Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

48 Reiko Tomii
In the early Meiji, Japan made a concerted effort to establish itself
as a modern nation-state. Its artists needed to adapt themselves to the rapidly
changing environment, as the Western institutions of exhibition, school,
and museum were introduced. Both the concept of “Wne art” and the practice
of the public display of art were novelties. The self-organized nature of
bijutsu dantai harks back to this period. While the government ministries
offered institutional exhibition opportunities through the “Domestic Painting
Competition” (Naikoku kaiga kyoshinkai; 1882 and 1884) and the “Domestic
Industrial Exposition” (Naikoku kangyo hakurankai; 1877, 1881, 1890, 1895,
and 1903), such early organizations as Meiji Art Society (Meiji Bijutsu-kai;
founded in 1889) and Japan Art Association (Nihon Bijutsu Kyokai; founded
as Ryuchi-kai in 1879; renamed in 1887) sponsored their own exhibitions
to create ongoing opportunities for public display. 7 Hereafter, an ever growing
number of art organizations became the engine of exhibition activities
in modern Japan. Through their regular exhibitions, these organizations provided
forums for competing artistic idioms and ideologies, frequently embracing
ambitions to create movements.
When the Bunten (“Ministry of Education Art Exhibition”; Monbusho
bijutsu tenrankai) was instituted in 1907, this state-sponsored annual
salon became a focal point of art-world politics and the shifting allegiance
among bijutsu dantai. SigniWcantly, through the early postwar decades, the
annual or semiannual exhibitions sponsored by dantai—called dantai-ten
(“organizations’ exhibition”)—remained an indispensable, if not exclusive,
opportunity to display their works in public for artists of all ages and persuasions.
The commercial gallery system, especially for modern art, was slow to
grow. For example, even in 1957, a directory of the art magazine Bijutsu techo
(Art notebook) listed only thirty-Wve galleries in Tokyo, an overwhelming
majority of which were not commercial venues but “rental galleries” (kashi
garo) that provided their spaces to artists for a fee. 8 Since dantai-ten took the
form of kobo-ten (“open call” exhibitions) that would accept non-members’
works on a juried basis, the larger and older dantai soon acquired prestige
and began to assume the inXuential place in the art-world hierarchy whose
apex was the government salon. Given the limited exhibition opportunities,
dissident artists, be they progressive or conservative, who were dissatisWed
with the existing dantai or the governmental salon, had to create
their own forums (i.e., their own art organizations) to show their works.
This was how the vanguard bloc emerged within yoga in the Taisho
period (1912–26), when vibrant liberal culture and the spirit of democracy
thrived in Japan. A complex organizational shufXing was initiated in 1914,
when progressive oil painters broke away from the Bunten salon, because the
salon refused to created a new separate section for artists with fresh approaches,