메이지 국가 건설기 일본 미술과 다카무라 고운

Abstract

With the Meiji Restoration, Takamura Kōun(1852∼1934), a craftsman specializing in carving Buddhist icons, lost his traditional job and got new ones. Instead of Buddhist icon commissions, which decreased because of Haibutsu kishaku(literally “abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni”), Kōun produced crafts for export and monuments of historical heroes. “Old Monkey,” the first Meiji wooden work designated as an important cultural property, was carved by Kōun to submit it to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago and the two most famous modern Japanese monuments, the “Kusunoki Masashige Statue” in front of the Imperial Palace and the “Saigō Takamori Statue” in Ueno Park, were produced under the direction of Kōun. Kōun’s transformation from ‘craftsman’ to ‘sculptor’ was closely intertwined with the Meiji government’s art administration, which used art as a tool for “Shokusan Kōgyō”(encouragement of new industry) and an apparatus for the construction of national identity and reinforcement of nationalism. However, Kōun’s son, Takamura Kōtarō(1883-1956) as a representative modernist of the Taishō era, could not accept Kōun’s work as art. To Kōtarō, strongly influenced by the art theory of modernism asserting that art should be the self-expression of autonomous individuals, Kōun seemed a figure lacking self-consciousness as an artist and an anachronism living in the modern era with a craftsman’s ethos. This article explores the ways in which the craftsman’s ethos of Kōun, which has been considered as a limitation for him and the legacy of the old days, worked for the production of “art for the nation” that the new era of Meiji required. By examining how Meiji artist Kōun, distinguished from Edo craftsmen and Taishō modernists, used his skills for the nation and succeeded in life and career, I explore the relationship between nation-building and art in Meiji Japan.