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Studies of Japanese Art by Period
Taisho (1912-1926), Showa (1926-1989), Heisei
(1989-present)
A Century of Japanese Photography (New York: Pantheon, 1980) covers the period
1840-1945. For a broad representation of Japanese woodblock prints (traditional
and Western-influenced), see Donald Jenkins, Images of a Changing World: Japanese
Prints of the Twentieth Century (Portland, Ore.: Portland Museum of Art, 1983);
Lawrence Smith, The Japanese Print Since 1900 (New York: Harper & Row,
1983); Margaret K. Johnson and Dale K. Hilton, Japanese Prints Today (Tokyo:
Shufutomo, 1980), on contemporary technique; and, for 80 works by living artists
with an introduction on printmaking techniques, Lawrence Smith, Contemporary Japanese
Prints (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). On prints of the early 20th century
- both shin hanga (new prints, work in the relatively flat traditional style,
as opposed to the more painterly prints of Kobayashi Kiyochika) and sosaku hanga
(creative prints influenced by Westerners from van Gogh and Gauguin to Kandinsky)
- see Helen Merritt, Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: The Early Years (Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1990). Merritt's discussions of the carvers, publishers,
and exhibitions are especially useful. A companion volume to this title is Helen
Merritt and Nanako Yamada, Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints, 1900-1975
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992), which gives more than a thousand brief
bios, lists of publishers, carvers, and printers; it reproduces seals and signatures,
but no prints. Oliver Statler, Modern Japanese Prints (Rutland, Vt.: Charles
E. Tuttle, 1956) is a highly readable introduction but more limited than Merritt's
books, since Statler is chiefly concerned with the Western-influenced "creative"
prints and focuses on artists rather than the social matrix of the prints. See also
Lawrence Smith, Modern Japanese Prints, 1912-1989 (New York: Cross River Press,
1994). For essays on images of women, with black-and-white reproductions of prints,
see Kendall H. Brown, Light in Darkness: Women in Japanese Prints of Early Showa,
1926-1945 (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1996). Kendall H.
Brown and Hollis Goodall-Christante, in Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern
Japan (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), illustrate about
120 traditional prints, chiefly from the first third of the 20th century, and argue
that these works, usually regarded as out of touch with the times, deserve serious
attention. For a thorough study of one of the most important sosaku hanga
artists, see Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton, The Graphic Art of Onchi Koshiro
(New York: Garland, 1986). For one of the best-known artists of the mid-20th century,
see Shiko Munakata, The Wood-Block and the Artist: The Life and Work of
Shiko Munakata (New York: Kodansha International, 1991). For an artist who works
in the style of the 19th-century woodblock artists but whose subject matter is contemporary
(e.g., AIDS, MacDonald's), see two exhibition catalogues with color illustrations
and useful texts: Howard A. Link, Waves and Plagues: The Art of Masami Teraoka
(Honolulu: Contemporary Museum, 1988), and John Stevenson, Masami Teraoka: From
Tradition to Technology: The Floating World Comes of Age (Seattle: University
of Washington, 1997), a catalogue with 50 color illustrations.
Exhibitions of contemporary calligraphy have produced some useful catalogues,
notably Eloquent Line: Contemporary Japanese Calligraphy (Washington, D.C.:
ISC Exhibition Service, 1992), which illustrates some 50 works and includes useful
essays, and Words in Motion: Modern Japanese Calligraphy (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbun,
1984), which includes 69 works and brief comments by modern calligraphers and, for
reasons unclear to us, an additional 43 minor pieces from the Library of Congress.
Introductory essays (by Stephen Addiss and Barbara Rose, among others) are of considerable
interest. Cecil H. Uyehara has written helpfully on contemporary calligraphy, notably
in a catalogue mentioned a moment ago, Eloquent Line, but also in an essay,
"The Rite of Japanese Calligraphy and the Modern Age," Orientations
(Summer 1987): 174-82. The Calligraphic Arts of Ogawa Toshu (Sapporo: Sapporo
International University, 1997), devoted to a single avant-garde calligrapher
working chiefly in a Chinese style, features several helpful essays, including one
by Lawrence Smith and another by the calligrapher. For about 100 images of Zen
calligraphy and painting, see a forthcoming exhibition catalogue by Audrey Yoshiko
Seo, with Stephen Addiss and Matthew Welch, The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen:
Paintings and Calligraphy (Boston: Shambala, 1998).
For a relatively brief survey of all forms of art from 1868 to 1968, see Hugo
Munsterberg, The Art of Modern Japan (New York: Hacker, 1978). On nihonga,
see Ellen P. Conant, Nihonga: Transcending the Past: Japanese-Style Painting,
1868-1968 (Tokyo and St. Louis: Kokusai Koryu Kikin and St. Louis Art Museum,
1996), a large, handsome book (117 illustrations in black and white, 250 in
color) that includes artists working not only in obviously traditional modes
but also painters who draw on Chinese literati painting and Abstract Expressionism.
Lawrence Smith, Nihonga: Traditional Japanese Painting, 1900-1940 (London:
British Museum, 1991), is an exhibition catalogue illustrating 29 works in color,
with a useful introduction on the history and techniques of Japanese-style
painting in the first half of this century, biographies, and comments on each work.
