Modern Japanese Art 1868–1952

NB: My interest in histories of art and design in Japan is largely shaped by the fact that I am a historian of art and design in modern China. The perhaps peculiar dating of modern Japan from the Meiji era through World War II can be explained by the fact that the end date is coincident with the establishment of the People’s Republic and early years of socialist China. I don’t make claims for comprehensiveness here, either.

Amagai, Yoshinori. 2003. “The Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō and the Beginning of Design Education in Modern Japan.” Design Issues 19, no. 2 (Spring): 35–44.

Brown, Kendall H., and Sharon A. Minichiello, eds. 2005. Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, And Deco. Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Buckland, Rosina. 2012. Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan. Brill.

Buckland, Rosina. 2024. The Splendour of Japanese Modernity: Japanese Arts of the Meiji Era. Reaktion Books.

Clark, John. 2010. Modernities of Japanese Art. Brill.

Conant, Ellen. 2012. “Cut from Kyoto Cloth: Takeuchi Seihō and His Artistic Milieu.” Japanese Art Society of America, no. 33, 70–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42597965.

Doshin, Sato. 2011. Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, translated by Hiroshi Nara. Getty Research Institute Publications.

Feltens, Frank, ed. 2023. Japan in the Age of Modernization: The Arts of Ōtagaki Rengetsu and Tomioka Tessai. Smithsonian Scholarly Press.

Fogel, Joshua, ed. 2013. The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art. University of California Press.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2009. “Japan as Museum? Encapsulating Change and Loss in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japan.” Getty Research Journal (1): 39–52.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2012. “New Art and the Display of Antiquities in Mid-Meiji Tokyo.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society XXIV (December): 137–154.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2012. Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints. University of Chicago Press.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2013. “Yamato-e Across the Edo-Meiji Transition: Sumiyoshi Hirokata and Fenollosa” 「明治維新を越えたやまと絵——住吉広賢とフェノロサ. In Kinsei yamato-e saikō『近世やまと絵再考』, edited by Shimohara Miho. Bruecke.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2015. Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images. University of Chicago Press.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2017. “Mediated Realism in Kuwagata Keisai’s Illustrated Book of Birds from Abroad.”  Journal 18 no. 4 (Fall), https://www.journal18.org/issue4/mediated-realism-in-kuwagata-keisais-illustrated-book-of-birds-from-abroad/

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2018. “The Art of Reframing the News: Early Meiji Shinbun nishiki-e in Context.”  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 78, no. 1 (June): 47–90.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2018. “The Painter and the Archive: Models for the Artist in Nineteenth-Century Japan. In The Artist in Edo (Studies in the History of Art), edited by Yukio Lippit, 221–246. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Foxwell, Chelsea. 2023. Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan. Japanese Art Society of America.

Hu, Philip K., ed. 2016. Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan. Saint Louis Art Museum, in association with University of Washington Press.

Ikeda, Asato, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo. 2012. Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960. Brill.

Kaneko, Maki. 2015. Mirroring the Japanese Empire: The Male Figure in Yōga Painting, 1930–1950. Brill.

Levine, Gregory, Andrew M. Watsky, and Gennifer Weisenfeld, eds. 2012. Crossing the sea: Essays on East Asian art in honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu. Princeton University Press.

Levine, Gregory. 2013. Japonisme and the Rise of the Modern Art Movement. Thames & Hudson.

Lippit, Miya Elise Mizuta. 2019. Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan. Harvard University Press.

Lu Weirong (J: Riku Iei). 2007. Chūgoku no kindai bijutsu to Nihon [China’s modern art and Japan]. Okayama: Daigaku kyōiku shuppan.

Lucken, Michael. 2016. Imitation and Creativity in the Japanese Arts, from Kishida Ryûsei to Miyazaki Hayao, translated by Francesca Simkin. Columbia University Press.

Marks, Andreas. 2023. Japanese Yokai and Other Supernatural Beings. Tuttle.

Marra, Michael F., ed. and trans. 2001. A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics. University of Hawaii Press.

