Race and Medium at the 1900 Fair

The 1900 Exposition Universelle was a year of tremendous success for Japanese art in Paris, as it marks the first time any Japanese works were displayed and evaluated as “art” in a beaux-arts context. As Coaldrake notes, the French system for categorizing exposition entries posited an absolute division between “decorative” or “industrial” arts and “fine arts.” (176) In this system, an object with any function beside the purely visual or spatial function of painting and sculpture was defined by that function, and entered into a relevant pavilion of furnishings or textile. For Japan, this meant that the history of painting on silk panels was categorized as “decorative,” maligning an impressive millennia-old history of painting lineages and relegating any modern-day submissions to anonymous non-recognition in separate galleries throughout the fair. To Japan, this was a “pressing political and diplomatic issue,” as a country without recognition of its high arts was in threat of “being defined as second class on the world stage.” (176) Given the recent historical fact of France and America’s forcible overtaking of Japanese land and market access in the 1860s, and the pending renegotiation of the resulting unequal treaties, this categorical rather than empirical exclusion of Japanese art suggests a desperate effort by French exposition organizers to relegate Japan to a semi-colonial, liminally civilized status.

Lacquer Objects by Kamisaka Sekka, designed within a decade of the fair

In response, 1900 shows a new approach from the Japanese government. First, they submitted works, as usual, to a large number of pavilions. In spite of this separation of media meant to reference one another as an ensemble, the Japanese performed admirably, with works by the young Kamisaka Sekka and his mentor Kishi Kokei taking the gold in lacquer furniture and textiles. Second, the Japanese submitted works in oil paint and ink-and-mineral-pigment directly to the beaux arts pavilion. The oil painting was led by the artist Kuroda Seiki, who had first learned and then studied oil painting in Paris for six years before returning to Japan to pioneer a national style. His masterpiece triptych Wisdom, Impression, and Sentiment was one of the few works to receive a gold at the beaux-arts pavilion. Leading nihonga, or ink-and-mineral-pigment painting, was Hashimoto Gaho, the last painter in the Kano lineage and central to the Japan Fine Art Academy. His painting, Folding Screen with Painting of Dragon and Tiger, also received praise at the beaux-arts pavilion, and exposed audiences to a composition and theme with several centuries of painted history in Japan referenced in L’Histoire de l’Art du Japon. It is not clear how this folding screen managed to slip by the French organizers; perhaps the oppositional line between oil painting and “traditional Japanese-style painting” elevated the latter by power of association.

Kuroda Seiki, Wisdom, Impression, and Sentiment

Hashimoto Gaho, Folding Screen with Painting of Dragon and Tiger

Despite this Japanese victory, however, the comments made by French viewers to the beaux-arts pavilion reveal an extreme cultural anxiety upon seeing Japanes oil painting. Almost universally, this work was decried as “imitative” of European art and, ironically, as abandoning Japan’s true “decorative” calling. Remarkably, this reveals the instability of the categorical definition of fine arts used at the fair, which contradicts the concept of art as a self-asserting category by revealing its role as a vehicle for national essence.

A 15th century Dragon and Tiger painting included in L'Histoire de l'art du Japon

Many of the comments regarding Japanese oil painting have an unmistakable tinge of racial essentialism. In his report on the Japanese beaux-arts display, for example, W. Walton considers it to be an unwelcome cultural transgression contradicting the Japanese “temperament.” The term “imitate” abounds in his account, and he dismisses the Japanese painters as “clever islanders” who got lucky with a few copies- and thus not always prone to “failing at appropriation” of civilization (87)-rather than as first-hand witnesses to the art found in Paris. Where praise emerges it is of the “naiveté” of Kuroda’s “decorative” qualities, and of Hashimoto’s ability in the “imagination of monsters.” One wonders at the insistence of French commentators as they try to force Japan back onto a hierarchically lower rung, into the already poorly understood realm of craft, insisting that it matches the true nature of these “clever islanders.”

The Beaux-Art Palaces

In this context, the medium of oil painting ceases to be a category defined solely by its own parameters, but to suddenly have a valence of cultural essentialism that links it inexplicably to Europe. Oil paint, canvas, and varnish are suddenly no longer tools of personal expression or academic adherence, but are reimagined as the instruments of a fundamentally national expression- in short, oil painting gains the function of defining national character. For W. Walton, the oil paintings reveal too much of reality. Oil painting is not considered a technology in and of itself, but as a symptom of  “commercialism and the imitation of the European” (92). The commentator also fails to recognize the institutional and personal history of the oil painters- one of whom, Kuroda Seiki, received years of training in France before working tirelessly to adapt the conventions of oil painting to a Japanese context. 

Answering this question of why Japanese oil painting so perturbed European viewers requires further research, but these comments indicate a combination of factors. First of all, Japan had lept out of the decorative category, challenging what may have been assumed to be a stable category for a nation imagined as primitive. Second, Japanese oil painting seems to have rattled conventional notions of the medium, revealing the tension between the category of painting as autonomous and purely visual, and painting as mediating national essence for international contest.