Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images

Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting

Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting

Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images

Chelsea Foxwell

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Chelsea Foxwell is assistant professor of art history at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in China

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11080-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19597-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195971.001.0001

Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association.

Publication of this book was funded in part with the support of the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foxwell, Chelsea, author.

Making modern Japanese-style painting : Kano Hogai and the search for images / Chelsea Foxwell.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-11080-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-19597-1 (e-book)

1. Painting, Japanese—Meiji period, 1868–1912. 2. Painting, Japanese—Meiji period, 1868–1912—Exhibitions. 3. Kano, Hogai, 1828–1888. I. Title.

ND1054.5.F69 2015

759.952’09034—dc23

2014029549

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ben

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Notes to the Reader

Introduction: Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

1 Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

2 In Search of Images

3 The Painter and His Audiences

4 Decadence and the Emergence of Nihonga Style

5 Naturalizing the Double Reading

6 Transmission and the Historicity of Nihonga

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book on the art of the Meiji era is the result of the extraordinary generosity of a number of individuals and institutions. I would first like to thank the mentors who inspired and guided my interest in this chapter of world history. My debt to Satō Dōshin, both personal and intellectual, is too big to ever repay. I am happy to have had the chance to participate in bringing his Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State to English-speaking audiences and can only hope that readers will see in the present work the extension of some of the many threads spun by his and by Kitazawa Noriaki’s profound scholarship and collegiality. For their help since the earliest days of my career, I am also grateful to Cherie Wendelken, Eugene Wang, Christine Guth, Jerome Silbergeld, Ellen Conant, Andrew Gordon, Emiko Yamanashi, Gennifer Weisenfeld, and Satomi Matsumura. I owe a lasting debt to Melissa McCormick, who supervised my doctoral studies and shaped my perspective on the arts of the Meiji era in two major ways: by challenging me to account visually for nineteenth-century Japanese art and by helping me gain a thorough understanding of how paintings and other objects were made and viewed in the medieval and early modern periods. During my residence at Columbia University, my research was also shaped and guided by professors Henry D. Smith II, Robert Harrist, Jonathan Reynolds, Anne Higonnet, Carol Gluck, Gregory Pflugfelder, David Lurie, Haruo Shirane, Keith Moxey, Yoshiaki Shimizu, Timon Screech, and Julia Meech, and by colleagues Rosina Buckland, Adam Clulow, Colin Jaundrill, Dipti Khera, Mathew Thompson, Yasuko Tsuchikane, Xiaojin Wu, and Lei Xue. Their guidance and support made a world of difference.

The University of Chicago provided the ideal intellectual environment in which to complete this book. I am deeply grateful to the former and current chairs of the Department of Art History, Joel Snyder and Christine Mehring, to Dean Martha Roth, and to colleagues who read and commented on portions of the project, especially Martha Ward, Wu Hung, Ping Foong, Claudia Brittenham, Megan Luke, Cécile Fromont, Richard Neer, Katherine Fisher Taylor, and Aden Kumler. Julia Sapin provided valuable feedback on chapter 5 and on a portion of the project I presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting. My colleagues in Japanese studies, especially Jim Ketelaar, Susan Burns, Hoyt Long, Hiroyoshi Noto, Michael Fisch, Michael Bourdaghs, and Norma Field, provided advice and support. Among the graduate students, I offer special thanks to Nancy Lin, Stephanie Su, Eleanor Hyun, Quincy Ngan, and Helen Findley. I also benefited from the input of Chicago colleagues Elizabeth Lillehoj, Janice Katz, Jun Mizukawa, and Sarah Fraser. Irene Small has been a source of radiant energy and creativity. Mai Yamaguchi and Maria March provided research assistance and organizational support. I also offer profound thanks to Susan Bielstein, Anthony Burton, and Joel Score at the University of Chicago Press, to the anonymous readers of the manuscript, and to Amanda Rybin, Bridget Madden, and Whitney Gaylord in the Visual Resources Collection of the Department of Art History.

