From Art without Borders to Art for the Nation: Japanist Painting by Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai during the 1930sMikiko Hirayama

Excerpt

As recalled by the artist Kuroda Jūtarō 黒田重太郎 (1887-1970) in 1936, Japanese oil painters active during the mid-1930s felt that their world had come full circle. Gone were the days when they struggled to efface any trace of Japan from their own work. For most of them, translating their Japanese aesthetic sensibilities into the medium of oil painting was a challenging as well as perfectly legitimate endeavor. Although Japanese oil painting (yōga 洋画) by definition entailed a fusion of the Western medium with non-Western formal elements, it was during this decade that artists started to pursue stylistic eclecticism as an artistic goal in its own right, which critics “single[d] out as an independent movement.”

Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai 独立美術協会 (Association of Independent Artists, hereafter abbreviated as Dokuritsu) was at the forefront of this artistic trend. It was one of the numerous painters’ groups formed in the early Shōwa period on the basis of diverse artistic and ideological goals. Founding members had formerly belonged to other independent groups, many of which had been established as alternatives to the government-sponsored Imperial Art Academy Exhibition (Teikoku Bijutsuin Tenrankai, abbreviated as Teiten 帝展). Among them, Dokuritsu had a very specific agenda that, as we will see later, set it apart at its inception from many other similarly progressive organizations.