Chelsea Foxwell
Assistant Professor of Art History and the College
University of Chicago
Copying/Nature: Notes from the Case of Nineteenth-Century Japan
Friday, May 7, 4-6 pm
CWAC 156
Abstract
Within East Asian art history, arguments about “naturalism” have developed in tandem with the awareness of representational fidelity’s prominence in the story of Western art. The roots of this view are partly historical: even prior to the nineteenth century, Japanese viewers often associated newly imported European pictures with mimetic priorities, contrasting them to the older modes of painting practiced in Japan.
Yet while “copying nature” is usually rated positively among today’s scholars and viewers, “copying” (other pictures) has remained ambivalent and undertheorized among viewers and scholars of Edo-period art. This paper will first evaluate some existing positions on copying/nature in the scholarship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan in order to investigate the relationship between the two processes of “copying” and “copying nature.”
The second half of the presentation draws on my research from 1880s Japan and looks at the moment in which existing, Edo-period approaches toward painting (and copying) clashed with newly imported assertions that “Japanese paintings are nothing but copies of old paintings, and do not constitute painting as a fine art.”