This book would not have come about without the generosity of the curators, scholars, collectors, and caretakers who facilitated access to the works of art discussed herein. In this respect I am grateful to Satō Dōshin, Furuta Ryō, Anne Morse, Ono Mayumi, Ido Makoto, Seya Ai, Masako Watanabe, Ellen Takata, Rob Mintz, Akira Takagishi, Itakura Masaaki, Andreas Marks, Ann Yonemura, and all those who enabled me to study works in their collections. Thanks are also due to several institutions in Japan, Britain, and the United States that waived image reproduction fees, especially the University Museum of the Tokyo University of the Arts, the Waseda University Theatre Museum, and the Khalili Collection. In Japan, Tsunoda Takurō, Katō Hiroko, Yoda Tōru, Honda Mitsuko, Murakado Noriko, Ōnishi Junko, and Adachi Gen provided research advice and trusted friendship. Tamamushi Satoko facilitated my research at the Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and was a source of great encouragement.

Essential funding was provided by the Japan Foundation and the MOA Museum of Art, which supported my long-term research in Japan; the Getty Research Institute, where I found the ideal environment for writing and ideal colleagues; the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University; the Franke Institute for the Humanities; the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities and Department of Art History; the Leo and Catherine Guttman Foundation; and Joan B. Mirviss. Publication of the book and its images is supported by subventions from the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Fund for Faculty Initiatives in Art History at the University of Chicago, the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association, and the Association of Asian Studies.

I am grateful to my parents, Theresa Foxwell and the late David Foxwell; to my late grandfathers, E. Donald Foxwell and Pasquale Spirito; to friends and family for their truly endless support and encouragement; and to Avery and Derek for their cheer. Final thanks go to my inimitable husband, Benjamin Liu, who has provided support, enthusiasm, creative thinking, and all-around sunshine for almost as long as I can remember. This book is dedicated to him.

NOTES TO THE READER

Japanese and Chinese names appear in standard order, surname followed by given name, except where the individual was or is primarily active in the West. The romanization of the Kano surname follows Meiji-era conventions; it is typically rendered as Kanō in modern Japanese.

Dates before 1873 follow the Japanese lunar calendar.

Japanese characters are provided in-text only in the case of writing styles such as kanbun where there may be more than one common transliteration and where required to clarify homophonic readings.

All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

INTRODUCTION

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

For Old Japan was like an oyster—to open it was to kill it.

—BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, Things Japanese (1891)¹

The decline of Japanese painting has never been more extreme.

—TOKYO NICHI NICHI SHINBUN (Tokyo Daily News, 1882)²

In the 1880s, two related developments concerning Japanese painting emerged on opposite sides of the globe. In France, England, and the United States, enthusiasts declared that authentic Japanese culture was headed toward extinction, a result of the West’s aggressive opening of Japan to trade and diplomacy and the ensuing revolution of 1868, as the Meiji Restoration was sometimes called. Treating Japan as a heightened allegory of their own experience of modernization, many Western writers constructed a dichotomy between Old Japan and the modern, Westernizing Japan. In the same way that Old Japan was seen as having been sacrificed in the process of opening, Japanese art was imagined to be dead or dying under the withering influence of Western contact.³ The corpus of Japanese art and material culture envisioned by Western collectors was therefore deeply associated with the past and its preservation.⁴

In Japan, meanwhile, artists, dealers, and art administrators worked to ascertain the foreign demand for Japanese art. As one Japanese visitor to France reported to his compatriots in 1883, foreign buyers of Japanese art prefer Japanese-style flower patterns and so forth and, contrary to what one might expect, they do not like the grand new Western-style patterns.⁵ That Western viewers did not want Japanese artists to paint in the Western style was news in Japanese circles. Such comments were exchanged on the pages of Japan’s first art journals, in the newspapers, and at newly founded societies for the study and promotion of art in the Meiji period. As a greater number of interlocutors turned to the subject of Japanese art and its place within a global context, the new phrase Japanese painting (nihonga) arose as a central term in the conversation. Nihonga designated two overlapping spheres of discourse. First, as an unprecedented invocation of all Japanese painting as a single field, it figured in a globally informed metadiscourse on the future of painting in Japan, a collective imagining of what Japanese painting might be.⁶

