Curated by Chelsea Foxwell and Bradley M. Bailey
IN 1911 the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo—among the oldest in the world, established in 1673 as a kimono fabric shop—sponsored a much anticipated and lucrative competition for an artwork that could be deployed for a publicity campaign. The winning entry, a gorgeous, self-referential oil painting by Hashiguchi Goyō called Kono bijin (This Beauty), depicts an impeccably dressed modern woman perched on an Art Nouveau settee that wouldn’t be out of place in Paris. She is flipping nonchalantly through an album of nishiki-e woodblock prints depicting beautifully arrayed Edo-era ladies seated on traditional tatami mats. While the women in the album are looking stage right at something unseeable that captures their attention beyond the edge of the print, the one actually holding the book meets the eye of the viewer with a disarming—and decidedly modern—direct gaze. The iconic painting was reproduced so many times it’s even available as a poster right now on eBay for $9.99, but during its initial run, the sumptuous lithograph required over thirty passes through the press to capture the extraordinary variety of colors resplendent in the myriad floral patterns present in the original oil painting—tranquil blues, fresh yellows, and greens and pinks of the earliest spring day. The print heralded a new age of advertising in late Meiji-era Japan (1868–1912), which was marked by the fall of shogun rule and the opening of the country to global trade and influence. The poster project brought acclaim to both Hashiguchi and Mitsukoshi, which, more than just a shopping destination, had become something of a cultural center that published a popular literary magazine–cum–public relations rag and even mounted art exhibitions on-site. On the whole, Mitsukoshi was in the business of selling an idea of international luxury as much as the luxury goods the newly empowered middle class was eager to obtain, now that Japan’s ports had opened to foreign commerce. Above all else, the Hashiguchi print did what it was intended to do: inspire conspicuous consumption. And indeed, in a nearby display case in “Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan” at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, one could ogle samples of garment patterns created by Mitsukoshi’s design department.
This exhibition is a revelation of juxtapositions that told a complex story about culture and commerce, nature and artifice, Eastern and Western, and tradition and innovation during an era of intense geopolitical, cultural, and technological transition.
This exhibition—currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and which assembles more than 130 moving and fascinating artworks, including prints, textiles, enamels, paintings, and lacquer pieces—is a revelation of juxtapositions that tells a complex story about culture and commerce, nature and artifice, Eastern and Western, and tradition and innovation during an era of intense geopolitical, cultural, and technological transition. In sum, it’s a tale of how the isolated chain of islands that is Japan became a global power, importing and exporting material and influence while expanding modernism in the process.
Antique slides reproducing photographs of the Meiji emperor and empress, each wearing a surprising pink sash tenderly handpainted onto the glass, were eerily haunting as they overlooked the splendor of the Smart Museum’s galleries, which included stunning woodblock prints by Kobayashi Kiyochika in the meishō-e (famous views) tradition, in which depictions of Tokyo at night—in this case clearly influenced by the burgeoning art of photography—were tweaked by intimate atmospheric illuminations of industrial bearing. For example, in Summer Night at Asakusa Kuramae, 1881, a row of gas lamps (the first of which were installed in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 1874 as part of an intentionally forward-facing revitalization of the area following a devastating fire) warmly light a crowded modern promenade.
Among soft inky seascapes and vases adorned with swirling carp and other traditional Japanese motifs—updated with flourishes of modern innovation—was a boldly colorful pentaptych print featuring Western trade ships, laden with cargo, flying American and European flags, approaching a crowded harbor. Through portholes and above deck, merchants and diplomats in morning coats and women in hoop skirts (perhaps their wives?) ready themselves for the kinds of encounters that are illustrated in Toyohara Chikanobu’s Concert of European Music, 1889, a polychrome woodcut in an adjacent room. In this work, whose lines evoke the stately contours of William Morris, Japanese men in Western suits and women in bustled Victorian gowns (with draping and patterns reminiscent of kimonos) either sing or play an assortment of instruments: cellos, violins, a flute, and an upright piano. The patterns of the garments, curtains, carpets, wallpaper—and even of the sheet music resting on the piano—are so intricately distinct and detailed that the piece almost appears collaged. The performance might be taking place in the Rokumeikan, a pavilion where Western etiquette was taught and practiced. Further complicating the scene, as the rich and informative catalogue for the multicity exhibition points out, the “European” music on the stand is a well-known Japanese song collected in the Meiji shōka (Meiji songbook). Of course, “European” is a style, not just a signal of origin, and much of the work collected in “Meiji Modern” blurs the distinction between Japan’s perspective of Europe as a state of mind and a site of dangerous imperial power, even as the country was perfecting its own violent imperialism during this period, commanding global attention both politically and artistically.
One of the most stirring prints in the show was Yukawa Shōdō’s Telephone Call: A Merchant’s Wife, 1903, from the series “One Hundred Beauties Performing Ancient and Modern Customs,” 1901–1903. Here, a woman in a deep-blue formal kimono pushes a delicate purple curtain back to place or take a call on a beautifully depicted Kellogg-style wall phone. The juxtaposition of the classical past with the modern marvel of universal communication is so stark she appears to be hailing the future. The news isn’t good.
Japan’s Imperial Navy was established in 1869, and the sea itself as a charged theater of violent military action featured prominently throughout the Smart’s galleries. A woodblock print by Takeuchi Keishū that appeared in a popular magazine in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War (reproduced in the exhibition catalogue and on view in the MFA, Houston iteration of the show), depicts a nurse with the Japanese Red Cross attending to a vase of ailing flowers. The darkest pinks of the weary wilted blooms rhyme with the vibrant Red Cross insignia on her starched white nurse’s uniform—as well as with the implied blood of the undepicted soldiers presumably in her care. Over her right shoulder, an inset image hanging behind her—in the manner of an ominous map in an otherwise intimate Vermeer interior—depicts an overwhelming Japanese warship, the brutal, overbrimming wake of which seems to fill the water jug the nurse uses, in vain, to enliven the dying blooms.
Though much of the work collected in “Meiji Modern” was crafted according to a propaganda agenda that sought to underscore imperial military prowess and human progress, with the hindsight of two world wars—and viewed now, during a period of remarkable global devastation—the exhibition is tremendously sad, even as much of the artwork shimmers with the brilliance of human genius. One such example was Morning Sea, a staggering embroidery of turbulent waters that measures six by ten feet and features 250 different shades of blue, gray, and white silk threads (this sublime object was not at the Smart, but it was presented in an earlier version of the show at New York’s Asia Society). Hashio Kiyoshi finished this piece—stitched with the ecstatic precision one finds in the drawings of Vija Celmins—in 1915, when the First World War was already underway. In this wide expanse devoid of ships, agendas, campaigns, flags, and indeed of humans, it is easy to imagine a future beyond us. And if the human cruelty this folding screen obscured was perhaps unimaginable in 1915, it is undeniable in 2024. Today we are on the brink of something unfathomable, just as the Meiji artists, in their own moment of technical transformation and major global conflict, must and mustn’t have known.
“Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan” is currently on view (through September 15) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Robyn Schiff is a poet and a professor at the University of Chicago. Her most recent work, a book-length poem titled Information Desk: An Epic, was published by Penguin Books in 2023.
