Modernism and Tradition Jostle at the Asia Society

Meiji Modern shows we can’t put Japanese 19th-century art in a box.

I always enjoy exhibitions at the Asia Society on Park Avenue and 70th Street. It’s a research center and promotes cultural exchange, both vast enterprises, but I visit for its enlightening, enchanting art shows. New York’s Asia Society is one branch of this international organization. It’s a museum that collects art and also collaborates with other museums and scholars to enrich the public’s understanding of Asian art. Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan is the Society’s new exhibition. I loved it.

It starts with a vase, not a petite thing I’d use to display lilacs from my yard but a nearly six-foot-tall cloisonné killer with a nocturnal blue background and cherry blossoms and wisteria cascading down the neck and shoulders, and white and pink chrysanthemums decorating the body and base. The Yokohama ceramicist Goto Shozaburo (active 1860–1910) made it in the mid 1890s on commission for an American, building a special oven to accommodate a form this big. Shozaburo had exhibited his work at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. By 1900, Vase with Blossoming Flowers was in the Yale Art Gallery, the first work of Asian art in its collection.

It’s a majestic thing but sexy, too, and I couldn’t help thinking about a pinup in a kimono. Vase with Blossoming Flowers is in Meiji Modern’s introductory gallery, and what a bombshell of an introduction. A timeline near it gives us a thumbnail story of the Meiji, the era of emperors between 1868 to 1912. These are the years just after Japan opened to the West.

Admiral Perry’s two trips to Japan in the 1850s were exploratory, diplomatic, and military. “Opening to the West” meant a raft of trade treaties and Japan’s exposure to American, British, and French culture, high and low. It was a two-way street, with Japonism becoming a fashion trend off and on until at least the 1910s. During the Meiji years, Japan fought and won wars with China and Russia. It built a powerful, modern navy.

Vase with Blossoming Flowers begins the story of the old, insulated art world in Japan absorbing Western aesthetics and our bourgeois lifestyle, never with whole-hog greed but by tinkering and tweaking. Shozaburo developed an international clientele buying his cloisonné work. He promoted himself at the major world fairs. And the vase introducing Meiji Modern isn’t dainty or reticent. It’s big, American-style big. Cloisonné was not invented by the Japanese, but by the Meiji era, Japan was producing the finest in design, color, and manufacture.

With this object, the curators of Meiji Modern tempt and tease us. How does the story of this gorgeous vase affect a Japanese painting, textiles, sculpture, and prints? What’s Japanese about Japanese art in this period? What’s American about it? Art historians, critics, curators, and lots of high-end collectors tend to look at art from this period as tinged, tainted, singed, or outright burnt precisely because of Western influence. During the Meiji era, traditionalists in Japan thought Western culture was barbaric. The exhibition takes a new look.

Mostly, it’s a perfect exhibition in this respect, too. Scholars can appreciate it for displaying the best of its kind and articulating a new take on an undervalued and under-examined time. Visitors who aren’t specialists — and I know very little about Asian art — are no doubt thrilled to discover beautiful art they didn’t know and to learn its history in labels that are both clear and serious.

Each of the Asia Society’s graciously proportioned galleries focuses on a different theme. Most of them work well. The first gallery is a mix of who’s who and what’s what. There are images of Emperor Meiji (1852–1912), whose reign from 1868 to his death determines the span of the exhibition. Meiji wasn’t any old emperor but a revolutionary who moved Japan from rule by feudal, isolationist shoguns, or lords, to a constitutional monarchy and central governance.

Meiji and his empress, Haruko, made public appearances and often dressed in Western clothes. Documentary prints — sometimes art, sometimes news illustrations, sometimes ephemera — tout them as well as concerts of European music, scenes from European and American cities, and Ulysses S. Grant’s sensational three-month visit to Japan in 1879 as an imperial guest. A kabuki play written for Grant’s visit told the general’s life story in samurai terms, with a finale of dancing girls dressed in American-flag kimonos.

Grant’s trip around the world should be an art exhibition on its own.

Mixed with these works is high art. Chromatically brilliant woodblock prints by Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915), made in the late 1870s and early ’80s, display the city, countryside, and harbors lit by electricity, gas lamps, and fireworks as well as the moon and sun. Kiyochika didn’t study art with the major ukiyo-e masters. In these prints and his views of the Great Fire at Ryogoku in 1881, he’s working in a new style informed by American and British watercolors. He’s making a good stab at chiaroscuro, too.

Hashio Kiyoshi’s 1915 Morning Sea is sublime. It’s a silk-embroidered screen, about ten feet wide, and rhapsodic, austere, and dreamy. It was displayed to awed viewers at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

Kiyoshi (1888–1963) used close to 250 different shades of blue and gray thread to make a view that’s immersive and real yet the stuff of drama. The lacquered wood and bronze frame, with the screen splits, keep us moored but barely. Kiyoshi looked at Western photography and British, American, and French seascapes, but in medium and style as well as in using a screen, it’s very Japanese.

Morning Sea is in the Navigating Changing Seas section. It mixes economic, social, and political changes — and art reflecting these — with old Japanese art forms such as screens and woodblock prints.

I’d never seen, simple country soul that I am, something like Tide Changing Jewel with Dragon, from around 1900. It’s called an “okimona,” a small sculptural object without any apparent utilitarian function, as the show’s catalogue defines it. This is unkind. The work is an unblemished, opaque, perfectly round, and obsessively polished rock crystal set on a base of swirling waves and abstract dragons made of cast silver. No utilitarian value? Well, you can’t serve condiments on it, but it’s about infinity, myth, the sea, balance, and the Victorian séance craze. I also love it for its superb craftsmanship.

