Nihonga

• Japanese: 日本画 (Nihonga)

Nihonga (lit. "Japan pictures" or "Japanese painting") is a term applied broadly to Japanese paintings of the Meiji period and onwards which employ traditional media and techniques. Also called "neo-traditional" painting, the term Nihonga, along with the movement or genre itself, emerged around the 1880s as a reaction against the prominence of yôga (Western-style oil painting) and the decline of traditional modes of painting. The style has been described as "modernist," and combines elements of the style and techniques of Rinpa, Kanô school, Tosa school, ukiyo-e, literati painting, and other traditional painting schools with elements of Western technique and style including perspective, shading and modeling, attention to light sources and shadow, the absence of outline, and a degree of realism or naturalism, in compositions which most often feature traditional subjects or themes. Works are done not in oils, acrylics, pencil, charcoal, or other Western media, but in ink and colors on paper or silk, on hanging scrolls, handscrolls, folding screens, or other traditional formats. Gold and silver foil, mica, and other such materials employed by Rinpa, Kanô, and ukiyo-e artists are also sometimes used.

Galleries in Japan, artists' groups, and painters themselves continue to apply the term Nihonga to works produced today, and indeed Nihonga painters today continue to be commissioned to create works for traditional contexts. For example, the temples of Kennin-ji and Kenchô-ji employed painter Koizumi Junsaku to create dragon paintings for their ceilings in 2000-2002. The period from roughly the 1880s to 1930s, however, can be discussed as the real core period of the development of Nihonga, with the question of what constitutes Nihonga in the post-war period becoming much more contested and debatable, as many artists begin to experiment and to deviate further from either traditional themes and subjects or traditional media and techniques.

Background

Nihonga emerged out of a reaction against movements to fully embrace Western painting styles and techniques as part of the surge towards modernity, discarding traditional Japanese painting as non-modern, as backwards and as being "of the past."

It is important to note, however, that a great many artists produced works in both the Nihonga and yôga modes, studying in one first before switching to the other, or dabbling simultaneously in both. This was a time when the art world was highly politicized, with rivalries between Tokyo and Kyoto, and between various factions within both Nihonga and yôga, but the rivalry between yôga and Nihonga was not such that artists could not have feet in both, especially in the 20th century, after the initial battles over the direction "modern" Japanese art would take had passed.

It is also important to note that it was certainly not the case that schools of traditional painting had died out or stopped entirely at this time, or that Kanô, Rinpa, Tosa, ukiyo-e, and literati painters had put down their brushes to pick up Western-style brushes for oils. Despite the rapid and dramatic changes the country had seen since the opening of ports to the West in 1854, and the Meiji Restoration in 1868, all of these schools, and others, continued, many of them as vibrant as ever, showing little or no discontinuities or shocks from the developments of these decades. Kanô and literati artists, and others with strongly artistically conservative foundations, especially those based in and around Kyoto, and those with strong connections to the kind of patrons, such as temples, which demanded traditional style artworks, were shielded to some extent from the rapid changes going on in Tokyo, and in less traditional sectors of society. Many of these artists also found work through commissions from the government, or in working at museums, including on conservation efforts.

Ukiyo-e represents the other side of the scale. A fundamentally popular, that is, commoner, art, subject to the market, to popular demand, and to current/contemporary trends and fads throughout its history, ukiyo-e of the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods reflected the changes seen in society. Yokohama-e featured foreigners, their ships, buildings, and fashions, while the work of Kobayashi Kiyochika and others depicted a changing, modernizing, Westernizing Tokyo, complete with gas lamps, horse carriages, rickshaws, and the like; Kiyochika and other artists also depicted battles and wars overseas and at home, depicting scenes from the 1874 Taiwan Expedition, Satsuma Rebellion, Sino-Japanese War, and Russo-Japanese War in a more realistic and detailed style which some scholars have described as the sign of clear decline in the art form.

History

Origins

Though growing out of a fusion or synthesis of a number of painting traditions each of which were centuries old, the seeds for the Nihonga movement can be said to have been sown by the emergence of that which it railed against.

A group called the Ryûchikai, or "Dragon Pond Society," had been formed in 1878 by Kuki Ryûichi and a number of other officials involved in Japan's participation in international expositions to promote the production of the type of works highly valued by Westerners, so as to enhance Japan's prestige and acceptance as a "modern" nation-state and equal member of the international community.

