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Japan’s jazz-age avant-garde – Book Review

By admin ⋅ July 18, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde 1905-1931, by Gennifer Weisenfeld, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002; 370 pages, $55 cloth.

Gennifer Weisenfeld is that rare creature, a scholar of Japanese art (now teaching at Duke) who specializes in the modern era. Her first book (based on her doctoral dissertation) is centered on the short, intense life of Mavo, a group of Japanese artists committed to social revolution. Led by Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901-1977; names are in Japanese order, family name first), the members created paintings and sculptures; staged events, exhibitions and performances; and designed books, magazines, signs and a few structures. The Mavoists were young, disorderly provocateurs, and Weisenfeld starts her book: “There was a loud crash as rocks shattered the glass roof of the Takenodai exhibition hall …,” describing a salon des refuses Mavo staged outside the hall while an art-establishment jury was at work inside.

Five artists signed the manifesto establishing Mavo, but the active core ranged between 10 and 15, while dozens more participated in the exhibitions and other activities. Mavo was at its height around the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake that leveled much of Tokyo in 1923. That was a fluid period between the social enlightenment of the ‘teens and the rise of militarism in the ’30s. Weisenfeld builds out from the Mavo center, setting the scene, explaining such peculiarities as the exhibition system, introducing other influential artists of the period, and comparing the contemporaneous themes and activities of the European avant-garde.

When Murayama went to Germany to study in late 1921, Japan was still in a period of voracious consumption of Western ideas and techniques, in art as in virtually all other fields. The nation had already shifted from resistance to adulation and back more than once. As early as 1855, the government had established an “Institute for Western Learning,” and Western teachers were imported in the belief that Western-style painting offered a useful perceptual logic. But by 1879, in a reaction, a group of influential men set up a program to perpetuate traditional practices in Japanese arts by honoring esteemed practitioners (today they are commonly called Living National Treasures). Western painting arose again only at the end of the 19th century, as versions of European styles were introduced by artists returning from study abroad, and Japanese cultural magazines such as Shirakaba offered articles on European trends. (Meanwhile, of course, traditional Japanese art was still influencing artists in France.) The social status of Japanese artists went up and down; they were sometimes regarded as mere artisans. The notion of “fine art” was only established with the introduction of a new word, bijutsu, in the 1870s, as distinguished from the broader category of geijutsu, which included crafts and decorative arts. Ideas of individualism and self-expression crept in from the West as Japan began a slow shift away from being a consensus society.

Murayama had a somewhat unusual background. He was not of the aristocracy, but came from an educated Christian family. He was essentially self-taught as an artist, which Weisenfeld says gave him a perspective free of the rigidity of conventional art studies and the control of the widespread and powerful art associations that sponsored juried exhibitions in Japan. By the 1920s, the art world was ruled by highly structured exhibiting societies and art schools; the most influential national exhibition was the Bunten, an official activity of the Ministry of Education.

Murayama arrived in Berlin in February 1922, but found obstacles to his expected study of philosophy. Instead he became enmeshed in the city’s cultural life at a time of intense sociocultural criticism by such artists as George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix and other Expressionists and Dadaists. Through another Japanese expatriate, Murayama was introduced to the circle around Galerie Der Sturm. He was a quick study (probably benefiting from his youthful practice of watercolor, which was classified as an amateur medium in Japan): within a month of his arrival, he was exhibiting canvases that depict turbulent and deformed streetscapes and geometricized human faces. He followed the performing arts, especially the theater of Georg Kaiser and the dances of Niddy Impekoven. He remained in Berlin only until December 1922, but his German experiences and contacts were to prove pivotal to his future.

Within weeks of his return to Tokyo, Murayama was writing regularly for local art magazines. He had his first show in May 1923. Inclusion in a prestigious “official” group show and two more solo shows followed in short order, one of these at his home–an unusual venue–and the other at an avant-garde cafe. In an April 1923 art-magazine essay, he introduced what he called “conscious constructivism,” which involved expressing modern life through nonobjective form in order to reintegrate art and daily life and eradicate elite “fine art.” His writing was vivid; he claimed that “the vegetative art of the majority of the world and the crippled pale beings who advocate it, the slavering aesthetics, and sleepy art criticism are all completely putrefied!” His attitude owed much to Der Sturm; he often quoted Kandinsky, as well as Marinetti, whom he had met in Berlin. (He also corresponded with El Lissitzky and Theo van Doesberg.) He believed, Weisenfeld says, “that raw emotions and the experiences of daily life, both positive and negative, … expressed the modern condition even though they produced art that was often frank and disagreeable” and that technical mastery was “irrelevant in an age of subjectivity, when absolute standards of criticism had been discredited.”

by Janet Koplos – http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_11_90/ai_94079414