Screens are anchor furniture in Japanese homes. They make for expansive surfaces that can be decorated. Meiji Modern has plenty of them, and they’re fascinating. An early Halloween treat was the Hell Courtesan pair of screens, by Utagawa Kokunimasa (1874–1944). The two ten-foot screens, from 1900, show skeletons — 18 of them – asymmetrically cavorting, alone or in pairs or trios, against a silver-leaf field just mottled enough to suggest, ever so subtly, a landscape.

I’d never heard of a Hell Courtesan, but she’s a Japanese-folklore figure who is often a well-born young woman kidnapped and sold into a life of prostitution. Her life, it’s said, became a living hell after she met her longtime client Ikkyu Sojun, a Japanese Buddhist monk. He was a connoisseur of sake and an iconoclast whose sexual demands were cruel and capricious, inventive and insistent. She’s no damsel in distress, though, and more like Lilith or Messalina than poor Hagar or Miss Havisham. There’s never a dull moment for the Hell Courtesan.

They’re haunting, scary, bewitching, and fun. They’re an old-fashioned memento mori, a look at the way of all flesh, but they’re a spoof, too, and modern because of it. They’ve got a bit of James Ensor in them, but Kokunimasa is on a parallel, not overlapping track.

Contrasting with Hell Courtesan is Tigers by Mountain Streams, by Kishi Chikudo (1826–1897), from the mid 1890s, and Black Bull, by Mochizuki Gyokusen (1834–1913), from around 1910. Both are explicit nature studies, and, like Hell Courtesan, they draw from a new Japanese interest in anatomy as studied in the West. Black Bull has more than a touch of Modernist simplicity.

Meiji Modern has one or two military motifs, and these tell another facet of Japan’s story. Japan, like its new European and American friends, vastly enhanced its military, especially toward the end of Emperor Meiji’s rule. Military scenes even decorate men’s underwear. General Nogi Maresuke, the strategist behind Japan’s military buildup, appears on the front and back of an under-kimono from around 1900. When emperor Meiji died in 1912, Nogi, like the samurai of old, committed what we’d call hari-kari.

Japanese art gave and took motifs from the European Art Nouveau movement, especially in Japanese peacock vases. Itaya Hazan’s Vase with Bamboo Leaves, from 1915, isn’t exactly Art Nouveau, but it’s gorgeous. Hazan (1872–1963) is the father of modern Japanese ceramics. Here, he started with a deep blue field on which he carved overlapping bamboo leaves. Then he painted the centers of the leaves with a green glaze but left their edges white. He created great depth, but I loved it for its palette and presence.

It was a new world. In Telephone Call: A Merchant’s Wife, a 1903 polychrome woodcut by Shoda Yukawa (1868–1955), a well-to-do, elegantly dressed married woman talks on a telephone, with shiny bells printed in metallic ink for extra attraction. There’s also a bowler hat, a pair of cufflinks, paintings that look as if they were done by Tissot, and, shock of shocks, a nude from 1904 painted by Hashigushi Goyo (1880–1921). Renoir, Courbet, Rubens, and Titian needn’t work. For a nude, Goyo’s seems very chaste indeed.

Meiji Modern is a traveling show organized by the Japanese Art Society. Since it’s going to multiple stops, some light-sensitive prints, screens, and paintings couldn’t be in all venues. This happens but it’s still a loss. The very good catalogue, which I loved, gave me a sense of the things that didn’t make it to New York. The militant underwear notwithstanding, there are lots of dramatic battle pictures in the Meiji era. They’re powerful and eerily beautiful.

There’s a small fashion gallery. It’s a bit of a muddle. I liked Young Girl Under a Parasol, a colored print from 1897 showing Japan’s version of Thoroughly Modern Millie. She’s not completely modern, though. She wears a kimono. She’s holding a book and moves freely out of doors. Her parasol’s really a European-style umbrella. Next to it is a beautiful kimono with peacock and tree motifs. There’s a court military uniform, plus that bowler and cufflinks, and the nude painting. The gallery seems crammed, and the objects together are discordant.

The catalogue has good essays by curators Chelsea Foxwell and Bradley Bailey and succinct catalogue entries for almost every object included in Meiji Modern regardless of whether it made the entire tour. The only annoying thing about it is that the object information — materials, lender, and dimensions — are at the back of the book rather than with each catalogue entry. This leads to lots of flipping back and forth for any thorough reader.

Meiji Modern is the perfect introduction to Japanese art as well as a scholarly exhibition targeting one era in depth. The art’s just Western enough to look more familiar and to feel less inscrutable. Traditional Japanese aesthetics makes itself clear, though. As in every Asia Society show I’ve seen, wall-art paintings, prints, screens, sculpture, furniture, and vases are in sublime equipoise.

I chatted with Yasufumi Nakamori, the Asia Society’s brand-new director. He just started a few weeks ago. He’s impressive. He’s been the curator of photography at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Tate in London, three museums with great and growing photography collections.

I can tell he’s both a curator and a teacher, with deep knowledge of art and a feel for objects on one side of the coin and a talent for communication on the other. The best curators have to be good teachers. What’s the point of knowing a lot if you don’t know how to get people excited about it? I think he’ll be a big success. Meiji Modern left me wanting to learn and see more, and having met Yasufumi, I can’t wait to see his next show on modern Asian photography.