Second, as a term denoting only painting in the manners distinctive to our country (wagakuni koyū no gafū), it reflected the originally Western ambition to preserve (hozon) existing Japanese painting from admixture with oil painting and other forms of Western painting (yōga, seiyōga) that had gained popularity and accessibility following the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868.⁷ Under the prevalence of a developmentalist, even Darwinian, paradigm that foresaw native Japanese painting as succumbing to Western modes of representation, the term nihonga reflected a certain view of temporality and authenticity: one in which the hope of preserving authentic Japanese art was tied to the act of segregating Japanese painting from the globally engaged practice of painting at large. This verbal reframing of existing Japanese painting had another effect as well: it inserted a symbolic separation between the painting of the Meiji era and past painting. The result was a mirroring in Japan of the contemporaneous Western appraisal of Japanese painting as bifurcated between an authentic premodern corpus (Japanese painting) and a corrupt modern corpus (Japanese-style painting, or consciously Japanese painting). With the birth of nihonga, the originally Western fear about the death of authentic Japanese art took on a complex life within Japan.⁸

This book explores the earliest phase of that process, in the 1860s through the 1880s, years of tremendous social change and economic instability. This period saw fundamental challenges to peoples’ conception of what a painting was and what (or whom) it was for. It was not just—or not even—that paintings themselves were changing. Even when paintings stayed the same, there were notable changes in artists, viewers, viewing environments, and the words surrounding painting.

The Search for images of the book’s title refers to the Japanese and foreign demand for new art that would represent Japan internationally.⁹ Such demand materialized through the Meiji government’s efforts to support art and craft exports and deliver impressive exhibits to the world’s fairs, and it was a catalyst for many of the objects examined in this book. But seeking is different than finding, mental images work differently than actual paintings, and demand must be gauged, imagined, and speculated on. The emergence of nihonga as a modern traditional style of painting was similarly mediated and experimental, a process that involved ascertaining Western criticism, reframing existing styles and iconography, and exhibiting pictures to diverse audiences. Aimed at capturing and analyzing these forces, this book focuses on individual objects and artists caught in intense moments of interaction with the demand for Japanese images. It centers mainly on Tokyo (known as Edo prior to 1868), where many of the central government’s art policies were formed, and presents a series of studies of individual works and themes rather than a single chronology.¹⁰

The Painting Distinctive to Our Country

The word nihonga arose to fill a new discursive need.¹¹ Prior to the late nineteenth century, there had been no term to denote all paintings made in Japan. Instead, as Kitazawa Noriaki has emphasized, pre-Meiji interlocutors distinguished various schools and lineages (shoryūha) of painting. These might be characterized as primarily Japanese (yamato-e), Western (ranga), or Chinese (kanga) in style, but the main understanding of a painting school or lineage was based on the models of the household and the master-disciple relationship. The Kano, Sumiyoshi, Ōkyo, Kōrin, Shen Nanpin, and Kishi schools are all examples of the practice wherein descendents born or adopted into a school were understood as carrying on its master’s lineage.¹² In the 1880s, the word nihonga began to assume the status of umbrella term, gathering this plurality of schools under a single heading. But why and how did it emerge? And what were the consequences of reframing the existing schools and lineages of painting in this manner?

Although they have been modified by recent scholarly contributions, the most familiar accounts of the rise of nihonga emphasize a linear narrative in which early enthusiasm for oil painting cooled into a desire to protect the national essence (kokusui)—and with it, traditional Japanese painting—in the 1880s.¹³ Within the central government, this purportedly led in 1889 to the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) under the Ministry of Education, with Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) in key positions, and later, in 1907, to the founding of the Ministry of Education Exhibition (Bunten), a national salon that solicited painting submissions in two discrete categories, nihonga and yōga, thereby imposing a bifurcated understanding of painting in other circles too. This narrative requires several emendations. First, the notion of a national essence, like that of traditional Japanese painting, was projected backward onto the 1880s art world by historians and memoirists.¹⁴ While both concepts were more or less present by 1890, the language of the 1880s is far more ambiguous when compared with the late Meiji, after 1900. I have not detected a clear tide of opinion toward painting in Japanese materials and away from oil painting in the 1880s or 1890s but, instead, a variety of opinions from a variety of individuals, even if we limit ourselves to Tokyo or to the central government, which was composed of competing individuals, bureaus, and ministries.¹⁵ Consequently, it is a drastic simplification to conclude that there was a general turn toward painting in Japanese materials and away from oil painting on the level of discourse (as opposed to funding) in the mid-Meiji.

Second, the rise of nihonga as a general category, both conceptually and visually, must be distinguished from the rise of government funding for nihonga at oil painting’s expense, although those two ascendencies are naturally related. Once this distinction is made, the standard narrative’s Tokyo-centrism and its problematic privileging of Fenollosa and Okakura are both relativized, for the standard narrative pertains directly to the funding situation and is insufficient to describe what was happening visually and conceptually throughout Japan.

