Background

This Guide is essentially an annotated selective bibliography, but at the outset we indulge ourselves for a moment and offer some comments on the history of English-language publications on Japanese art.

Probably the first important work in English is Ernest Fenollosa's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, posthumously published in 1912, a book that inevitably has been superseded but that was an astounding achievement at the time. Other pre-war books that must be mentioned are Langdon Warner, Japanese Sculpture of the Suiko Period (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1923); Chie Hirano, Kiyonaga: A Study of His Life and Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1939); and Jon Covell, Under the Seal of Sesshu (privately printed, 1941).Generally, however, apart from material concerned with Japanese crafts and export wares, writing before World War II seems to have been chiefly concerned with prints and netsuke (miniature sculptures).

Most of the significant work produced after World War II and before the 1990s was in the form of the exhibition catalogue. In the 1950s, catalogues began to show important unfamiliar material, but they were chiefly picture books with perfunctory introductions and captions. In the late 1960s, however, the catalogue became in effect a significant book on the topic. Early examples of this new sort of exhibition catalogue are John M. Rosenfield and Shujiro Shimada, Traditions of Japanese Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1970) and Jan Fontein and Money L. Hickman, Zen Painting and Calligraphy (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1970). Interestingly, in those days the university presses seem to have played almost no role in publishing books on Japanese art (for example, Rosenfield and Shimada's book was published by the Fogg Art Museum, not by Harvard University Press). No doubt, this was partly because there were very few scholars working in the field. To the best of our knowledge, the first book on Japanese art published by an American university press (we are not including an occasional brief catalogue published by a university museum) was Langdon Warner's The Enduring Art of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), and the second was Warner's Japanese Sculpture of the Tempyo Period, posthumously published in two volumes in 1959 by Harvard University Press, and reissued in one volume in 1964. (Warner's book on Suiko sculpture, to repeat, was published by Yale but for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Hirano's book on Kiyonaga was published by Harvard but for the Museum of Fine Arts.) Borderline examples of university engagement are found in James Cahill's Sakaki Hyakusen (1983), published by the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, and Christine Guth Kanda, Shinzo (1985), published by the Council on East Asian Studies and distributed by Harvard University Press. It was not until 1987, when the University of Hawai'i Press published Stephen Addiss's Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters: The Arts of Uragami Gyokudo, that the university presses began to play an active role in publishing books on Japanese art. Recently the university presses at Hawai'i and Princeton especially have shown an interest in Japanese art, but the exhibition catalogue continues to be the dominant form of publication.

It might be noted, too, that in contrast with some of the most recent books on art, which emphasize social context, catalogues inevitably stress the artwork itself. They usually do set forth the social or political or religious context, but since each work commonly is illustrated in color, and since the largest market is the visitor to the museum, the chief concern is with the aesthetic value of the work. University press books, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with the setting than with the works, with (so to speak) the context (social, political, religious) rather than the text (the work itself). They may be chiefly concerned with systems of patronage, or images of women, or workshop practices, important issues that may be discussed in terms of otherwise negligble works. An example is a fairly recent Princeton University Press book, Donald F. McCallum's Zenkoji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art (1994). Because the icon in question (the text, as we now say) is a secret image, one never seen by the public and not seen even by the priests of the temple, McCallum's concern cannot be with the aesthetic properties of the image; rather, his concern is with why the image was widely copied, and with the cult that believed the Zenkoji icon was the Buddha incarnate. We are not saying, however, that university press books invariably ignore aesthetic matters. An example of a university press book that is much concerned with the objects themselves is Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis's forthcoming Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998).

If one compares English-language writings on Japanese art with those on, say, Italian Renaissance art, or the Impressionists, or contemporary American art, one is justified in saying that very little has been published on Japan. On the other hand, even by 1987, when the Asia Society first published this bibliography, there were indeed many books (again, chiefly catalogues of important exhibitions) and articles worth reading. It was our intention then to offer some guidance by calling attention to the major writings on the arts of Japan. Six years later the Guide was revised for inclusion in Penelope Mason's History of Japanese Art (New York: Abrams, 1993), and now (spring 1998) at the invitation of the Asia Society and with the permission of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., we have revised it again.

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