Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 This is the argument of my Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), see especially 76–9, 10–21, 132–48, 152–228, 240–8. My scepticism towards conventional art-historical depictions of the avant-garde derives from formative immersion in the work of feminist art historians, such as Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and Lisa Tickner. They helped me see through the phallocentricism and homophobia of such authoritative texts as Charles Harrison's English Art and Modernism 1900–1939 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981, 1994), which actively misrepresents the politics of various artists and critics in order to pitch the history of the British avant-garde as a contest between the effeminate bourgeoisie and rugged working lads, in defiance of the fact that debates over the future of easel painting – itself a bourgeois form – played out entirely in bourgeois venues for the attention of bourgeois patrons by players who, almost without exception, came from the bourgeoisie. Christopher Reed, ‘Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties’, Genders 11 (Fall 1991): 58–80. As I argue in Art and Homosexuality, these biases continue to animate much art-historical discourse. 2 The derivation of ‘avant-garde’ from military theory is widely recognized; first use in English is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary to the Daily Telegraph in 1910. The concurrent replacement of the term ‘school’ with ‘movement’ likewise adopts a military paradigm of conquest and appropriation as the model for understanding what modernist artists do. The OED reports that ‘movement’ came into common English during the eighteenth century as military terminology. This is the OED’s second meaning, with a first citation noted in 1762 and a definition quoted from a military dictionary of 1876: ‘the regular and orderly motion of an army for some particular purpose’. The OED's sixth meaning – after the ‘movement’ of watches and so forth – is a ‘course or series of actions and endeavours on the part of a body of persons, moving or tending toward some special end’; the example given is the ‘Oxford Movement’. The OED, itself a late Victorian text, makes no reference to ‘movement’ applied to the arts. The first uses of ‘movement’ in relation to art I have found concern the Pre-Raphaelites, a self-consciously primitivist group (in 1871 Tinsley's Magazine 8: 392 referred to ‘the growing Preraphaelite movement’; an 1894 book is titled Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement). But the term ‘Preraphaelite school’ was also commonly used. The concurrence of the rise of ‘movement’ and ‘avant-garde’ in English around 1910 is exemplified in Roger Fry's anthology of essays written between 1901 and 1920. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920). Here Fry calls groups of artists a ‘school’ seventeen times – all but two in essays written before 1910. He uses ‘movement’ for this purpose twenty-nine times – all in essays written after 1910. His 1901 essay on Giotto, for instance, uses ‘movement’ to designate ideas about religion (‘the Franciscan movement’, 131, ‘the Waldensian movement’, 150), but calls groups of artists ‘schools’ (‘the Roman school of painting’, 143, ‘the later Byzantine school’, 135). Fry's later articles, however, use ‘movement’; a 1919 essay on El Greco, for instance, describes him as part of the sixteenth century's ‘current of artistic movement’ (207). 3 So specific is Japan's history as both subject and agent of colonial dynamics that some scholars argue Edward Said's ‘generalisations’ about Orientalism ‘apply to perhaps every area of the Far East except Japan’. Jan Walsh Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 25. For an early critique of Said's relevance to Japan, seeP. L. Pham, ‘On the Edge of the Orient: English Representations of Japan, circa 1895–1910’, Japanese Studies, 19, no. 2 (1999): 163–81. Gayatri Spivak excludes Japan from her analysis of ‘Asia’, asserting that ‘Japan had seemed to break away from Asia at a certain point’. Spivak does not develop the provocative implications of her remark that Asia has ‘two absurdities at its two ends: Israel and Japan’. Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 10, 11. 4 This is the argument of Hokenson's Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics; see also Michel Melot, ‘Questions au Japonisme’, in Society for the Study of Japonisme, Japonisme in Art: An International Symposium (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980), 239–60. 5 Mortimer Menpes, ‘A Personal View of Japanese Art: A Lesson from Khioso’, Magazine of Art, 11 (April 1888): 199; reprinted in Japan: A Record in Colour (London: Charles Black, 1901), 31. 6 J. A.M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London: n. p., n.d. [1890]), 159. Similar examples are given in Pham, ‘On the Edge of the Orient’, 167. 7 ‘Japan and the Japanese’, Edinburgh Review, 13 (January1861): 46, 51. 8 Oscar Wilde, Intentions, Complete Works, Vol. 7 (New York: The Nottingham Society, 1909), 47–8. About Menpes, Wilde complained, ‘one of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans’ (48). 9 Until the 1860s, ‘japanwork’ signified lacquer from anywhere in East Asia, just as ‘china’ signified (as it still does) porcelain. 