Third, existing descriptions of the way that Japanese painting became nihonga in the Meiji era use the paintings of well-known masters to illustrate the narrative, but they have yet to provide a solidly visual understanding of what happened to painting after the Restoration: how did painting change, and what were the causes and mechanisms of that change? This, of course, is a difficult proposition. There were dozens of major painters and literally thousands of minor ones, with documented submissions to the 1882 and 1884 exhibitions from every region of the country. In this book I have endeavored to use visual and textual materials to articulate certain trajectories of this change through the 1880s and especially surrounding the painter Kano Hōgai (1828–1888), who moved from Shimonoseki to Tokyo in the 1870s and ended up in a patronage relationship with Fenollosa. I see my work as part of an ongoing scholarly effort to understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century creators, from Kikuchi Yōsai (1781–1878), Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), Taki Katei (1830–1904), and Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) to Takeuchi Seihō (1864–1942), Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875), and Okuhara Seiko (1837–1913).¹⁶

Given that there are so many painters waiting to be studied, some may wonder why, in the end, I decided to work on Hōgai, an artist who became part of the standard narrative and worked for Fenollosa and Okakura, whose roles in the Meiji art world have already received so much attention.¹⁷ Significant questions remain about Fenollosa’s position in the art world of the 1880s, and it is important to continue to think critically about them along with opening other avenues of inquiry, as Ellen P. Conant has challenged us to do.¹⁸ This book’s position on Fenollosa’s relation to the emergence of nihonga developed as the result of thinking not about Fenollosa but around him, temporarily bracketing him while studying the discourses and trends with which he coincided. The second major motive in centering on Hōgai is rooted in my conviction about his works, which prompted me to understand him not as a pawn in the hands of prominent advocates or as someone who had later fortuitously entered the canon, but rather as a thoughtful painter who confronted myriad problems of the picture surface, of audience expectations, and of general political and economic upheaval. Most of Hōgai’s paintings look nothing like our mental image of nihonga; acknowledged as strange and outmoded in their own day, they are at odds with the way they have been used as illustrations of a standard narrative that was used to chart movement from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Japan Art Institute to the Bunten. The fact of their Kano style does support this school’s instrumentality in the making of modern Japanese-style painting, but even then, Hōgai had a complex relationship to Kano orthodoxy.

Furthermore, in stark contrast to some of his contemporaries and most of his successors, Hōgai left virtually no written records. Understanding his paintings ultimately takes us far beyond the artist himself, and to the extent that his later paintings would be enshrined (and copiously forged) as early nihonga, they provide one window onto the larger problem of how Japanese artists weathered the change from the shogunal era into Meiji.

Hōgai was a thoughtful painter, and one final reason his paintings matter to the history of Meiji art is that the making of modern art in this period is, in the end, part of the story of Japanese art’s globalization. Japanese art from the Edo period forward addressed foreign viewers as well as more diverse audiences in Japan within a compressed time frame of interactions made possible by modern transportation and print technology. Seeing Japanese objects exposed to buyers and viewers beyond the artists’ circle of connections and beyond the archipelago’s boundaries, Meiji artists and arts officials concluded that the work of interpreting and valuing Japanese objects could be quite different from that at home. As one of the first Meiji painters to work directly with a foreign patron, Hōgai was in a curious position, but one that would become extremely relevant to subsequent Japanese artists’ attempts to engage foreign viewers and criteria.

Nihonga and the Specter of Foreign Demand

The creation of the concept of Japanese painting reflected the global nineteenth-century impulse to divide painting and other arts into national schools, but it also reflected the stance of foreigners such as William Anderson (1842–1900), Louis Gonse (1846–1921), and Ernest Fenollosa, whose position as non-Japanese made it natural for them to designate all of Japanese painting as a single entity.¹⁹ Further research bears out Kitazawa’s initial suggestion that nihonga was painting in translation: as will be shown in greater detail throughout this volume, some of the first appearances of the word involved either the translated statements of Western commentators, such as Gottfried Wagener (1831–1892) and Fenollosa, or Japanese speakers’ perceptions of the profile of Japanese art abroad.²⁰ For example, in an 1876 newspaper article, oil painter Goseda Hōryū (1827–1892) declared that Japanese artists working in both seiyōga (Western painting) and nihon no gafū (Japanese painting styles) must improve by the time of the Domestic Industrial Exhibition and the 1878 Exposition Universelle. Hōryū also designated Japan’s paintings with the phrase nihon no e (日本の画) (written almost like nihonga, but with the hiragana phonetic gloss ゑ[e] over the final character)—by which he meant oil paintings that would represent Japan’s artistic attainments to Westerners.²¹ Even before it became limited to works in so-called Japanese materials, nihonga and related terms were tied to the act of positing an international audience for Japanese art.