Probably the most important book on contemporary art is Alexandra Munroe, Japanese
Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Abrams, 1994), the catalogue
of an exhibition of 50 years of avant-garde art shown at the Guggenheim Museum
Soho and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It contains some 445 illustrations
(more than 200 in color), representing the work of more than 100 artists (including
calligraphers, photographers, and video and performance artists). Essays by Isozaki
Arata, Nam June Paik, and others make it especially interesting, and an extensive
bibliography, chronology, and glossary make it an important reference work. Part
1 is an introduction to critical issues of postwar avant-garde Japanese art, part
2 offers a survey of individual movements in Japan, and part 3 consists of writings
by artists and others. Much less impressive is Against Nature: Japanese Art in
the Eighties (Cambridge, Mass.: Grey Art Gallery, 1989), an exhibition catalogue
of some 30 paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works by nine young artists and
one artists' collective. The relevance of the title is not entirely clear, though
probably it is meant to indicate that pictures of female beauties, Fuji, and wisteria
are excluded; what is clear is that the artists are insistently modern. Also relevant:
Mark Sandler, ed., The Confusion Era: Art and Culture in Japan During
the Allied Occupation, 1945-1952 (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery,
1997), which contains essays by Donald Richie, Sherman Lee, and others, and some
60 illustrations, 30 in color; and David Elliott and Kazu Kaido, Reconstructions:
Avant-Garde Art in Japan, 1945-1965 (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1985), which
is said to focus on the relationship between art and society, but we have been unable
to review the book.
Two books treat painting, sculpture, and architecture. Michiaki
Kawakita, Modern Currents in Japanese Art, translated by Charles E. Terry
(New York: Weatherhill, 1974), though devoted chiefly to Western-style and Japanese-style
painting of the late 19th and 20th centuries, also includes some sculpture and architecture.
Toru Terada, Japanese Art in World Perspective, translated by Thomas Guerin
(New York: Weatherhill, 1976) has abundant illustrations of contemporary painting,
sculpture, and architecture, but its text is somewhat baffling. David Kung, The
Contemporary Artist in Japan (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1966) contains brief
interviews with painters, sculptors, and calligraphers, and illustrates their work.
William Lieberman, The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1966) is an exhibition catalogue featuring the work of 46 Japanese
artists, some of them living in Europe or the United States. Contemporary Japanese
Art in America: Arita, Nakagawa, Sugimoto (New York: Japan Society, 1987) prefaces
illustrations of the work of two painters and one photographer with a useful essay
on "Japanese Artists in the American Avant-garde, 1945-1970." Hiroshi
Sugimoto has emerged in the United States as the most important contemporary Japanese
photographer; several catalogues of his work have been issued, most with useful commentaries,
and Norman Bryson discusses an aspect of his work in an essay in Parkett 46
(1996): 120-23. For reproductions of some 90 pieces of sculpture from the second
half of the 20th century, see Janet Koplos, Contemporary Japanese Sculpture
(New York: Abbeville, 1991).
Ceramics: Herbert H. Sanders, The World of Japanese Ceramics (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1967) surveys contemporary ceramic art, paying special attention
to tools, materials, forming processes, and decorating processes. Among the works
on individual potters of the mid-20th century, two books on Hamada and one on Rosanjin
are especially useful: Bernard Leach, Hamada: Potter (New York: Kodansha International,
1975); Susan Peterson, Shoji Hamada: A Potter's Way and Work (New York: Kodansha
International, 1995); and Sidney Cardozo and Masaaki Hirano, The Art of
Rosanjin (New York: Kodansha International, 1987), which is devoted chiefly to
Rosanjin's ceramics but includes some of his painting and calligraphy, and a sample
of his writings. On contemporary Japanese ceramics, see Frederick Baekeland and Robert
Moes, Modern Japanese Ceramics in American Collections (New York: Japan Society,
1993), for an exhibition catalogue of 120 pieces by 87 artists, covering work in
a variety of styles from 1935 to 1991, including not only traditional glaze styles
and techniques such as Bizen and Raku but also nontraditional functional pieces and
ceramic sculpture.
For contemporary lacquer (some 60 objects by 38 artists made chiefly 1985-95),
see the exhibition catalogue by Masami Shiraishi, Rainbows and Shimmering Bridges:
Contemporary Japanese Lacquerware (New York: Japan Society Gallery, 1996).
For woodwork, bamboo, lacquerwork, weaving and dyeing, metalwork, jewelry,
and glass, see Robert Faulkner, Japanese Studio Crafts: Tradition and the
Avant-Garde (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995). (The idea behind
"studio crafts" is that they are handcrafted works with "artistic"
value.) On cloisonné, see Lawrence A. Coben and Dorothy C. Ferster,
Japanese Cloisonné: History, Technique, and Appreciation (New York:
Weatherhill, 1982).
David B. Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture, 1868 to the Present
(New York: Kodansha International, 1988), a survey of architecture from the
Meiji period to about 1980 - from the age of eclectic revivalism to postmodernism
- includes more than 400 black-and-white photographs and plans, some of which show
buildings that are no longer extant. Hiroyuki Suzuki et al., Contemporary Architecture
of Japan, 1958-1984 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1985) contains photographs
and plans of 92 buildings of various types, along with a fairly brief text; Botand
Bognar, Contemporary Japanese Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1985) covers the same period but views modern architecture in the context of earlier
culture. Bognar's New Japanese Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International,
1991) illustrates a few works by each of 23 architects, with the illustrations often
accompanied by brief comments by the architects.
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