Exhibition Japan - Tradition and Present 1974

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Shown in Düsseldorf: Onchi, Allegorie Familie, 1927

The exhibition Japan - Tradition and Present ( Japanese 日本 - 伝 統 と 現代 , Nihon - Dentō to Gendai) took place from May 3 to June 9, 1974 in what was then still the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf . At this first exhibition of Japanese art in Germany after 1945, 50 Japanese artists from the years 1886 to 1947 and two groups of artists were shown.

To the exposition

Unlike later exhibitions on contemporary Japanese art, which were largely supported by the Japan Foundation , this one took place on the initiative of the then director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Jürgen Harten, who thanked a large number of people and institutions in the foreword. In the first text, Harten also expresses himself about Japanese art of the 20th century. He deals with the remark that Japan would only copy the West without creating anything of its own. Harten proves that “copying” does not get to the heart of the matter with a word from the artist Shintarō Tanaka: “In my head I think Western, but everything else about me is deeply rooted in Japanese tradition”. In order to avoid misunderstandings as much as possible, Japanese calligraphy was avoided from the start; Buddhist-religious art does not occur either. For the selection of the artists it was about current accents with a historical perspective from case to case.

In a further contribution, the American Professor Joseph Love, who lives in Tokyo, details the works on display. He describes the special development of art in Japan during the Meiji period , namely the rather rigorous division of the visual arts into a “Japanese” direction and a “Western” direction. While the painters of the Nihonga style today do not only create gentle figures and landscapes or deal with historical subjects, the “West painters” shown here have gone one step further, pretending to be artists who have long not only been express yourself in the blackboard, but express yourself in "things". Of course, it is becoming more and more difficult to find a specifically Far Eastern coloring in the pictures and objects, especially with Ufan Lee, Love sums up his contribution.

Some pictures shown in Düsseldorf

Exhibited artists

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n The catalog does not contain any names in Japanese, nor any length characters above the vowels. Even so, a number of artists could be identified, but by no means all.
  2. ^ Fujio Akai (* 1945) and Jun Suzuki (* 1946).
  3. ↑ Kazuo Shiraga (白 髪 一 雄; 1924–2008), Atsuko Tanaka , Saburō Murakami (村上 三郎; 1925–1996), Michio Yoshihara (1933–1996), Akira Kanayma (1924–2006).

Exhibition catalog

Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (ed.): Japan - tradition and present. Nihon - Dentō to Gendai . Catalog, May 1974. 142 p. And 10 p. Advertisements.

literature

  • Schaarschmidt-Richter, Irmtraud (Ed.): The other modern. Japanese painting from 1910 to 1970. Edition Stemmle, 1999. ISBN 3-908161-85-1 .
  • Tazawa, Yutaka: Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Art . Kodansha International, 1981. ISBN 0-87011-488-3 .
  • Laurance P. Roberts: A Dictionary of Japanese Artists . Weatherhill, 1976. ISBN 0-8348-0113-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The technical term for the "Japanese" direction is " Nihonga " (日本 画).
  2. ↑ The technical term for the "western" direction is " Yōga " (洋 画).