Research and Innovation

The Japanese Creative Print (sôsaku hanga) movement, which had originated in the early twentieth century in opposition to traditional ukiyo-e prints, came to worldwide prominence between 1945 and 1970. Forging ties with artists, scholars, museums, and collectors overseas, Japanese printmakers brought their artistic innovations into fruitful interaction with a global art scene. Americans had long considered imported objects labeled “Made in Japan” as shoddy and inferior in quality, but they warmly welcomed Creative Print artists and prized their work for its consummate craftsmanship, inclination toward abstraction, and sometimes exotic subject matter. Benefiting from government-sponsored exchange programs, Japanese printmakers performed an important role as cultural ambassadors and helped smooth tensions between the peoples of two nations that had recently been enemies at war but that were now allies in peace. The prints documented in Made in Japan range widely in treatment and medium, embracing woodcut, stencil, lithography, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and screenprint. Essays outline the history of the Creative Print movement and its American patronage from the Occupation through the 1960s, and consider its relationship to the earlier tradition of ukiyo-e prints. With nearly one hundred color illustrations, the book is the first to narrate the Creative Print movement in all its diversity and constitutes a major reappraisal of one of the twentieth century’s most important moments of cultural and artistic exchange.

Illustrated with masterpieces from Japanese collections by Matisse, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Corot, Cézanne, and Monet, Japan and Paris explores the history of collecting Western art in Japan and its influence on Japanese modern art. In particular, it addresses the development of Western-style modernist impulses as Japan's early interest in the Barbizon School extended to include modes of expression such as Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, and Fauvism. In addition to showcasing works by some of the best-known French and European painters, works by Japanese artists who were instrumental in the introduction of Western modes of expression to Japan are included, such as Kojima Zenzaburo, Kume Keiichiro, Maeta Kanji, Mitsutani Kunishiro, and Fujita Tsuguharu.

An analysis of early twentieth-century Japanese “creative prints” (sôsaku hanga) as a new vehicle for modernist expression by the hands of oil painters.

This introduction to an exhibition for modern Korean artist Young Na Ahn places the work in the context of traditional and modernist movements.

In a close analysis of Katsura Yuki's transwar work and practice, I argue that her representational strategies allowed her to engage with gender difference while liberating her from its traps.

Catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition by Tamás Konok. Ludwig Múzeum - Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers, both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution. Pressly places both paintings in their historical context—a time of heightened anti-French hysteria—and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format. Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.

This book explores the ways in which Flemish painting between 1550 and 1650 both represented and reflected the burgeoning capitalism of Antwerp, Europe`s major trade center of the time. Honig focuses on representations of markets and the development of an aesthetic of display, and on the interaction between beholders and pictured markets – an aesthetic of exchange. She further argues that certain modern ways of collecting, displaying, and valuing paintings had their roots in the market aesthetics of this period.

Analyzing an enormous range of works, from art centers such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, (many published here for the first time), Modern Art in Eastern Europe shows that any understanding of Modernism is essentially incomplete without the full consideration of vital Eastern European creative output. He argues that Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism, along with other great modernist styles, were merged with deeply rooted, Eastern European visual traditions. The art that emerged was vital modernist art that expressed the most pressing concerns of the day, political as well as aesthetic. Mansbach examines the critical reaction of the contemporary artistic culture and political state. A major groundbreaking interpretation of Modernism, Modern Art in Eastern Europe completes any full assessment of twentieth-century art, as well as its history.

Anthony Colantuono's monograph titled 'Guido Reni's Abduction of Helen' (Cambridge University Press, 1997) was the first major study of how the Barberini papacy (1623-44) used works of art as instruments of diplomatic discourse, furnishing artists with iconographic instructions encoding moral and political concepts designed to influence the intended recipient. Reni's 'Helen' for Philip IV of Spain is the prime example: The painting's imagery insinuates that the Spanish monarchy, like the Trojans of old, will receive divine punishment for their war-mongering behavior. The study also demonstrates that the peculiar flurry of encomiastic publications describing and interpreting the paintings were deliberately orchestrated to increase the fame of the painting after the Spanish ambsassador refused to accept it.