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"That Julia Andrews has reached sources that are so sensitive and difficult with such success is remarkable. The book is unquestionably a brilliant job, well-written, understandable, and of enormous scholarly value."--Joan Lebold Cohen, author of The New Chinese Painting
How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis. Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami...
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a writer and a spiritual seeker, as well as a distinguished American painter. In his introduction to this generously illustrated volume, Townsend Ludington explores the relationships among Hartley's art, poetry, and essays. He traces the philosophical and literary sources that nourished the artist's evolving spiritual consciousness.Raised in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley felt at odds with life. A voracious reader, he educated himself and became enamored of the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and, particularly, of Walt Whitman. He began spending winters in New York City where he met and was befriended by Alfred Stieglitz. He visited E...
Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals who live and work there—young English students, office workers, painters, and hairstylists. New York City, one of the world’s most vibrant and creative cities, is also home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. Among them are artists and designers who produce cutting-edge work in fields such as design, fashion, music, and art. Part of the so-called “creative class” and a growing segment of the neoliberal economy, they are usually middle-class and college-educated. They move to New York for anywhere from a few years to several decades in the hope of realizing dre...
The complex and coherent development of Japanese art during the course of the nineteenth century was inadvertently disrupted by a political event: the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Scholars of both the preceding Edo (1615–1868) and the succeeding Meiji (1868–1912) eras have shunned the decades bordering this arbitrary divide, thus creating an art-historical void that the former view as a period of waning technical and creative inventiveness and the latter as one threatened by Meiji reforms and indiscriminate westernization and modernization. Challenging Past and Present, to the contrary, demonstrates that the period 1840–1890, as seen progressively rather than retrospectively, experienced...
Maximum Embodiment presents a compelling thesis articulating the historical character of Yoga, literally the “Western painting” of Japan. The term designates what was arguably the most important movement in modern Japanese art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most critical marker of Yoga was its association with the medium of oil-on-canvas, which differed greatly from the water-based pigments and inks of earlier Japanese painting. Yoga encompassed both establishment fine art and avant-gardist insurgencies, but in both cases, as the term suggests, it was typically focused on techniques, motifs, canons, or iconographies that were obtained in Europe and d...
Scholars, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, have studied the greater Taisho era (1900-1930) within the framework of Taisho demokurashii (democracy). While this concept has proved useful, students of the period in more recent years have sought alternative ways of understanding the late Meiji-Taisho period. This collection of essays, each based on new research, offers original insights into various aspects of modern Japanese cultural history from "modernist" architecture to women as cultural symbols, popular songs to the rhetoric of empire-building, and more. The volume is organized around three general topics: geographical and cultural space; cosmopolitanism and national identity; and diversit...
The modern histories of China and Japan are inexorably intertwined. Their relationship is perhaps most obvious in the fields of political, economic, and military history, but it is no less true in cultural and art history. Yet the traffic in artistic practices and practitioners between China and Japan remains an understudied field. In this volume, an international group of scholars investigates Japan’s impact on Chinese art from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s. Individual essays address a range of perspectives, including the work of individual Chinese and Japanese painters, calligraphers, and sculptors, as well as artistic associations, international exhibitions, the collotype production or artwork, and the emergence of a modern canon.
Encompassing movements from post-impressionism to post-modernism, eminent and widely published art historian Bernard Smith has written a sweeping history, a reformulation of art history in the twentieth century.
A pioneering study of German and Japanese postwar fiction, providing a broad cultural basis for understanding a half-century of responses to World War II from within the two societies.