TAKANORI KINOSHITA & JAPAN'S POST-WAR POSE

Seated Ballerina in Red Tutu (undated)

The history of modern Japanese art has a hierarchy of narratives. As in the West, the top narrative is the story of the avant-garde. This is often a tale of trail-blazing artists taking trips to foreign locales, usually Paris, and bringing back radical foreign styles in their suitcases. 

Another important storyline is the rejection of this foreign influx by the establishment of a self-consciously Japanese art form called Nihonga.

A third narrative occasionally looks at the subtle way these two movements interacted and influenced each other. Anything that falls outside these three main narratives, like the work of the Yokohama-based artist, Takanori Kinoshita, now on display at the Yokohama Museum of Art, tends to be sidelined.

"You are the first publication to cover the exhibition," the show’s curator, Tomoh Kashiwagi points out, a little surprised.

At first, this reaction is understandable because Kinoshita’s style is unremarkable, some would say pedestrian.

Born in 1894 to a rich family, he studied painting in Paris in the 1920s, where he managed to avoid the more avant-garde influences of the Ecole de Paris, like Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Cubism, and instead returned with a light, airy, rather slapdash, realist style, that was ideal for knocking off quick portraits of celebrities and socialites, and churning out magazine covers.

Just as this thought enters your mind, the exhibition presents you with a series of cover illustrations that he did for the Shukan Asahi magazine (Asahi Weekly) between 1961 and 1962.

With a total of 188 works, the exhibition also includes a few canvases by painters Kinoshita was associated with in his early days, including Yuzo Saeki, Katsuzo Satomi, and Zentaro Kojima, painters more open to the avant-garde styles of the day than the "artistically unadventurous" Kinoshita. But despite – or possibly because of – his conservatism, there is something uncanny and surreal about Kinoshita’s paintings for the Western viewer.

Paintings like "Woman in Red Dress" (undated) and "Woman in a Room" (1954) showing affluent, Westernized, post-war Japanese ladies in elegant interiors, have a strange charisma that is at first hard to explain.

Woman in a Room (1954), Woman in a Red Dress (undated)

Perhaps what is unsettling is that apart from the subjects, there is almost no other trace of Japanese-ness – no tatami mats, no kimonos, not even a little kanji scrawled on an alcove scroll or a magazine cover.

The interiors are typical Western ones that could just as easily have been transposed from American magazines of the 1950s and 60s, but the fact that they are inhabited by Japanese ladies playing the role of post-war Western materialism to the hilt gives them a quaint strained and soulless atmosphere. The subtle, frozen smile, the prim pose and blank gaze of “Woman in Red Dress,” for example, has a ‘Stepford Wives’ quality about it—and even looks like Nannette Newman from that movie!

According to curator Tomoh Kashiwagi, the rejection of the outward signs of Japanese-ness is ironically the thing that is most Japanese about these paintings:

“Kinoshita chose the subjects of figures and still lifes, traditional subjects of Western art, but, despite this, his paintings reflect the very Japanese elegance of the Showa period culture. The styles of the ladies were very influenced by the West, but what is most Japanese is the ability to absorb foreign influences.”

This ability has been noted throughout Japanese history. Its unique point is that the adoption of foreign ways does not necessarily involve a loss of Japanese identity, independence, pride, or status.

This could be described as a kind of aggressive passivity, something that we can also find in the strategies employed by women in male-dominated societies. Just as Japan, as a nation, in the earlier Meiji period, enthusiastically embraced Western technology and civilization, so we feel in these paintings that these ladies of the post-war period are embracing Western styles and fashions for similar motives – a sly empowerment.

Nude Wearing Negligee (1970)

The adoption of Western clothes, accessories, interiors, and even body language in the paintings, combined with the ‘cool,’ unexpressive faces, suggests a certain degree of passive manipulation and empowerment through the eliciting of desire. This quality of aggressive passivity is highlighted by the frequent use of red, the most vibrant, passionate, and active colour, in conjunction with the passive gaze of the figures, who seldom look at the viewer.

This device of avoiding eye contact is also noticeable in a series of ‘Goyaesque’ nudes from the 1960s and 70s, done on large canvases that are all grouped in one room to maximize their impact. Here, the sexuality of the figures is more explicitly and aggressively unleashed, but, just as in the other pictures, the averted gaze gives them an element of passivity.

For Japanese, the Showa era is increasingly becoming a period associated with glamour and nostalgia. This is the main reason this exhibition was brought together. But beyond the glitz and sentimentality, these paintings also provide intriguing insights into Japanese social history. It would be hard to find a painter less avant-garde than Kinoshita, or one less concerned about the outward show of being Japanese, but, ultimately, this is what makes Kinoshita’s story – and that of the Showa ladies – all the more interesting.

Previously published 2008

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