When the words for Japan and painting were joined to form the word nihonga in the 1880s, it could be said that two different moves took place simultaneously. First, the Western concept of the national school took on life in Japan, one of many new ideas that included the notion of art itself (bijutsu), genre categories such as history painting (rekishiga) or the nude (ratai), and the competitive, juried public exhibition (hakurankai, kyōshinkai).²² Second, the word nihonga enacted or performed the distinction between newly imported Western forms and ideas and existing Japanese ones. In this way, even though the word nihonga was dependent on foreign concepts of the national school, those who invoked it reinforced the notion that Japanese art should seek independence from Westernizing influences.²³

Despite its endemic vagueness, by the first decade of the twentieth century the word nihonga most commonly referred to what writers in the early 1880s had called the painting methods distinctive to our country; that is to say, it excluded oil painting in the act of attempting to define an indigenous, distinctly Japanese painting. In 1882 the Meiji Interior Ministry hosted the first government-sponsored exhibition devoted exclusively to painting, soliciting [works] of all the different schools, with the exception of Western painting (seiyō-e o nozoku no hoka, ryūha no ikan o towazu).²⁴ The Second Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition (Dai Nikai Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) followed in the spring of 1884. While the two large, high-profile exhibitions did not use the word nihonga, their manner of defining painting created a conceptual category based on the exclusion of Western painting. Furthermore, while many researchers initially concluded that this exclusion reflected Western negativity toward Japanese oil painting, Seki Chiyo has shown that the major outcome of this event was the selection of elegant, pedigreed painters to supply Japanese-style cedar door paintings for the Meiji Imperial Palace in Tokyo, while Yamaguchi Seiichi and Satō Dōshin cite Japanese concerns about the export market as the primary reason behind oil painting’s loss of government support at this time.²⁵ In each case, it is difficult to isolate a single motive or perspective from which the separation of nihonga from oil painting occurred. Similarly, the government-sponsored Tokyo School of Fine Arts, founded in 1889 under Fenollosa and Okakura’s advocacy, formally excluded oil painting from the painting (kaiga) department, but that decision reflected several different perspectives: Fenollosa and Okakura’s belief in the future of painting in Japanese materials as a progressive contribution to world art; their desire to secure the past; and Meiji government officials’ awareness that the Western market for Japanese oil paintings was limited.²⁶ Here, too, personal, governmental, and foreign-oriented objectives were intertwined.

By the late Meiji, nihonga and yōga (also seiyōga, seiyō-e) came to constitute a dichotomy, at much the same time that a Western/Japanese dichotomy was being codified in other spheres of daily life and culture, such as architecture, dress, and cuisine.²⁷ Yet these dichotomies were originally much more ambiguous than they now appear. As one reporter in 1905 would write, "People use the words nihonga and yōga almost unconsciously, although the question of whether these terms should be used or equated to each other [at all] . . . is unresolved."²⁸ Furthermore, the dichotomy left no obvious place for the category of Qing Chinese culture, save for that of assimilation within the broader category of East Asia.²⁹ The nihonga yōga binary was ever threatened with dissolution as the boundaries between what counted and did not count as Japanese painting were subjected to challenge and redefinition.

Contesting Nihonga

As a category, nihonga was contested from the beginning, even before the word entered common usage. Amid political jockeying and the widening of the cultural generation gap in the mid-Meiji period, the masters of each art, be it literature, theater, instrumental music, or calligraphy, required political patronage, financial backing, and the visibility that would prevent their institution from getting lost as daimyo and shogunal patronage declined and new cultural pursuits arose. Painters secure in their networks of patronage could change at their own pace, but those seeking the support of the government or the export market placed their painting in the service of fluid and competing visions of the Japanese nation.