McDermott, Hiroko T. 2010. “Meiji Kyoto Textile Art and Takashimaya.” Monumenta Nipponica 65, no. 1 (Spring): 37–88.

Morioka, Michiyo and Paul Berry. 2008. Literati Modern: Bunjinga from Late Edo to Twentienth-Century Japan. The Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Naoi, Nozomi. 2020. Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan. University of Washington Press.

Ogata Kōji. 1978. “Meiji to design: Tokyo kotō kōgyo gakkō kōgyo zu’anka o chūshin ni” [Design in the Meiji era: The design program at the Institute of Technology in Tokyo]. Shukagawa Gakuin tanki daigaku (Bulletin of Shukugawa Gakuin Junior College) 2 (March 31): 1–17.

Sapin, Julia. 2007. “Merchandising Art and Identity in Meiji Japan: Kyoto Nihonga Artists’ Designs for Takashimaya Department Store, 1868–1912.”Journal of Design History17 (4): 317–336.https://www.jstor.org/stable/3526998

Szostak, John D. 2013. Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early Twentieth Century Japan. Brill.

Trede, Melanie, Mio Wakita, and Christine M. E. Guth, eds. 2024. Japanese Art – Transcultural Perspectives. Brill.

Tseng, Alice Y. 2008. The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation. University of Washington Press.

Ueda, Kaoru, ed. 2021. Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan. Hoover Institution Press.

Wakita, Mio. 2013. Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei's Nineteenth Century Souvenir Photography. Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2002. Mayo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-garde, 1905–1931. University of California Press.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2007. “Reinscribing Tradition in a Transnational Art World.”  In Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century, edited by V. N. Desai, 181–98. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; Yale University Press.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2011. “Japanese Typographic Design and the Art of Letterforms.” In Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong, edited by Jerome Silbergeld, Dora Ching, Judith Smith, and Alfreda Murck, 827–48. Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University in association with Princeton University Press.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2013. “Western-Style Painting in Japan: Mimesis, Individualism, and Japanese Nationhood.” In Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms, edited by E. O. Brien, E. Nicodemus, and M. Chiu, 165–80. Wiley-Blackwell.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2015. “On Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923.” The Asia-Pacific Journal (February 9). http://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/Gennifer-Weisenfeld/4270.html

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2023. Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan. University of Chicago Press.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2024.The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930. Letterform Archive Books.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2025. The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Japan.Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060307.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 1997. “Embodiment/Disembodiment in Japanese Painting During the Fifteen Year War.”  Monumenta Nipponica 52, no.2 (Summer): 145–180.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2006. “Oriental Coefficient: The Role of China in the Japanization of Yôga.”  Modern Chinese Literature & Culture 18, no. 1 (Summer): 85-119.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2012. “From Resplendent Signs to Heavy Hands: Japanese Painting in War and Defeat, 1937-1952.” In Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000, edited by Thomas Rimer, 124–143. University of Hawai’i Press.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2012. “Yoga: The Western Painting, National Painting, and Global Painting of Japan.” In Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies, edited by Jordan Sand, Alan Tansman, and Dennis Washburn. Center for Japanese Studies. http: //escholarship.org/uc/item/3mn8m1bs.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2012. Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, The Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955.  University of Hawaii Press.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2013. “A Sculptor’s Brush with Ink: From the Flight of the Dragon to the Pool of the Inkstone.” In Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930, 95–107. The Noguchi Museum.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2019. “Modernist Passions for ‘Old Japan’: Hasegawa Saburo and Isamu Noguchi in 1950.” In Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, edited by Dakin Hart and Mark Johnson. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, University of California Press.

Wu Hung, and Chelsea Foxwell, eds. 2021. Photography and East Asian Art. Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, and Art Media Resources, Inc.

Wu, Chingshin. 2019. Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan. University of California Press.

Wue, Roberta, and Luke Gartlan, eds. 2020. Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan. Routledge.

Zohar, Ayelet, and Alison J. Miller, eds. 2021. The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity. Routledge.