Traveling Bunjin to imperial household artist: Taki Katei (1830--1901) and the transformation of literati painting in late nineteenth-century Japan

• Verfasst von: Buckland, Rosina
• Titel: Traveling Bunjin to imperial household artist: Taki Katei (1830--1901) and the transformation of literati painting in late nineteenth-century Japan
• Mitwirkende: Hay, Jonathan [advisor]
• Mitwirkende: Trede, Melanie [advisor]
• Verlagsort: [s.l.]
• Verlag: [s.n.]
• Jahr: 2008
• Umfang: 444 S.
• Illustrationen: Ill.
• Format: 28cm
• Fussnoten: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 2908. - Advisers: Jonathan Hay; Melanie Trede
• Hochschulschrift: Thesis (Ph. D.)
• ISBN: 978-0-549-79448-6
• ISBN: 0-549-79448-4
• Dokumenttyp: Hochschulschrift
• Sprache: eng
• K10plus-PPN: 1612884393

Abstract

Scholarship has tended to assume that Chinese-inflected culture in Japan -- painting styles, calligraphy-and-painting parties, informal collaborative scrolls, prose and poetry in Chinese, and tea practice -- was obliterated in the late nineteenth century by official policies of Westernisation. On the contrary, far from dying out after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it experienced a final flourishing until the late 1880s, when deteriorating relations with China began to complicate for the Japanese what had long been an idealized view of continental culture

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on the career and works of Taki Katei (1830-1901), one of the last generation to practice as an itinerant literati artist, trained in the styles of Ming- and Qing-dynasty painting, who had sought out Chinese contact in Nagasaki in his youth. During the 1870s and early 1880s, Katei participated in the active world of the literati arts in Tokyo, producing paintings, attending salons, and providing illustrations for publications

Abstract

However, as the social and professional situations around him began to change, from the mid-1880s onward Katei transformed himself into a modern painter engaged in the system of domestic and international exhibitions and art organizations, and employed by the imperial court. The pinnacle of his career came with appointment as an Imperial Household Artist

Abstract

As well as the professional adaptation, Katei's work was transformed stylistically. The painters of the Japan Art Association (Nihon Bijutsu Ky okai), of which Katei was a leading member, moved away from landscapes and figures, consciously focusing instead on bird-and-flower imagery, seemingly unencumbered by concepts and ideas and thus possessed of universal appeal. Isolated from the larger cultural consciousness of China, elements of Chinese painting styles were deployed strategically in the service of an 'invented tradition' of bird-and-flower paintings in order to represent Japan both at home and abroad. Katei was the foremost exponent of this popular genre. Yet, despite his success, he was among those painters whose achievements were eclipsed, and ultimately forgotten, due to factional rivalries and the subsequent direction of government-sponsored art, as well as the biases within art history itself