Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. This period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. This book discusses in depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the United States, went through a visual revolution. This book ... More

Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. This period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. This book discusses in depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the United States, went through a visual revolution. This book suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture—one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country. The book explores an impressive array of subjects: painting, sculpture, prints, fashion design, crafts, and gardens. The works discussed range from early Meiji attempts to create art that referenced Western styles to postwar and contemporary avant-garde experiments. There are, in addition, substantive investigations of the cultural and intellectual background that helped stimulate the creation of new and shifting art forms, including chapters on the invention of a modern artistic vocabulary in the Japanese language and the history of art criticism in Japan, as well as an extensive account of the career and significance of perhaps the best-known Japanese figure concerned with the visual arts of his period, Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin).