The public is invited to the following lecture. A 1,000 yen donation from non-members would be appreciated, but is not required.
Place: APIC Plaza, 1F, No. 32 Kowa Building. Turn right from Exit 3, Hiroo station (Hibiya line, rear of train from central Tokyo).
Information: TEL (03)5549-4751
Professor Sei'ichi Yamaguchi, who retired from the professorship of art history at Saitama National University four years ago, is the author of numerous books on the interaction between Eastern and Western art in Meiji Japan. His major field of study has been Fenollosa and his circle, on which subject his books include: 'Ernest F. Fenollosa: A Life Devoted to the Advocacy of Japanese Culture', 2 vol., 1982; 'Fenollosa's Writings on Art', 1988; and 'Fenollosa's Writings on Sociology', 2000. But he has also developed an interest in the late Edo, early Meiji painter Kawanabe Kyosai, whom he considers to have been overshadowed by the successful artistic movement inaugurated by Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin. On this topic he has written two books: 'Caricatures of Kawanabe Kyosai' (Iwanami Bunko, 1988) and 'Kyosai's Caricatures' (Tokyo Shoseki, 1992). He has also translated, among other works, Josiah Conder's 'Studies and Paintings of Kawanabe Kyosai' (1984) and Aurel Stein's 'Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan' (1999). Professor Yamaguchi currently lectures on art history at Jissen Women's University, and is an advisor to the Nagoya-Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Urawa City Museum.
Professor Yamaguchi finds it significant that Kyosai is better known in the West than in Japan. In his lifetime, he was acclaimed both by Japanese and foreign residents of this country. But since his death in 1889 at the age of 58, his name fell into oblivion here, while he retained his popularity in the West, where even today his work is popular among collectors and fetches high prices at auctions. Professor Yamaguchi attributes this to his critical spirit -- his tendency to oppose the trends of his time.
Even by Fenollosa, Kyosai was categorized with Hokusai as a popular artist, being considered to lack lyricism and grace: an attitude which still lingers. When the French artist Emile Guimet visited Japan in 1876 and sought an introduction to Kyosai, he was told that he would find him at home -- if he was not in prison. This was a real possibility: Kyosai did suffer imprisonment, though the exact reasons are not known -- whether on account of his appetite for caricature or his predilection for pornography. When the Meiji era began, he changed his name from Kyosai meaning 'madness' to Kyosai meaning 'dawn'; but he soon found plenty to criticise in the new age. One caricature of the period shows the god Fudo discarding his sword to take up a fashionable magazine, while an attendant digs into a dish of beef with rice. As his popularity proved that he echoed feelings prevalent in Meiji Japan, he was marked down as dangerous, and an official account of his work at the Ueno exhibition of 1881 spoke of him as vulgar, deranged and lacking a sense of beauty.
In the same year, Josiah Conder became his pupil, and remained so for the remaining eight years of his life. Conder had been invited to Japan in 1877 as an architect and engineer, but went on to study Japanese costume, flower arrangement, gardening, kabuki and rakugo. The reasons for this are made apparent in a lecture he gave to the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1880. The subject was the history of Japanese costume; but in his introduction he spoke of the ineptitude of uprooting a settled tradition, so coinciding with Kyosai's values? Kyosai, for instance, painted a cormorant laughing at Japanese aping Western costume.
In 1878, Ernest Fenollosa came to Tokyo University as a professor of political science; but instead of devoting himself to the dissemination of Western values, steeped himself in those of Japan, and was a collector of Kyosai before turning to more traditional genres.
Professor Yamaguchi will illustrate his lecture with slides, and also with Kyosai originals from his own and friends' collections.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 7", September 2000, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
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