia that outcomes were later published. See FURUICHI 2006). Cubism met with a mixed reception when it arrived in Asia, as it was considered as either a reminder of Western cultural superiority or a pan-cultural visual language of modernity for newly independent countries. There was also the concern that Cubism, being born of a particular cultural, philosophical and scientific background in Europe, was an imported phenomenon not suited to the Asian worldview. The Cubist or Piccassoid body, according to Bert Winther-Tamaki, provided Asian artists such as Yorozu Tetsugorō with an opportunity to violate a figurative subject to deform it in a way to express their own experience of modernity. The inhabitation of the Cubist body was a re-possession of their modern experience. (WINTHER-TAMAKI 2006, p. 310). Rooted in European capital cities, such as Paris and Berlin, Cubism embodied a new logic that shattered centuries of artistic traditions. In the Japanese case Euroamarican art gained particular importance during the transition from the Meiji (1868 – 1912) to the Taishō (1912 – 26) eras. 1910 was a moment of shift: it marked the arrival of modern art more en masse which happened at a time when Meiji institutions and government were being questioned, shifting the state regime towards democracy. The new forms of expression coming from abroad offered a new territory for individual self-expression to the large group of avant-garde Japanese artists. Karatani Kōjin calls this phenomenon of Taishō discursive space that combined cosmopolitan universalism with the seemingly contradictory “emphasis on Japanese uniqueness. (KARATANI, K.: The Discursive Space of Modern Japan. In: Japan in the World. Ed. H. D. HAROOTUNIAN. Durham 1993, p. 301, 304). Modernism in the Taishō period was effectively a result of cultural boomerang (coined by Kirk Varnedoe for the quality of 19th century ukiyo-e, that adopted European approaches) of Euroamerican Japonisme returning to Japan. This phenomenon is also labeled as “reverse Japonisme”– foreign ideas about Japanese art used in Japan for creation of new field of contemporary art. (VOLK, A.: In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art. Oakland 2010, p. 10). This circumstances paradoxically led Japanese artists to re-discover their pre-modern arts, so much admired by the Europeans involved in the Japonisme vogue. Cubism re-entered Japan with a storm and the catalogue of the cult exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in the Museum of Modern Art in New York held in 1936 was thought to have a “vital study reference”. (OMUKA, T.: The Reputation of Cubism in 1930s Japan, Modernism, Academism and America. In: FURUICHI 2006, p. 212). As Ōmuka Toshiharu observed – the reaction towards the MOMA show was immediate. Sanami Hajime published in a magazine Bijutsu (Art) a series of articles in reaction to the exhibition in which he introduced two parallel tendencies: a renewed interest in avant-garde painting and revived interest in classical western style Japanese painting genre – yōga. Nevertheless, it took a while for Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s catalogue to gain the lasting impact on Japanese artists. Even Sanami’s article was using Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887 – 1965) and Amédée Ozenfant’s (1886 – 1966) older text on “Modern painting” (Le Peinture moderne, 1924) as a reference for content and illustrations rather than the new Barr’s content. Upon examining Japanese perception of avant-garde movements from abroad we can conclude that Japanese avant-garde movements’ network was as an extension of an international activity and not some kind of a derivative tendency. The lack of prominence of Japanese artists within the main art historical narrative may be interpreted as result of imposed cultural differences rather than a fruit of mediocrity of Japanese artists’ production. According to Partha Mitter – the flexible language of Cubism, with its broken surfaces, released a new energy in artists in Asia that enable them to decontextualise and create a new modernist project. (MITTER, P.: The Formalist Prelude. In: Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms. Eds. E. O’BRIAN et al.: Oxford 2012, p. 146).