Female Nudity and Nihonga (1890-1960): The Paradox of a Certain Cultural Identity

Conference at 18:00 p.m. by Pierre-Gautier, head of the Japanese collections at the Cernuschi Museum.

Developed in the 1880s in reaction, among other things, to the increasingly dominant role of oil painting (yoga (洋画) in art education, the nihonga (日本画) has never made much secret of his nationalist and conservative leanings. However, this is a certain pretense, a Creole as art historian Furuta Ryō likes to call it, because, very early on, many young artists attempted to combine traditional painting with elements of Western origin. From the establishment of the official Salon (bunten (Japanese: 文展) in 1907, fierce disagreements broke out between the proponents of greater aesthetic freedom and an older generation who believed that this would herald nothing less than the decadence of Japanese painting. The relationship to the body, in its volume, morphology and contrasts – its incarnation, in short – is of course part of the disagreements opposing the old guard (kyūha (Japanese) and the new (shinpa As for the subjects discussed, neither faction gave a moment's thought to the nude: far too Western! And yet, during the years 1900-1910, aware of the success – even the scandalous success – that the female nude was enjoying in the yoga At the same time, some artists tried to reconcile nudity and nihonga : first timidly, then, from the 1920s, in a more flamboyant way, without however the nude as a subject always being totally assumed. Generally under the guise of themes from theUkiyo-e or colonial order, female nudity experienced, in the 1920s-40s, an unprecedented diffusion in a movement where it was not expected. A long-term study also invites us to question the socio-political impact of such a genre. If the use of nudity was part of a line as narrow as it was restrictive until 1945, the post-war period seems to have made it a real tool of protest, particularly among female artists.