Ernest Fenollosa, who had come to Japan in 1878, along with his former student Okakura Kakuzô, founded the Kangakai ("Painting Appreciation Society") in 1884 after presenting a highly critical speech to the Ryûchikai two years earlier. The pair, along with a number of artists and others who constituted this Society, worked to combat the shift to Western modes of art, and to promote an appreciation of the beauty of the traditional arts, and the value of Japan maintaining or creating its own distinctive national tradition of painting, rather than simply emulating that of the West.

Fenollosa did not regard ukiyo-e or certain other styles particularly highly, but was strongly interested in Buddhist art and in Kanô school painting, and worked with Kanô Hôgai to create a new national form of Japanese painting, which would incorporate Western techniques such as shading and modeling of forms, light and shadow, and linear perspective, and would focus on inherently Japanese themes which might appeal throughout the country. He focused especially on Buddhist imagery, believing this to be something which was innately Japanese and meaningful throughout Japan. Hôgai's "Kannon as Merciful Mother" (1883) and "Fudô Myôô" (1887) are two examples of this style envisioned and championed by Fenollosa.

Fenollosa and Okakura founded the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkô (Tokyo School of Fine Arts) in 1889, the first art school in Japan dedicated to teaching traditional painting styles and methods. This represented a dramatic change from the traditional studio system of art education, in which artists studied closely and intensively under a single master, and in which schools or styles were strictly separate. Traditionally one might study under a particular Kanô artist in his personal atelier, becoming inserted into his lineage of teachers and disciples, and being dismissed from his tutelage if one began to practice under a master of, for example, ukiyo-e or the Tosa school. Here, elements of all of these schools of painting - in ink and mineral pigments on paper or silk - were combined into a single new "school" or style of painting, called Nihonga, and classes more closely resembled the Western mode of art education; students studied under a number of different teachers, and learned more directly and more quickly (rather than merely learning by observation, only progressing to copying, and then much later to producing one's own original compositions after lengthy periods). Many of the most prominent Tokyo Nihonga painters of the time, including Kanô Hôgai, Hashimoto Gahô, and Yokoyama Taikan, taught at the school at one time or another.

Fenollosa left Japan for the United States in 1890, and Okakura took over as director of the school for a number of years. However, he soon came to face opposition from certain factions within the school, and from the Ministry of Education, and was forced to resign in 1898, forming the Nihon Bijutsu-in (Japan Art Institute) along with a number of artists (painting teachers) who followed him in resigning.

Most of the most prominent Nihonga artists traveled, studied, and showed abroad. To name just a few examples, Kanô Hôgai's "Kannon as Merciful Mother" was shown at the Paris Salon in 1883, and Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsô traveled to India in 1903 and to Europe and the US afterward, while Shimomura Kanzan studied in England, funded by the Ministry of Education.

Some famous paintings of this period include the hanging scroll landscape "White Clouds, Red Leaves" (1890) by Hashimoto Gahô and "Fallen Leaves" (1909) by Hishida Shunsô, a pair of two-panel folding screens (byôbu), both of which display traditional themes in traditional formats in traditional media, with a combination of new, Western techniques and stylistic elements with those taken from the Kanô, Rinpa, and other schools. Yokoyama Taikan's "Floating Lights" (1909), a hanging scroll painting in mineral pigments on silk, employs traditional bijinga conventions to depict a scene in India, featuring Indian women in Indian garments (albeit with very pale faces and Japanese-looking features).

Taikan also at this time, significantly, built upon a mode or style developed by Hishida Shunsô known as môrôtai (murky, or muddy, style), in which outline is dispensed with entirely; many of the works for which Taikan is most famous dispense with form entirely, not to depict purely abstractions, but employing fields of color, blending into one another (or fading into the unpainted background) to depict waves, mist, clouds, or the like.

The Second Generation: 1910s-1930s

After Okakura's death in 1913, Yokoyama, Shimomura, and a number of other artists took over as the leaders of the movement in Tokyo, revitalizing the Nihon Bijutsu-in and organizing, briefly, annual juried exhibitions known as the Inten.

