In the Shadow of Empire - by Alicia Volk (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A pioneering look at an immensely creative period in Japanese art that developed amid the Cold War.

Alicia Volk brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk's groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere--at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices--and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds.

Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond US-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art.

Review Quotes

"For those whose exposure to Japanese art is primarily to works of premodern Japan--temple bells, ukiyoe prints and such--the book should be a revelation. . . . Volk shows us that Japanese artists in the turbulent period from the 1930s to the 1950s produced works of art worthy of our consideration."-- "Asian Review of Books"

"'All Japanese art after 1868 is rubbish!, ' the art historian Sherman Lee once told the author of this book. Undeterred, Volk made modern Japanese art her specialism. Here she looks at how the cold war initiated a fertile period in Japanese visual culture."-- "Apollo, "Off the Shelf" column"

"In the Shadow of Empire elegantly foregrounds visual art as a way to understand the two central dilemmas for postwar Japanese: how to come to terms with their complicated feelings about participation in the disastrous war and how to build a better society from its ruins. Doing so meant choosing what to repudiate, what to keep, and what to refashion from the recent past. It also meant navigating the equally politically compromised terrain of the US-led occupation and the Cold War. In this creative and sensitive analysis of shrewdly selected painters, printmakers, and sculptors, Volk shows the varied ways that artists debated how to make art that appropriately responded to these urgent questions, producing images that have profoundly shaped postwar Japanese--and global--culture through today."
--Laura Hein, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History, Northwestern University

"A rich and revealing account of Japanese visual arts in the decade after the end of World War II, this strongly argued study follows artists as they navigated their own, often sudden, transition from war to peace in the double shadow of the defeated Japanese and ascendant American empires. Focusing on figures frequently neglected in the West-inflected art-historical narrative, the book contributes a fresh perspective both to art history and to postwar Japanese history as a whole. Fascinating."--Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor Emerita of History, Columbia University

"This marvelous book succeeds in transforming Japanese art of the American occupation (1945-1952) from what once seemed like the nadir of twentieth-century Japanese art history into the key that unlocks some of the most important patterns of its development. This compelling narrative scrutinizes a wide selection of little-studied archival materials to generate a fascinating panorama of diverse media and contentious debates in the troubled years immediately following war defeat."--Bert Winther-Tamaki, professor of Art History and Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine

"Volk's work is wholly original, providing new and creative interpretations of a wide array of Japanese artworks produced under the Allied occupation and calling attention to transwar continuities. Volk completely revises previous interpretations that have treated this period as static and largely unproductive, instead revealing a lively and compelling narrative about contested identities negotiated through art. In the Shadow of Empire builds on an important scholarly trajectory, and it will make a major contribution to the field."--Gennifer Weisenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University

About the Author

Alicia Volk is professor of Japanese art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement and In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art, a recipient of the Phillips Book Prize. She has been a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, an Ishibashi Foundation-Japan Foundation Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the University of London, and a Fulbright Research Scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo.