Revamped MoMAT Opens with Unfinished Business

The Tale of Akebono Village (1953)

As the first exhibition since its renovation, the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT) has arranged an exhibition of modern art covering the entire 20th-century ("The Unfinished Century: Legacies of 20th Century Art"). With its new digital library and shopping facilities, it’s almost as if the museum is trying to remind people of the entire spectrum of its responsibilities, to display, explain, and justify that most chameleonlike of beasts, Japanese modern art.

Despite a selection that appears to cover all the bases, including Nihonga, this still manages to be a daring exhibition. I realize this when I see Work (1924) by Toki Okamoto set next to The Parting of Hector and Andromache (1918) by Giorgio de Chirico. Executed in a more naive style, the painting by the young Japanese artist pointedly features many of the same dreamlike elements as the great Italian surrealist’s work, including de Chirico’s trademark faceless mannequin.

Leaning Women (1917)

Quite bravely, the exhibition scatters a few key works by Western artists among the cream of Japanese modern art. Tetsugoro Yorozu’s large, red, imposing Leaning Women (1917) is set near daintier but more skillful examples of cubism by Picasso and Gris. While the systemic abstraction and minimalism of Tadaaki Kuwayama’s three bands of color in Brown, White, and Blue (1968) looks even less imaginative next to precursors like Frank Stella’s enigmatically titled Marquis de Portago (1960).

Doesn’t this juxtaposition raise the danger of Japan’s indigenous output being seen as derivative?

"It’s one of the facts that there was a lot of copying, especially in the early years of the century," one of the curators, Mika Kuraya, admits. "But much more interesting is the very quick coming and going of art. These artists were looking at poor quality pictures in art magazines and imagining the color themselves. Gradually they started to use more of their own style, making something new."

She also points out that it was a two way process.

Marquis de Portago (1960)

"During the early years of the 20th century Japonism was still a potent force in Western art, then in the 50s the Zen attitude became fashionable."

Perhaps the key event in the evolution of the Japanese artistic consciousness was the war, a period well represented here. Despite being at war with the West, Japanese artists clung to Western forms. Saburo Miyamoto’s realist depiction of the surrender of Singapore, The Meeting of Gen. Yamashita and Gen. Percival (1942), has the somber tones and subtle technique of an old Dutch painting, with the plane of the conference room tilted to symbolically elevate the victorious Japanese above the defeated British.

As the war turned, however, a shriller tone became evident. Tsuguharu Fujita’s incredible oil painting Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End (1945) captures the hysteria and misplaced heroism of the time in an epic canvas that echoes the mood of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, as men and women, the living and the dying crowd together to face the end in a brutalized landscape.

Compatriots on Saipan Island (1945)

While pre-war paintings often had a swottish quality - as if the artists were trying desperately hard to please their teachers - post war art has a rawer, more emotional feel. These often jarring works emit greater sincerity and pack more of a punch. Included in this category is The Hiroshima Panels (I) Ghosts (1950) by Toshi and Iri Maruki, a vast sumi work on panel-mounted paper depicting a crowd of demonized and tortured figures. Kikuji Yamashita’s comically gruesome The Tale of Akebono Village (1953) and a couple of nightmarish oil landscapes on sackcloth from 1950 by the 21-year old Yayoi Kusama have a similar dark intensity.

Such passion is noticeably lacking in the playful post-modernist and non-expressive art works from the latter stages of the 20th century, like Saburo Muraoka’s Bent Oxygen (1985), which is exactly that, a bent bag of oxygen. In today’s decontsructed art world, the long legacy that Japanese artists struggled for so long to build up, and which is safely stored away in museums like MOMAT, no longer seems quite so important.

C.B.Liddell
The Japan Times
23rd January, 2002