In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art. In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorō, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.
Copub: The Phillips Collection
In Pursuit of Universalism Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art
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About the Book
Reviews
“Masterfully written. . . . Alicia Volk embarks upon a fascinating journey to develop an alternative perspective for narrating the complexities of the Japanese art scene. . . . Volk’s stimulating book definitively illuminates a new horizon for the field of modern Asian art. . . . It is precisely what the discipline needs.”—Journal of Oriental Studies
“Forceful and eloquent. . . . Volk masterfully unravels the knotty strands that coalesced to shape one individual artist’s perception of self and his work within existing academic, institutional, and professional structures. . . . [The] book deserves praise for being a substantially rigorous and provocative probe into the search for universalism in a differentiated world.”—International Journal of Asian Studies
“Deserves to be read by all historians of modern art and East Asian culture and contributes to the growing field of East-West cultural exchange.”—Journal of Asian Studies
“An impressive book, beautifully produced and sustaining intellectual rigour with its detailed, stimulating research.”—Japanese Studies
“Excellent. . . . Exquisitely written.”—Art Bulletin - College Art Association
“Written beautifully and compellingly.”—Journal of Japanese Studies
“In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history.”—Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Names
Introduction: Painting “X”
1. Reverse Japonisme and the Structure of Modern Art in Japan
2. Nude Beauty: A Modernist Critique
3. Inventing the Self: The New Woman and the Revolutionary Artist
4. Expressionism and the “New Period of the Primitive”
5. Unified Rhythm: Toward a Universal Painting
Epilogue: Japanese Modern Art in the World
Notes
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
Index