The Interior Ministry’s act of summarily excluding oil painting from the Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions of 1882 and 1884 was an affront to the small but elite cohort of Meiji oil painters and their supporters.³⁰ It was, furthermore, a retreat from the general mindset of the 1870s, when officials at the Ministry of Industry and other cosmopolitan Japanese supported oil painting (yūga, abura-e) as a supplement to the myriad crafts and industries . . . of our country Japan.³¹ At a time when the government printing bureau was working to master the technologies of metal-plate engraving, chromolithography, and photography, oil painting appeared to be assimilable to similarly practical aims.³² Acting on reports of the centrality of artistic developments in Renaissance Italy, the government hired three Italians to teach draftsmanship, oil painting, and sculpture at the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō), which had been founded by the Ministry of Industry in 1876.

Government policies of the 1870s treated oil painting as yet another manifestation of Western technology whose adoption was to be fairly uncontroversial. Policies promoting oil painting were frequently connected to concerns about the impression Japanese art would make on Western viewers. When the government Exhibition Bureau (Hakubutsukyoku) composed its guidelines for submissions to the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873, for example, it voiced the concern that old-school (kofū) Japanese paintings would undermine Japan’s status on the world stage. In Tokyo and elsewhere, the guidelines stated, "there are many famous masters of sculpture, but our painting methods still lack detail and refinement [saimitsu]; accordingly, attempts at copying real scenery [shinkei] remain poor."³³ This statement reflects the early Meiji assumption that Western viewers would be most impressed by detail, technical refinement, and illusionism because these were the qualities that Western pictures seemed to exhibit from a Japanese point of view.³⁴

At the time, these qualities appeared to be most clearly realized by producers of articulated metalwork dragons and hawks, or by carvers of wood and ivory who devoted themselves to the realistic representation of humans, birds, animals, genre figures, and other subjects. Such works did indeed elicit broad admiration and high prices in the West, particularly in the 1860s and 1870s, when only a few European writers had begun to advocate for the value of Japanese graphic arts.³⁵ Painting—particularly the elite painting that was proposed as the equivalent of fine art in the West—was indeed judged to be lacking in detail and verisimilitude, and the Exhibition Bureau intimated that Japanese painters should increase their mastery of these qualities in general and of oil painting in particular. The Vienna missive continued, It is true that old-style paintings by famous masters do have a certain charm that people enjoy. In recent years oil painting methods have also made tolerable progress, and there are some now which are quite worth looking at.³⁶

Members of the Japanese art world, in other words, did not initially see the Meiji government’s support of oil painting as a threat to old-style paintings. At the First Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877, oil paintings, paintings on silk or paper, and even calligraphy had hung side by side in similar framed mountings. In any case, scholars speculate that some paintings at the early Meiji exhibitions used affordable existing materials or homemade oil paints that deliberately sought the effects of oil painting.³⁷ Work on a variety of supports in both oils and Japanese materials flourished within a general culture of exploration.

The Meiji officials understandably sought to demonstrate Japan’s mastery of oil painting. The British diplomat Rutherford Alcock (1809–1897) had scoffed in the 1870s at what he supposed was the Japanese ignorance of perspective, oil painting, and the like; thus, the ambition to demonstrate Japan’s progress in the medium was perfectly reasonable from a foreign policy point of view. By the early 1880s, however, this position had come under attack by almost every Western commentator on Japanese art. The French critic Philippe Burty (1830–1890), who had begun writing about Japanese art in the early 1870s, wrote in 1883:

We learn with terror that Japan has invited professors of drawing and painting from Europe. Our methods, good among us, differ radically from those of the country that received theirs from China in ancient times but knew how to appropriate them with an unparalleled delicacy, perfecting them through the constant study of nature, and that would lose everything in exchanging them for others. Without paradox, it is our decorative artists who . . . ought to seek advice from the Japanese masters.³⁸

Fenollosa, who had come to the University of Tokyo in 1878 as a foreigner hired to teach philosophy and political economy, began his famous 1882 speech Bijutsu shinsetsu (The True Meaning of the Fine Arts) on a similar note. He promised to prove that verisimilitude was not the chief aim of painting and to offer more attractive alternatives. Already appealing to listeners through the apparent rigor of his logical predication, which seemed to transcend the limits of mere subjective judgment or regional preference, he further implied that Japan’s arts could contribute to Western art by helping the latter redress its own overreliance on illusionism.³⁹ Rather than constituting another area in which Japan would borrow technology from the West, Japanese art, in Fenollosa’s eyes, was eligible to become one of the first intellectual exports from Japan to the industrialized West.⁴⁰

