Japan, as elsewhere, has never had a singular art world but a plurality of formations. This is as true of pre-modern art as it is for Modernism and contemporary art — think of Takashi Murakami, his "factory" Kaikai Kiki and Geisai the art fair he founded. Individuals could, as now, constitute worlds unto themselves and the disciples orbited the patriarch to varying degrees of oblivion.
"A Close Look at Kyoto's Painting Studios" at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art is concerned with Kyoto gadan (modern nihonga [Japanese painting] circles), an appellation coined in 1911 at a lecture by the principal of the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting, Matataro Matsumoto, on the occasion of the first graduation ceremony. While nihonga was organized by the national exhibitions represented by the Japan Art Academy's Bunten that became the postwar Japan Arts Exhibition (Nitten) and educational institutions primarily in Tokyo and Kyoto, further subdivisions were apparent in the private teaching ateliers (juku) of individual artists who oversaw and directed the cultural production of their students until well after World War II.
The ateliers, like the national exhibitions and modern art schools, had their own feudalistic hierarchies and these were powerful agents shaping the directions of Kyoto nihonga through to the end of WWII. That model, if not entirely bankrupt, had its authority diminished in the flood of internationalism, the questioning of tradition, and the flourishing of "contemporary art."