Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting Kano Hogai and the Search for Images

Chelsea Foxwell, "Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images"
English | 2015 | ISBN: 022611080X | 296 pages | PDF | 11.3 MB
The Western discovery of Japanese paintings at nineteenth-century world's fairs and export shops catapulted Japanese art to new levels of international popularity. With that popularity, however, came criticism, as Western writers began to lament a perceived end to pure Japanese art and a rise in westernized cultural hybrids. The Japanese response: nihonga, a traditional style of painting that reframed existing techniques to distinguish them from Western artistic conventions. Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting explores the visual characteristics and social functions of nihonga and traces its relationship to the past, its viewers, and emerging notions of the modern Japanese state.