Modernities of Japanese Art

This book contains foundational studies of various modernities in Japanese Art published since 1986 by John Clark. His articles address modern Japanese print history, Modern Japanese Aesthetics, the history of Japanese Western-style painting including the avant-garde, the relation of art and foreign aggression, and the post World War II development of critical art, as well as post-modernism. The basis for these essays is through-going empirical research in Japanese sources over many visits to Japan since 1969, with at the same time a theoretical rigour derived from semiotics applied to traditional Japanese-style painting and other subjects. Some of these essays which were previously published in French and Japanese appear here in English for the first time. The whole collection brings together as one volume a large body of art historical and critical work not otherwise easily accessed. This book forms a pair with the author s "Modernities of Chinese Art" (Brill, 2010).

John Clark, is Professor of Asian Art History at the University of Sydney.Among his books are Modern Asian Art (1998), Modernities of Chinese Art (Brill, 2010) and Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s (2010; Best Art Book Prize, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2011). He is currently working on The Asian Modern, a new comparative study of around twenty-five modern Asian artists across five generations from the 1850s to the 1990s.