DENVER – “We support women artists,” Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, told a room of donors, art historians and trustees on the opening night of His brush, an exhibition of Japanese artists primarily from the Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. The museum director listed three shows in seven years as proof of fairness: Women of Abstract Expressionism (2016), His Paris (a 2018 traveling exhibition curated by the American Federation of Arts and independent curator Laurence Madeline), and now His brush. But His brush is more than an inclusiveness initiative. It’s akin to the growing number of women-only presentations because it reveals a fact that’s lurking in plain sight: great women artists have existed everywhere and at all times.
The artists in His brush did not use aliases, were employed by the imperial family, maintained generational workshops and sold labor. Still, most of the names in the show would get a “who?” by Japanese art historians. It’s been 35 years since the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas presented the groundbreaking exhibit Japanese women artists 1600–1900 and 20 years since the important book Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field was released, and women artists still make up a fraction of the historic record.
The political and socio-historical background of pre-modern Japanese women was unique. During the Edo period, the Tokugawa family instituted a feudal system with Confucian class structures. Samurai were at the top of the social ladder as protectors of powerful landowners. Below the warrior class were farmers and then artisans, with merchants below. Some people existed above the social system, such as the imperial family and the Buddhist clergy, and others existed below, such as courtesans. Confucius and Buddhist teachings positioned women as subordinate to men, which limited their mobility and education. Women who learned poetry, painting and calligraphy needed the support of a man, such as a father or a family friend, for training, therefore male teachers are appointed everywhere. His brush.
The exhibition is organized to reflect the social silos of women: the inner chambers (wealthy women), the studios, the Buddhist nuns, the floating world, and the literati (a social gathering of artists). Certain artists, such as Ōtagaki Rengetsu, appear in several places in the exhibition to express his vast network among poets. As a Buddhist nun, her status allowed her to travel unaccompanied and these movements are documented in sketches from a travel journal and an extraordinary painting, “Moon, Blossoming Cherry and Poem” (1867), inscribed with his famous verse:
The inn refuses me, But their slight is a kindness. I make my bed instead Below the cherry blossoms With the hazy moon above.
Despite a variety of expressions and materials in his brush, the works do not differ stylistically from those of the men of their time. Dr. Patricia Fister states in the book Bloom in the shade (1990) that if artists studied with the style of the Kano school, they would follow that tradition and if they studied the Chinese literary style, that way would dictate. If gender cannot be localized in paintings, why does the curatorial approach and the title of Her?
Noguchi Shōhin was born in Osaka in 1847. She learned poetry and painting from an early age, studying with the painter Hine Taizan. She became a professor of painting in a women’s university, exhibited at the Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris. and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, served as the Imperial Family’s official artist and was widely covered in the Japanese press, but is absent from Japanese art books today.
Some reasons why we don’t know these artists are related to their context and others to ours. Fister notes that biographies of female artists have often emphasized their modesty to avoid the scorn of being indulgent as artists: “Because of this downplaying of achievements, modern readers have received little information about the place of women in the history of Japanese art. .” For example, Ryōnen Gensō was rejected for training by a famous Zen monk Ōbaku due to her beauty. As a nun at the Hōkyōji Imperial Buddhist Nunnery, her head was already shaved and her dress humble. She burned her face with a hot iron to diminish her appearance and gain acceptance. A single poem by Gensō is featured in the exhibit alongside a print by male artist Utagawa Kunisad recreating the dramatic moment of his self-harm.
The gender debate in Japan reveals less generous responses than Fister’s. In 1997, art historian Chino Kaori presented “The Importance of Gender Studies in the Discourse of Japanese Art History” at a symposium in Tokyo that would serve as the basis for an anthology titled Women? Japan? Beauty? Chino acknowledged that the objects and themes addressed in Japanese art history were selected based on the values of the authors – heterosexual men. She presented a new interrogation of objects with a gender consciousness. Art historian Shigemi Inaga criticized Chino in the newspaper Aida (1998), arguing that a feminist perspective takes ‘minority’ creators as ‘universal’. He defined the universal as a discourse that reflects male dominance at the time of creation. Essentially, Inaga suggested that women artists existed outside the mainstream and were therefore properly marginalized by historical research.
Shigemi’s position has been replaced with more compelling arguments that question the effectiveness of female-only shows. A 2021 Hyperallergic article illustrates how such exhibitions sub-category female art history and leave male-dominated narratives unchallenged. A recent art review article states that all-female exhibits have been done for decades with little or no impact on museum acquisitions or our collective memory. If all-male shows have presented an incomplete perspective of history, writes Eliza Goodpasture, so have female-only shows.
The promotion of women requires negotiation with men. Men are everywhere His brush – named as teachers, abusers and patrons. Their lingering presence threatens to take credit for the work. In a show with Japanese names that are obviously not feminine for a predominantly English-speaking audience, what would be the assumption about the creators if gender wasn’t headlining? There is a great deal of research on viewer biases in science museums or how additional text around American landmarks does not alleviate existing attitudes. Do women-only exhibits help combat the idea that important work is male, just as exhibits organized around race and ethnicity combat whiteness?
The traditional framework of what deserves to be studied, criticized or preserved, and who holds the authority to declare it, persists in our institutions and problematizes alternative curatorial approaches. “We support women artists” sounds good but seems empty when you know that female art only represents 11% of museum acquisitions and those efforts culminated in 2009, according to a report by Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin.
Museums are linked to patrons as a driving force for acquisitions. The Burns Halperin report found that 60% of the objects in his study entered museum collections by gift or bequest. His brush was made possible through a donation of 500 objects by collectors Dr John Fong and Dr Colin Johnstone. The donation was secured under the guidance of the museum’s former curator of Asian art, Tianlong Jiao, now chief curator of the Hong Kong Palace Museum. The museum tells Hyperallergic that it delayed the initial opening in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An exhibition catalog titled Tradition and triumphwas released in 2021, but has not been distributed. Hyperallergic obtained a copy of this original catalog and a comparison with the current checklist shows that many objects have been removed from display. According to museum sources, the exhibit was delayed, the book scrapped, and the checklist revised due to authentication issues. Now several artists are represented by far fewer works: Kiyohara Yukinobu was reduced from five paintings to two, and nearly 20 pieces attributed to Ōtagaki Rengetsu were cut. While this highlights the problems of museum scholarship related to donor demands and resources, it also confronts any impending skepticism about the importance of these women. Why make fakes of an irrelevant artist?
Criticizing collectors for acquiring the same art as the previous generation and condemning museums for not evolving is entirely satisfying and fair – but no narrative is complete. In the book Paint outside the lines, economist Dr. David Galenson presents a statistical correlation between art exhibited in retrospectives and illustrated in textbooks and auction prices, proving that intellectual and economic markets are in dialogue. Art historical research (and its funding) must exercise historiographical methods to attack problematic claims and question omissions for a change in collections to be observed. Dr. Peggy Wang discusses in her book The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art how simplistic Western interpretations of Chinese artists in the 1980s and 1990s repeated inaccurate narratives with such frequency that they became reality in business and academic forums. Since art historians can manipulate or rectify economic and social history, the discipline must revisit its own production.
Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, recently wrote that there is more than one solution to the problem of representation in collections. All possibilities must be explored because museums move slowly, she says, like a mountain carried away one grain at a time. While we watch the top, maybe her brush create the next horizon.
Her brush: Japanese female artists from the Fong-Johnstone collection continues at the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, Colorado) through July 16. The exhibit was conceived by Professor Andrew L. Maske and co-curated by Dr. Einor K. Cervone, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Denver Art Museum.