Yasuda Yukihiko, along with Imamura Shikô and a number of others, meanwhile, founded a group known as the Kôjikai sometime in the first decade of the 1900s, which, along with the Nihon Bijutsu-in, with which there was little or no rivalry, served as the focus of the movement for a time. Maeda Seison and Kobayashi Kokei, who joined this society in 1907 and 1901, respectively, represent two other particularly prominent members of this second generation of Nihonga painters.

Nihonga paintings of this period, as of the previous period, vary widely in their subjects, and to a great extent in their style as well. While one of Imamura Shikô's more famous works depicts scenes in the tropics (based on a trip to India in 1914) on a handscroll in a lighter palette and a style resembling literati painting more closely than anything else, works such as "Amidadô" (1915) by Kobayashi Kokei and "Yoritomo in a Cave" (1929) by Maeda Seison employed bold colors to depict historical scenes and sites.

This period saw a great boom of interest among the painters (and more widely) in historical fashions, ancient treasures, and the like. Many artists traveling in the West, or in Kyoto and Nara, studied great treasures of the past, including profoundly famous and art historically significant Chinese works, and Japanese works which had been inaccessible either because of their location overseas, or secreted away in temples, shrines, or other private collections. One example of a famous work studied and copied by Nihonga artists at this time is the so-called "Admonitions Scroll" attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344 - c. 406), acquired by the British Museum in 1903, which Kobayashi Kokei and Maeda Seison studied and copied on a trip to London in 1922. Works such as Maeda Seison's "Yoritomo in a Cave" and "Falling Flowers" (1904) by Kikuchi Keigetsu reveal extensive familiarity with the details of armor and other military accouterments of the time of the Genpei War (1180s).

Kyoto Nihonga

Though Yokoyama Taikan, Hishida Shunsô, Yasuda Yukihiko, and Imamura Shiko, among others, spent time in Kyoto and Nara, teaching, painting, and studying ancient and historical treasures, Kyoto had vibrant and active neo-traditional movements of its own, more directly linked to the continuation, or transformation, of lineages of painters in a variety of traditions, especially those trained in the Maruyama and Shijô schools, which had been leading the way in incorporating aspects of Western techniques and modes, including naturalism, sketches from life, and the modeling of volume, since the mid-18th century.

All in all, Kyoto saw far less cultural & social disruption in the 1850s-1870s than did Tokyo. As a result, the line between Nihonga and what came before is more blurred as it applies to Kyoto painters, many of whom are included among ukiyo-e artists (e.g. Kawanabe Kyôsai) or literati painters (e.g. Tomioka Tessai) in accounts of Edo period art, and also sometimes described as Nihonga artists. Similarly, literati painting in and around Kyoto is considered in some accounts to have continued straight into the 20th century; an exhibition entitled "Literati Modern" organized by the Honolulu Academy of the Arts included a great many artists who are commonly labeled as Nihonga artists.

A leading figure in the emergence of Nihonga in Kyoto was Takeuchi Seihô, who studied under Maruyama-Shijô painter Kôno Bairei and who is perhaps best known for his "Moon Over Venice" (1904), which is done, of course, entirely in traditional materials and format (ink on paper hanging scroll), but in rather Western styles, the work resembling to a great extent depictions of the same site by the English painter J.M.W. Turner.

Uemura Shôen, the first woman to receive the Order of Cultural Merit, and a student of Seihô's, was hardly the only prominent woman Nihonga artist active in Kyoto at this time; though very few, if any, women artists are cited as being prominent in Tokyo Nihonga, Kyoto-based women Nihonga painters were fairly numerous and prominent. Nevertheless, Shôen has been described as "Japan's most notable female painter of the pre-World War II period," and is known (as are most female Nihonga artists) primarily for her bijinga.

While many Nihonga artists in both Kyoto and Tokyo painted bijinga which depicted women in traditional clothing and settings, happy, demure, or more or less emotionless, many, such as Kajiwara Hisako and Kakiuchi Seiyô were particularly innovative in depicting women in Western clothes and modern scenes, and showing emotions such as exhaustion, worry, and pensiveness. Many other Nihonga artists similarly portrayed aspects of modern life in their paintings as well; though the movement is defined by its use of traditional media and techniques and/or traditional themes and subjects, it is not strictly limited to the latter.

References

• Conant, Ellen (ed.). Nihonga: Transcending the Past. The Saint Louis Art Museum, 1995.
• Mason, Penelope. History of Japanese Art. Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. pp363-370.