Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Wibke Schrape
(Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
Rosina Buckland (British Museum)
Tomoë I.M. Steineck (University of Tuebingen)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 5, Auditório 3
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel on Japanese images from the nineteenth century addresses materiality as a stage of negotiation between artistic and art historical discourses. Three case studies illuminate the flexibility of artistic material in the intertwined networks of producing and collecting Japanese artefacts.
Long Abstract:
Significant shifts within art history in recent years do change not only what material is studied, but also the materiality of the academic subject itself. Besides phenomena such as digital art history, research also focuses on non-academic traditions of art historical discourse and visual cultures beyond the canon. In pre-modern Japan, artists naturally engaged in art historical knowledge production not only as producers, but also as distributors, authenticators, and collectors of art. Their paintings and prints functioned as visual media of art historical discourse.
This panel addresses materiality as a stage of negotiation between artistic and art historical discourse in nineteenth-century Japan. It approaches artworks as materials of both, visual art and individual art histories. Every album, every room decorated with paintings, every exhibition, every collection of artworks arranges and establishes orders of images in the sense of an art history in a nutshell. At the same time, these orders of images primarily served different individual, religious, and social needs, often overlooked in art history.
Three case studies illuminate the flexibility of artistic material in the intertwined networks of producing, collecting and interpreting Japanese visual arts. One focus is set on the sociability of art creation, consumption, and collection inside Japanese visual cultures. Remountings and rearrangements of images from one medium to another is another form, in which collectors intervened not only with the general conditions of artworks, but their actual materiality. Last but not least, all three papers deal with Japanese artefacts from European collections. The flexibility of artistic material is therefore also discussed in regard to transfers from one episteme to another one. While the material seems to stay the same at first glance, transpositions and regroupings affect artworks' conditions and agency.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses a compendium of paintings (mekuri) that once served as room decoration and was re-organized into a model collection in Berlin. It facilitates a glimpse at the understudied field of nineteenth-century visual culture and a reflection of collector's impact on artworks' materiality.
Paper long abstract:
In 1879, the diplomat Max von Brandt (1835-1920) sold a large compendium of paintings on paper from Japan to the Prussian state, who assigned it to the Ornamentstichsammlung held at the Königliches Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin. Though enumerated and described image by image in 1879, it was transferred to the Kunstbibliothek as a compendium with the general lot number 07.2181 in 1907. After World War II, it finally entered the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin. Only few of the 139 sheets have been exhibited in the more than 130 years since the paintings first entered a collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The paintings, which once served as room decoration, were reorganized repeatedly during this time and lastly regrouped according to size, format, and artist. Inventory numbers of all three holding institutions reflect different systems of understanding, organizing and storing the compendium of paintings detached from screens or sliding doors (mekuri).
The paintings of different formats surprise with a rich variety of subjects and a great diversity of artists from different lineages including the Sumiyoshi school, literati in succession of Tani Bunchō, Edo Rinpa artists, and artists unknown or understudied. The collection thus unfolds a network of artists either working together across workshops or compiled together in the late Tokugawa period. It allows a surprising view on the understudied field of Japanese pictorial culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The paper takes this compilation as a case study to reflect intertwined networks of producing, collecting and interpreting Japanese visual arts. It understands the compilation as an alternative art history in a nutshell that sheds light on understudied artists and fields of pictorial production in nineteenth century Japan. The paper thereby reflects art historical structures of organizing visual art discursively in processes of canonization, and materially through collecting and reorganizing artistic materials.
Paper short abstract:
A sumptuous album of shoga (calligraphy and painted images) from the 1850s, languishing for decades in a library collection, yields insights into contemporary practices of cultural networking and the shifting meanings of the "artwork" dependent on context and viewer.
Paper long abstract:
In bakumatsu Japan, the multi-artist album was an established medium within shoga, a rich field of creativity before art history split asunder painting and calligraphy. For the album's owner, it could stand as testament to his network and the cultural capital he commanded. For the artists, their contributions might be paid work, tokens of friendship or thanks, or a means to advertise their status or ambitions. Edinburgh Central Library holds a deluxe example of such an album, containing 106 works by an impressive array of notable figures. The images are by men of the literati persuasion, the official Kano, Itaya and Sumiyoshi schools, the Rinpa lineage, and the Maruyama-Shijō group; the calligraphies include waka, kanshi and prose passages, by Chinese-style practitioners, kokugaku and Confucian scholars, popular writers, one Chinese individual, and members (both male and female) of the courtier class. In terms of age, the participants range from neophytes to esteemed octogenarians.
Understanding the contributors requires enlarging the scope beyond conventional art historical resources, extending into literary, government and intellectual history, and imperial court records. Once these are understood, is it possible to work backwards from the contributing artists to discover a unifying figure at the centre, in the gap where the first owner stands? Also, there is the intriguing question of why a fifth of the pages remain empty.
In the late 19th century the album entered the possession of one of the foreign specialists hired by the Meiji government. For him, it delivered a very different kind of symbolic capital, as evidence of the alien culture he had experienced. Later, within the municipal collections, the album's role shifted once again, to stand as evidence of the global reach of local figures and as symbol of international exchange. Having lain dormant for seventy years, the album will soon go on public display for the first time, repurposed as a representative example of Japanese art history in the 19th century. This paper will examine the polyvalent quality of the album, with meanings that enter and recede according to the position and context of the observing individual.
Paper short abstract:
The Spinner Collection constitutes a unique theological study of Japanese religion through its visual material. The paper investigates the icons and contributing artists with focus on the atelier of Kanda Sōtei, to trace the complexity and variety of sacral art production in pre-modern Japan.
Paper long abstract:
Sacral art, whether of high or low cost, translated religious authority into visual power and occupied an important place within consumerism, and thus a place in the minds and homes of the people. This paper takes the Spinner Collection as a case study to investigate the nineteenth-century activity radius of artists engaged in sacral art production. It further highlights the potential of objects of faith to be witnesses of religious developments with widespread impact for common devotees in pre-modern Japan.
The Spinner Collection comprises approximately 480 objects collected by Wilfried Spinner, the first Swiss missionary to Japan, during his stay in Tokyo between 1885 and 1891. It has been quietly kept at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich since 1985 and was rediscovered by the author only in 2012.
The collection embodies a rare attempt to gather material for religious studies through visual sources. It underlines the missionary's theological focus on the lived and practised faith of the commoners. The subjective impression of the mundane and non-uniform appearance of the scrolls, paper sheets and small private statues is deceptive. The intellectual content is immense and its structure allows insight into the formation of a collection with immaterial purpose.
The icons act as a window to the versatile pictorial production of artists such as Yukawa Harunobu, engaging both in secular and sacral print production. A similarly enlightening source is the group of drawings by the atelier of Kanda Sōtei in Ueno, an atelier that provided the Tokugawa shogunate with sacral images. They highlight the capacity of an atelier initially dedicated to religious images of the shogunate, more precisely the doctrines of Tenkai that visually unfolded at the temples of Kanei-ji and Rinnō-ji. Nevertheless, by the 19th century they served a vast array of temples mainly located in the Kantō region, producing icons regardless of schools. The lively communications between schools in the Edo period have been highlighted by scholars such as Sueki Fumihiko in the last decades. The activity of the Kanda atelier underlines this theory from the angle of the material production.