Cultural Crossings: Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924) and the Making of Japanese Western-Style Painting

Abstract

Western-style painting (yōga) represents a seminal movement in modern Japanese art. As Japan opened up to the world in the Meiji period (1868–1912) and pursued a modernization program inspired by the industrialized nations of the West, its artists looked to Europe for new artistic paradigms. A number of Meiji painters studied under European artists and transposed European media and techniques to Japan, successfully establishing Western-style painting as a national school of art alongside neo-traditional painting (nihonga). While nihonga has been well studied by Japanese and Euro-American scholars however, yōga has lacked serious scholarly attention outside of Japan due to the paucity of artworks in international collections and historic reservations about the artistic value of its culturally indeterminate form. As such, yōga has largely been excised from the history of modern art in the West, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the development of Japanese modernism and the globalization of oil painting. My dissertation examines the formation of yōga as a radically new artistic practice and discourse in the Meiji period through an assessment of the oeuvre of Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), an eminent figure in the Japanese art world who is celebrated as the “father of modern Japanese Western-style painting.” I posit that Kuroda, who lived and worked in France and Japan, was an intercultural figure whose hybrid oeuvre constituted a dynamic negotiation of stylistic and cultural disjunctions in the quest to found a new school of modern art. Although Japanese scholars have done much to document and interpret Kuroda’s work within its local context, my dissertation brings a new range of methodologies to bear on his career that reveal the rich multivalence and global reach of his painting. Against the background of the artist’s own writings and a consideration of contemporary socio-cultural conditions in both Japan and Europe, my dissertation re-examines Kuroda’s oeuvre through a series of case studies including Portrait of a Woman (Kitchen), Lakeside, Talk on Ancient Romance, and Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment. Focusing on Kuroda’s career, which fundamentally shaped the course of oil painting in Japan, this dissertation elucidates yōga’s implication in a wide range of artistic discourses and modes at the end of the nineteenth century, from artists’ fraught negotiation of the modern self to the status of the human body in fine art. Furthermore, by revealing the fecundity of Kuroda’s hybrid identity and artistic vision, this dissertation challenges paradigms that continue to dictate the canon of modern art history and hinder our appreciation of intercultural phenomena today, including Eurocentrism and Orientalism.