Given the affirming nature of this claim, it was easy for Japanese audiences to suppress or overlook the fact of its being made within a broader and more problematic Orientalist discourse. As Elisa Evett and Akiko Mabuchi have noted, Westerners who exalted Japanese art tended to attribute to Japan a primitive closeness to nature and innocence of Western high art.⁴¹ While the consequences of reimporting the values of japonisme or Orientalism were many, with repercussions that extended well into the twentieth century, this discourse encouraged the perception of Japanese art or Japanese painting as a unitary category and, moreover, as an entity that was opposed to and ultimately threatened by Western painting.⁴²

Kano Hōgai

There were clearly winners and losers in this process of consolidating Japanese art in opposition to that of the West, and it is no secret that Kano Hōgai was among the former. Patronized by Fenollosa and eulogized by Okakura, Hōgai would assume a key role in the triumphal narrative of the salvation and development of traditional Japanese painting promulgated by the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Japan Art Institute. As early as the 1890s, the Kano painter had effectively become an ideal father figure: laid to rest on the eve of the school’s opening, he provided a symbolic foundation for the next generation without actively interfering in its work.⁴³ The school and the Japan Art Institute, two institutions shepherded by Okakura, went on to write the victors’ history of nihonga. Hōgai continued to be praised and credited, aided by the almost magical hold on viewers of his final work, Merciful Mother Kannon (fig. 6.1).⁴⁴

Some narratives have treated nihonga like a specific art movement with instigators (Fenollosa and Okakura), leaders (Hōgai, Gahō, and the artists of the Japan Art Institute), activists, and opponents (oil painters, literati painters, and some Kyoto masters). To be sure, Fenollosa and Okakura were utterly partisan in their attempts to control and curate Japanese painting’s past, present, and future. The relation between the term nihonga and these individual actors was, however, considerably more complex. Nihonga was not a discrete artistic movement but a term of discourse that initially bore no ties to a specific style, practitioner, or visual vocabulary, yet it proposed a vision of painting in Japanese materials that ultimately bound its raison d’etre to the state itself, seeking to become a national school such as was being called for in other countries at the time.⁴⁵ Fenollosa and Okakura constituted one of several constituencies that competed to articulate nihonga’s parameters by championing certain artists and drowning out competing groups, such as Kyoto naturalist painters and Chinese-style literati painters.⁴⁶

So, is the continued prominence of Fenollosa, Okakura, and their protégés (including Hōgai) in the narrative of nihonga’s origins due to their profound success at mythmaking or, worse, to scholarly torpor? At a time when so many overlooked painters of the Meiji era await our attention, what can the study of Hōgai bring to our understanding of nihonga’s early years? For me, the answer to these two questions lies less in a reassessment of Fenollosa than in a reassessment of nihonga as such. In a quest to determine who should receive credit for Japanese painting’s successful modernization as nihonga, generations of scholars and critics have argued over the extent of Fenollosa’s role in Hōgai’s career, or in the making of nihonga as a whole. But while I am prepared to recommend Hōgai’s paintings as among the most interesting of the Meiji period, my overall attitude is far less celebratory. Fenollosa, as a source of patronage and championship, was the one detail that set Hōgai apart from his colleagues. What does it mean that the man who would be remembered by many twentieth-century writers as the most prominent Japanese-style painter of his generation was working for an American?

This question is not merely a matter of canon formation. It also had play within the figures’ lifetimes, shaping their careers and the category of nihonga. And it coalesced what would become one of the main problematics of modern and contemporary Japanese art: namely, its negotiation of conflicting domestic and international images of Japan.⁴⁷ Since the specter of foreign demand for and perceptions of Japanese art loomed so large in the history of nihonga, it is no wonder that one of its most successful exponents would be in American employ. What once appeared to be Fenollosa’s or Hōgai’s personal role in the making of nihonga was only one of the earliest and most paradigmatic cases in which the figure (or figment) of Western demand manifested itself in the production and display of Japanese painting.

Exhibition Culture and the Viewers of Meiji Painting

The scenario of the exhibition hall and the shadowy presence of its implied Western audience can provide a new perspective both on Hōgai, whose agency and strategies of picture-making were so different from those of the self-directed modern artist, and on the history of nihonga. International demand was ultimately far more crucial to the emergence and visual codification of nihonga than any individual artist, patron,