Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty offers sustained analyses of seminal institutions and individuals that shaped the notion of “art” in the Meiji period (1868–1912 CE). This book consists of three major sections: (1) “The Politics of Modern Art: Institutions, Economics, and Art History”; (2) “The Language of Modern Art: Painting and Language”; and (3) “The Structures of Modern Art: Painters and Art Associations.” The resulting dense study owes much to Satō's deep engagements with rich archival material, but, as these section titles make clear, also to his ambition to offer a broad historical view of the discursive formation of “art” by deploying heretofore understudied critical perspectives.
As Satō himself frequently mentions in the body of the argument, and as Chelsea Foxwell's informative introduction notes, the art historical scholarship produced in Japan in the 1990s is marked by several projects that reexamined the concept of...