10 Writing about the USA, William Hosley outlines how histories of the avant-garde dismiss middle-brow interest in Japanese aesthetics owing to its association with middle-class women. Emphasizing the importance of late-nineteenth-century women's decorative arts societies that sought to broaden employment opportunities for women by collaborating with industry and founding and sustaining some of America's most prestigious museums, Hosley argues that ‘Japanese art conventions and decoration figured so prominently in this activity that … [w]hen critics and pundits referred to “the Japan craze,” it was women's work they had in mind’, though this ‘story of such vigor and interest has been suppressed’ when women lost ‘control of organizations they helped found or rehabilitate during the 1880s’. William Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Athenaeum, 1990), 161–4. 11 Charlotte Maria Salwey, Fans of Japan, (London, 1894), as cited in Christopher Bush, ‘The Ethnicity of Things in America's Lacquered Age’, Representations, 99 (Summer 2007): 80. Bush's argument that ‘the U.S. relationship to Japan was deeply connected to its more general relationship to things’ (78) extends to Great Britain. Although the American market was much larger, Japanese exports to Britain more than doubled during the Edwardian era. Ayako Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910: Gateway to the Island Empire of the East (London: Curzon, 1999), 31; Olive Checkland, Japan and Britain after 1859: Creating Cultural Bridges (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 52–3. 12 Yuko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). 13 Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition, 1. 14 The Japan-British Exhibition was twice the size of the Japanese displays at the 1904 World's Fair in St Louis, USA, and three times bigger than those at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The indifference of the Edwardian avant-garde to the Exhibition is reflected in art history's overlooking of this vast spectacle. The basic source is Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition. An anthology on the Exhibition is forthcoming: Ayako Hotta-Lister and Ian Nish, eds, Commerce and Culture at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition: Centenary Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 15 The Japanese government was so pleased with British journalists’ response to the Exhibition that the Imperial Japanese Commission published a compendium, The British Press and the Japan-British Exhibition (n.d. [1910–11]; reprinted Melbourne: Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies, 2001). See also Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition, 129–30. 16 Hugh Cortazzi and Anne Kaneko, The Japan Society: A History, 1891–2000 (London: Japan Society, 2001), 22. 17 William H. Coaldrake, ‘Introduction’, in The British Press and the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, x. 18 The Illustrated Catalogue of Japanese Old Fine Arts Displayed at the Japan-British Exhibition, London 1910 (Tokyo: Shimbi Shoin, 1910), 45. 19 William H. Coaldrake, ‘Architectural Antiquarianism, Japanese Models and the Construction of a Modern Empire at the 1873 Vienna and 1910 Japan-British Exhibitions’, talk given May 13, 2006, Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, caea.uchicago.edu/events_publications/symposia/051306/abstracts/coaldrake (accessed May 10, 2006). Welcomed by specialists, the models were acquired by various institutions in Britain and on the continent when the Exhibition closed. Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition, 68, 107, 124–5 20 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 106. 21 Clive Bell, Art (New York: FrederickA. Stokes, 1914), 22, see also 36. For a detailed documentation of European perceptions of Japanese art as primitive, see Elissa Evett, ‘The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century’, PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1980. 22 ‘Japanese Pictures at the Exhibition, III: Genre and Modern Works’, The Times, June 25, 1910, in The British Press and the Japan-British Exhibition, 96. Hotta-Lister argues that the negative reception for modern Japanese art in Britain in 1910 prompted the Japanese to send more historical art and less new art to subsequent international expositions. Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition, 121–2. 23 W. B. Yeats, ‘At the Hawk's Well’, Four Plays for Dancers (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 23–4. 24 The original production featured a flute and what is variously described as a harp or a guitar in lieu of a zither. 25 Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man, the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 212 (this book is much re-issued, most recently in 1999). R. F. Foster's 2003 biography debunks the myth of Ito as ‘authentic’, but with the effect of almost eliminating him from the story, scanting his impact on Yeats’ imagination in a condescending, chronologically garbled, short account. R. F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003), 38–9. Descriptions of Ito as a Noh dancer who ‘performed the play’ rather than a modern choreographer who contributed to the invention of the performance persist; see Karen E. Brown, The Yeats Circle, Verbal and Visual Relations in Ireland, 1880–1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 64. I am grateful to Carrie Preston for alerting me to Ito's contribution. 