Maximum embodiment: yoga, the western painting of Japan, 1912-1955

Abstract

The period that is the focus of this book, namely, the 1910s through the 1950s, was a late phase in a much longer history of Japanese encounters with European painting. Yet Yoga was still typically regarded as a recent “transplant” from Europe. For example, the Yoga painter Koide Narashige, discussed in Chapter 2, despaired that Yoga was like a cut flower without roots and therefore destined to wither before it could grow in Japanese soil.2 Although similar claims that twentieth-century Yoga had no “roots” in Japanese cultural history were repeated by numerous Japanese as well as foreign critics of Yoga, this view discounts a considerable earlier history of Japanese engage. Introduction 4 ments with European painting. In fact, the earlier reaches of this genealogy predate the development of that seemingly unimpeachable symbol of Japanese aesthetic identity, the ukiyo-e woodblock print. This section provides a brief overview of the history of Japanese ventures in the practice of European painting before the period that is the focus of this book. Four major phases can be identified in the early history of Japanese practices of European painting: Jesuit painting in the sixteenth century “Dutch painting” (Ranga) in the eighteenth century academic naturalism in the 1870s and, finally, academic institutionalization and the emergence of a bohemian sensibility in the 1890s.3