Japanese calligraphy had its international heyday—collaborating with and yet challenging abstract painting—in the early postwar years. This book explores a Kyoto-based calligraphy group Bokujinkai, and its contribution to the Japanese, American, and European postwar avant-gardes.

With its vivid descriptions of courtly society, gardens, and architecture in early eleventh-century Japan, The Tale of Genji—recognized as the world’s first novel—has captivated audiences around the globe and inspired artistic traditions for one thousand years. Its female author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a diarist, a renowned poet, and, as a tutor to the young empress, the ultimate palace insider; her monumental work of fiction offers entry into an elaborate, mysterious world of court romance, political intrigue, elite customs, and religious life. This handsomely designed and illustrated book explores the outstanding art associated with Genji through in-depth essays and discussions of more than one hundred works. The Tale of Genji has influenced all forms of Japanese artistic expression, from intimately scaled albums to boldly designed hanging scrolls and screen paintings, lacquer boxes, incense burners, games, palanquins for transporting young brides to their new homes, and even contemporary manga. The authors, both art historians and Genji scholars, discuss the tale’s transmission and reception over the centuries; illuminate its place within the history of Japanese literature and calligraphy; highlight its key episodes and characters; and explore its wide-ranging influence on Japanese culture, design, and aesthetics into the modern era. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

This is an insightful and intelligent re-thinking of Japanese art history & its Western influences. This broad-ranging and profoundly influential analysis describes how Western art institutions and vocabulary were transplanted to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870-80s, artists and government administrators in Japan encountered the Western 'system of the arts' for the first time. Under pressure to exhibit and sell its artistic products abroad, Japan's new Meiji government came face-to-face with the need to create European-style art schools and museums - and even to establish Japanese words for art, painting, artist, and sculpture. "Modern Japanese Art" is a full re-conceptualization of the field of Japanese art history, exposing the politics through which the words, categories, and values that structure our understanding of the field came to be while revealing the historicity of Western and non-Western art history.

Regardless of how globalized our world might seem, languages and written words continue to refer to particular cultural locations. If we are unable to read them, however, written words and scripts present a purely visual encounter. Traces of Words explores the cultural significance and artistic representations of Asian words and writing by focusing on its visual and material presence. Writing, especially calligraphy, has been referred to as an aesthetic form, and has played an important social and political role in diverse Asian traditions ranging from Buddhist text in Pali to Islamic and Chinese calligraphy. This tradition of scripting continues to have an impact on contemporary artist as well. Words, whether spoken, written, imagined or visualized leave traces unique to human life. Essays from five experts and illustrations of ancient and contemporary works invite us to explore this theme in Traces of Words.