26 Ian Carruthers, ‘A Translation of Fifteen Pages of Ito Michio's Autobiography Utsukushiku Maru Kyoshitsu’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 2 no. 1 (1976): 39. Ito's memoirs were published in Japan in 1956 in two versions, as explained in Carruthers, 32. A variant translation of this section is in Shotoro Oshima, W.B. Yeats and Japan (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1965), 43–4. 27 Carruthers, ‘A Translation’, 35. One of Ito's friends was Tamijuro Kume (his given name is sometimes presented as Taminosuke, commonly known as Tami) continued to consult with Pound until his death in 1923. On Kume's training in Noh and his letters concerning his consultations on In the Hawk's Well, see Carruthers, 35, and Sanehide Kodama, ed. Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan, 1987), 2–3, 9. Six months after this performance, in late October 1915, Ito performed Noh-inspired dances for Yeats and Pound using Pound's translations of Japanese poetry as a text and costumed in samurai armour ‘reconstructed’ (in Pound's terminology) by Edmund Dulac and Charles Ricketts. 28 Anthony Thwaite, ‘A Talk with Ito’, Truth, 3 August 1956: 899. 29 Gregory K. Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 186–7. Moses P. Handy, ed. The Official Directory of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: W. P. Conkey, 1893), 416. 30 On the influence of Dalcroze's training on Ito's dance, see Mary Fleischer, Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer Collaborations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 167–73. 31 Ito's role in producing the costumes is unclear. Yeats credited the costumes entirely to Edmund Dulac. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 221. Ito, in one memoir, recalls ‘Edmund Dulac, a painter, made everything including the costumes and masks’, but in another says of his costume, ‘we made this in Dulac's house. He had done some research on Noh masks’. Carruthers, ‘A Translation’, 35, 39. 32 W. B. Yeats, ‘Certain Noble Plays of Japan’, 1916, reprinted in Essays and Introductions, 221, 224. For the most detailed analysis of Ito's role in creating At the Hawk's Nest, see Mary Fleischer, Embodied Texts, 149–213. 33 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ezra Pound’, Poetry, September 1946: 326; in Helen Caldwell, Michio Ito: The Dancer and his Dances (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 50. This passage demonstrates Yeats’ place in the social formation of the London avant-garde, even as scholars debate whether his poetry qualifies as stylistically avant-garde. 34 Carruthers, ‘A Translation’, 33. 35 Ottoline Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–18, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber, 1974), 41. 36 Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, 25 September 1915, in Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950; reprinted New York: New Directions, 1971), 63. 37 On the paradox of the avant-garde's continual reiteration of the trope of novelty, see Jed Rasula, ‘Make it New’, Modernism/modernity, 17 no. 4 (2010): 713–33. 38 Ezra Pound, ‘Remy de Gourmont’, Fortnightly, 98, no. 104 (1915), 1165; ellipsis in original. 39 Caldwell, Michio Ito, 37, quoting The Times, 11 May 1915. Ito's memoir explains that ‘[b]ecause I was billed as “The Japanese Dancer”, I had to create a “Japanese” atmosphere. All of my dances were original however’. Carruthers, ‘A Translation’, 39. Ito mentions his Coliseum engagement in his letters to Pound scheduling their first visits. Kodama, Ezra Pound and Japan, 8. 40 Michio Ito in New York Tribune, 19 August 1917, in Mary Fleischer, Embodied Texts, 183. 41 Michio Ito to Ezra Pound, 19 December 1920, in Kodama, Ezra Pound and Japan, 18. 42 Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 221, 227–8. Compare Yeats’ published account of the ‘pleasure’ he took in ejecting ‘a newspaper photographer’ from the performance of At the Hawks Well, ‘ explaining to him that as fifty people could pay our expenses, we did not invite the press’. Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers, 87. 43 Ibid., 86. 44 Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 229. When, later in 1916, Pound republished the texts from Certain Noble Plays of Japan with more material, he titled that volume ‘Noh,’ or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan. ‘Noh,’ which derives form the verb ‘to be able’ is more commonly translated as ‘skill’ or ‘talent’. Ito recalled his surprise at the originality of Fenollosa's translation, saying, ‘No Japanese could have come up with that sort of observation’. Carruthers, ‘A Translation’, 39. British audiences accepted Yeats’ connection of Noh to nobility. British Vogue, crediting ‘informative material’ provided by Pound, described At the Hawk's Well as ‘the first performance of a nô play outside of Japan’ and ‘a drama of the aristocracy’. ‘Are You in the Nô? The Symbolic Drama of Japan, Ages Old, Mystic, Aristocratic, Has Made Fashionable London Its Own’, Vogue (London), 1 July 1916: 69, quoted at themargins.net/bib/B/BL/bl060. Describing the first performance of At the Hawk's Well, Edward Marsh explained, ‘many of the conventions [are] taken from the traditional dramas – rather unluckily for us called the No-drama, of the Japanese nobility’. Edward Marsh to Cathleen Nesbitt, in Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh: Patron of the Arts (London: Longmans, 1959), 383–4. 45 Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 246–7. 46 Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers, 88. 