Critique: Japan Modern, on view at the Rijksmuseum

Currently on display at the Rijksmuseum is Japan Modern, an exhibition of works from the Elise Wessels Collection, the Jan Dees and René van der Star Collection, and Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art. Woodcut prints, posters, kimonos, and lacquerware depict Japan’s rapid modernization during the first decades of the twentieth century.

The end of the nineteenth century brought profound changes to Japan, which transformed from an agrarian medieval country to a modernized nation in the span of several decades. Changes in daily life included the introduction of trains, cars, and electricity; people began wearing Western-style clothing, and Tokyo became a modern metropolis.

Woman Applying Makeupby Hashiguchi Goyo (1918)

Two principal printmaking movements emerged during the turn of the century: shin hanga and sosaku hanga. The turn of the century in Japan was marked by optimism, as well as nostalgia -- in times of great uncertainty, artists sought to glorify the past. This nostalgia is exemplified by the shin hanga (“new print”) artists, who printed peaceful landscapes and beautiful women in traditional dress. An example is Woman Applying Makeup by Hashiguchi Goyo (1918): the soft portrait of a woman applying white powder to her neck evoked eighteenth-century prints, but the ring and art-nouveau lacquer mirror indicate that the print originated in the early twentieth century.

Portrait of the Poet Hagiwara Sakutaro
by Onchi Koshiro (1949)

Shin hanga clung to traditional production methods involving a division of labor between artist, block cutter, printer, and publisher, but sosaku hanga (“creative print”) stressed the artist as the sole creator motivated by a desire for self-expression. The style is characterized by somewhat coarser production quality and more expressive mark-making -- an example is Portrait of the Poet Hagiwara Sakutaro by Onchi Koshiro (1949), who is considered the father of sosaku hanga. A strikingly intense portrait, the dark tones and rough texture of the woodblock print hint at the sitter’s melancholy.

Breton Womanby Yamamoto Kanae (1920)

Notably, sosaku hanga was strongly inspired by artistic movements in Europe, and as such the exhibition is especially compelling for challenging the paradigm of Japonism, which posits a unidirectional transference of aesthetic ideals from East to West. While it is well-known that Japanese ukiyo-e prints had an enormous influence on Western artists (such as van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Monet), less-recognized is the influence that Western paintings had on Japanese artists. Previously, printmaking was seen in Japan as a craft and means of reproduction, but under the influence of European ideas, Japanese artists also began to see printmaking as a form of artistic self-expression, prompting the emergence of sosaku hanga. Subsequently, Western techniques were incorporated in numerous ways. Sosaku hanga artists were more inclined toward realism, and emphasized textures and hatched lines, moving away from the simple elegance evident in previous Japanese printmaking. Western subjects also began to appear in prints, such as in Breton Woman by Yamamoto Kanae (1920) -- which depicts a favorite subject of Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, the Breton woman in her starched headdress.

The “Westernization” of Japanese prints, as evidenced by the works in the Japan Modern exhibition, proves to be a useful entry point into a discussion of East-West relations at the turn of the century. During this transitional period, the Japanese became concerned that they would lose their own traditions by becoming a part of the modern world. Did “modern” mean “Western”? Could the Japanese create a strong national identity that was nonetheless uniquely Japanese? This conversation was carried out at all levels, including in art. Thus, shin hanga and sosaku hanga can be interpreted as symbols of the two competing influences of the time. While sosaku hanga embraced Western artmaking techniques, shin hanga slavishly imitated the Japanese past, though it too showed signs of Westernization through the use of greater realism in portraits and the use of contour lines to create volume.

Given the political significance of these prints, it is somewhat disappointing that the Rijksmuseum did not highlight the overtly political aspects of shin hanga versus sosaku hanga, and its implications for East-versus-West, old-versus-new discourse. Perhaps the curators intended for the artworks to speak for themselves, expecting that such contrasts would arise from observation of prints and decorative objects. It seemed that the curators generally avoided directly addressing the complicated relationship between Japan and the West, characterized by a long period of self-imposed Japanese isolation, followed by a forced opening of Japan to Western trade. Against this political backdrop, the ways in which Japanese artists respond to the West become all the more fraught and fascinating -- but this discussion is notably underemphasized in the museum labels.

Moreover, the exhibition does not mention Japan’s military activities, which are integral for understanding Japanese modernization. At the time many of the artworks on view were created, Japan greatly increased in military might: it defeated China in a short and bloody war in 1894-95, defeated Russia in 1905, and established a colonial empire stretching across Taiwan, Korea, the South Pacific, and Manchuria. This military history could have been included in the exhibition -- for example, the First Sino-Japanese War was thoroughly documented by woodblock printmakers, and indeed set the stage for the last flowering of traditional ukiyo-e. However, none of these prints appeared in the exhibition, so the Rijksmuseum thus muted the more difficult aspects of Japanese growth: the fact that Japan’s wealth and prosperity rested on the defeat and subjugation of other peoples.

In addition, by 1920, Japan had become a constitutional monarchy with a democratically elected parliament; however, this did not address the rising spectre of right-wing nationalism and fascism in the 1930s. It can be argued that shin hanga prints helped carry some of the conservative messages of the political right, by showing Japan as a placid, nostalgic, and racially homogeneous dream; shin hanga functioned in some ways as propaganda for the ruling regime, but the exhibition does not explicitly note the political role that the genre played. By not addressing Japan’s colonial empire or its tumultuous relationship with the West, the exhibition is not entirely comprehensive, and the Rijksmuseum missed an opportunity to engage in valuable, if controversial, discussions of colonialism and the role of artworks as political objects.