Visitors to the current exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo might be excused for thinking they'd been misled. Instead of encountering a display of works expressing the essence of 20th-century Japanese art, perchance, or the challenge of assimilating Western artistic techniques, this show features works by one of the foremost exponents of nihonga -- traditional Japanese painting.
Yuki Ogura died two years ago at the advanced age of 105. At first, her sedate, flat-looking pictures of women in kimono, and delicate studies of flowers that hark back to the Edo Period seem out of place in MOMA. But it should be remembered that nihonga, despite the overt traditionalism of much of its subject matter, was the other side of the great art odyssey that began when Japan's 2 1/2 centuries of isolation was shattered by the arrival of the Black Ships of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in July 1853.
Following the 1868 Meiji Restoration, many talented young Japanese artists eagerly embraced the styles of Western art and traveled overseas to explore and learn. However, an equally strong countermovement developed, led by the art critic Tenshin Okakura and Ernest Fenollosa, an American who taught at Tokyo University from 1878 to '86 and helped convey an appreciation of Japanese art to the West. This resulted in the founding of the Nihon Bijutsu-in (Japan Art Institute), which consciously rejected Western artistic trends and tried to promote a purely Japanese aesthetic.