47 W. B. Yeats to Yone Noguchi, 1921, Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi, Vol. 1, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 16–17. That Yeats was stirred to these generalizations about ‘your painters’ by Noguchi's poem about Hiroshige, a print designer, betrays a related imposition of the priority of easel painting in the Western avant-garde. 48 Gilbert and Sullivan discography: gasdisc.oakapplepress.com. 49 Quoted from the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive: math.boisestate.edu/gas/carte/1926/index. 50 Yeats’ ambiguous position in the canon of writers representing ‘the colonial world ruled by European imperialism during a climactic insurrectionary stage’ is analysed in Edward Said's ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, in Culture and Imperialism (New York:. Knopf, 1993), 220–38 (quotation from 220). For debates about his status in post-colonial studies, see Deborah Fleming, W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hills Press, 2001). 51 William Plomer, ‘Anglo-Afro-Asian’, Malahat Review, 1, no. 1 (1967): 5–11. 52 Plomer's sole previous impression of Japan was a legacy of the Japan-British Exhibition, for he recalled on a trip to England at about age 7 seeing ‘a large battleship, a complicated structure, gliding through the morning haze’ off the Isle of Wight. This was the Ikoma, which the Japanese navy sent to Britain to coincide with the Exhibition. Plomer recalled someone telling him, ‘That great big ship belongs to the plucky little Japs who beat the Russians. Yes, they're our friends, and perhaps some day you'll go and see their pretty country, where the houses are made of paper and the ladies wear chrysanthemums in their hair’. William Plomer. The Autobiography of William Plomer (New York: Taplinger, 1976), 181. 53 Peter F. Alexander, William Plomer: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 141. 54 William Plomer, Paper Houses (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), xiii. 55 William Plomer to Stephen Spender, September 22, 1931, Plomer Collection, Durham University Library. 56 Stephen Spender to William Plomer, n.d. [September/October 1931], Plomer Collection, Durham University Library. 57 Edmund de Waal, ‘Homo Orientalis: Bernard Leach and the Image of the Japanese Craftsman’, Journal of Design History, 10 no. 4 (1997): 361. On Leach's Japanese circle, see Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory,, 12–16, 233–5. 58 Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays (New York: Watson-Guptil, 1978), 171. 59 Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West, 171–2. Mark Tobey, ‘Reminiscence and Reverie’, Magazine of Art, October 1951: 230. On their fractious journey east, see Emmanuel Cooper, Bernard Leach: Life and Work (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 184. 60 Mark Tobey to Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, April 25, 1934, Dartington Hall Trust Archive. 61 Mark Tobey, ‘Eastern Trip’ proposal, 1934, Dartington Hall Trust Archive, reprinted in Tobey, ed. Maggie Giraud (Totnes: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996), n.p. 62 Mark Tobey to Dorothy Elmhirst, n.d. [‘Friday’], Dartington Hall Trust Archive; a very similar draft appears in Tobey's journal at the University of Washington Library. 63 Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West, 181. The archival record is unclear about the exact dates of Tobey's time in Japan, but scholars conclude that he left for San Francisco in mid- to late July 1934, having arrived in Japan from China in late May or early June. 64 Quoted in Katharine Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (n.p.: Da Capo Press, 1962), 236–37. 65 In Kuh, The Artist's Voice, 236. 66 Eliza E. Rathbone, Mark Tobey: City Paintings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1984), 31. 67 Tobey quoted in Kuh, The Artist's Voice, 236. Peter Wollen, ‘Fashion/Orientalism/the Body’, New Formations 1 (1987): 5, 7–8. 68 Judith S. Kays, ‘Mark Tobey and Jackson Pollock: Setting the Record Straight’, in Mark Tobey (Madrid: Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1997), 91–114. 69 Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), 2–3. 70 Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘The Asian Dimensions of Postwar Abstract Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics’, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 152. 71 In addition to the books by Yuko Kikuchi and Bert Winther-Tamaki cited above, see Alexandra Munro, ed. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994), Gennifer Wiesenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and the forthcoming Guggenheim Museum exhibition Gutai: Splendid Payground, scheduled for 2013. 72 See Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson and Paul J. Karlstrom, eds. Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Gordon H. Chang, Karen Higa, Sharon Spain and ShiPu Wang, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Jeffrey Wechsler, Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian-American Artists and Abstraction 1945–1970 (New York: Abrams, 1997). 73 I contest the wholesale dismissal of aesthetics by scholars such as Benjamin Buchloh in his high-post-modernist moment as energetically as I resist the rejection of the intrusion of politics into aesthetics insisted upon by October magazine (under Buchloh's editorship) in a later moment of the avant-garde's recent history of successive novelties. Christopher Reed, A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 56; Art and Homosexuality, 245–6. 74 Raymond Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 148–69.