C.B. Liddell - The Japan Times

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C.B. Liddell

For C.B. Liddell's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 9, 2016

The colorful combination of power and art

Each part of Italy has its own character, but Venice has always been something special and unique. While much of Italy was reduced to insignificant statelets, for much of the peninsula's history Venice was quite the reverse. It projected power far across the Mediterranean and ran a large commercial empire that brought it into close contact both with northern Europe and parts of Asia.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 2, 2016

The earliest memes also had humor

The curators at Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art (NMWA) have decided that Japan, a country well-known for its own print art, should know more about the print art of Europe. In this endeavor, they have chosen the work of Israhel van Meckenem (c. 1445-1503), a Germanic print artist from the Lower Rhine area, active in the latter half of the 15th century.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jul 19, 2016

The Renaissance rebranding of Italy

Every country tries to find an image that its people can believe in and unite around. Britain recently decided to become an island in its own right instead of a "Continental" country, tied mainly to the European Union. Japan, meanwhile, still seems caught between its manufacturing past and a perceived need to rebrand — with the help of the 2020 Olympics — as a successful knowledge economy.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jul 5, 2016

Seeing Greece, before its civilization peaked

We are only a month or so away from the Rio Olympics. While the world will soon be focused on that, in Japan many will also be thinking four years ahead to the Tokyo Olympics. It is easy, then, to see why the Tokyo National Museum is holding "A Journey to the Land of Immortals: Treasures of Ancient Greece."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 14, 2016

Renoir's true colors could rescue him from the haters

It's been a few years since the last big Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition in town. The last one, if I remember correctly, was "Renoir: Tradition & Innovation" at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). That brought over the French impressionist's "Dance at Bougival" (1883), an excellent painting, but padded out the rest of the show largely with inferior works, leaving a generally negative impression — no pun intended.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

May 31, 2016

A liberating walk through the woods

Painters and trees have a lot in common. Both are light-catchers: the painter looks at the world around him and tries to capture it, while a tree catches the light in order to grow. Trees are also part of the world that many artists see and often depict. So, there is quite a lot of synergy at the Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art's latest exhibition — "Trees in French Landscape Paintings, 1850 to 1920."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

May 17, 2016

Caravaggio: Art that has been through the wars

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

May 10, 2016

Ito Jakuchu: Quite the rare bird

The best time to see Ito Jakuchu's work was back in 2000 or 2006, when there were two major exhibitions that aimed to re-evaluate the underappreciated 18th-century Kyoto painter.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Apr 5, 2016

Kuniyoshi and Kunisada: When great minds think a little differently

When Japan opened up to the Western world in the 19th century, popular artistic tastes were dominated by two great woodblock print artists, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) and Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864). Contemporaries, keen rivals and both members of the Utagawa School, the pair had the inventiveness and flexibility to keep abreast of changing tastes as well as the whims of the censors.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Mar 29, 2016

The illuminating nature of Emile Galle

The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum has always had a connection with French glassware. After all, almost the first thing you see as you enter through the front entrance is a set of glass-relief doors with an angel motif. These were created by the famous French glass artist Rene Lalique as part of the original Art Deco design, when the building was created in the 1930s as the residence for Prince Yasuhiko of the Imperial Family.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 16, 2016

What do you know about the flowers that grow in an English royal garden?

There is a fascinating story to be found at the "English Garden" exhibition now on at the Panasonic Shiodome Museum — that is if you look closely. That tale is of botanical imperialism, namely the desire by the expansionary spirit of the British Empire to send artists and botanists to far-flung, exotic lands to draw, paint, record, collect and occasionally transplant various plant species to new environments.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 9, 2016

Dutch painters cut from the same canvas

The first noticeable thing about the exhibition "Vermeer and Rembrandt: the Masters of the 17th Century Dutch Golden Age" at the Mori Arts Center Gallery is the juxtaposition of the names. Vermeer's name comes before that of Rembrandt, marking him as the leading Dutch artist as far as the modern art public are concerned.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 2, 2016

Getting sentimental about the Pre-Raphaelites

Sometimes even provincial cities in the West seem to have much greater public art resources than Japan's capital. This is driven home by a video at the "Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic Painting from National Museums Liverpool" exhibition now on at Tokyo's Bunkamura The Museum.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 19, 2016

The frayed edges of modern Japan

In the Edo Period (1603-1868) and the years that followed, Japan made strenuous efforts to bring together its patchwork of feudal regions into a strongly centralized state with a unified culture. Accordingly, the nation now is one of the most homogenous in the world. But there are a couple of places where this strongly mono-cultural model begins to fray.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Dec 15, 2015

Smiling between the lines of ukiyo-e

Some art collectors enjoy the eclectic, picking up art pieces opportunistically — even randomly — usually when they find something at the right price. Others have more streamlined tastes and focus on a theme or genre, building up more consistent collections.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Dec 8, 2015

Real beauty lies in rustic reality

French society and culture has always had a fascination with the exotic, going back to the Chinoiserie of the rococo period, the Orientalist fascination with the harems and slave markets of the Middle East, and the Japonisme of the 19th century. One might even suspect that this trait could represent a certain vacuous element in French society.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 20, 2015

Monet's experiments meet his masterpieces

To anyone familiar with art exhibitions in Japan, it is clear that Impressionism is one of the most well-known and most-loved of all the "isms" and movements of Western art. The name of the movement is believed to have come from a 1872 painting by Claude Monet titled "Impression, Sunrise." When it was exhibited at a show in Paris in 1874, its title was picked up by unsympathetic critics and used to give the movement the name by which it has been known ever since.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 13, 2015

Usugrow feels the art of skulls in his bones

With shows four times a year, Diesel Art Gallery in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward is one of the best free art venues in Tokyo and is well worth checking out. Located in the basement of the clothes brand shop, it puts on consistently good shows that steer clear of the pretentiousness of more "artsy" venues, while remaining edgy in the way that shop-supported art spaces are seldom comfortable with.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 6, 2015

First impressions of the late impressionists

Any great story tends to focus on a limited number of characters, with everybody else either reduced to anonymity or the status of extras. In literary fiction or movies this is never a problem, but when the narrative is a historical one, it can lead to a certain amount of neglect and unfairness.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 29, 2015

The changing views of landscape painting

There are many ways in which an art exhibition can make a positive impression, but the two main ones are through the quality of the artworks and the narrative that ties these together. The present exhibition at Bunkamura The Museum is rather weak on the first element but much stronger on the second.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

Historically, kabuki was considered the entertainment of the merchant and peasant classes, a far cry from how it is regarded today.

For Japan's oldest kabuki theater, the show must go on

By Lance Henderstein

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

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