Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism

Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism examines the most significant Japanese art and literary magazine of the early twentieth century, Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910–1923) and its founder, the Shirakaba-ha (White Birch Society). Erin Schoneveld's book explores the fluid relationship that existed between the different types of modern visual media, exhibition formats, and artistic practices embraced by the Shirakaba group. It provides a new comparative framework for understanding how the avant-garde pursuit of individuality during this period stood in opposition to state-sponsored modernism and how this played out in the emerging media of art magazines and artistic collectives.

Schoneveld argues that the Shirakaba group and Shirakaba magazine’s embrace of Post-Impressionism through the life and work of artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin offered them a key rhetorical strategy in the evolving discourse of modern Japanese art. Their strategic alignment with artists who they believed represented the revolutionary aesthetics of individualism and artistic self-expression during the early twentieth century assisted in concretizing Shirakaba’s own humanist ideology. Schoneveld analyzes key moments in modern Japanese art and intellectual history by focusing on the Japanese artists most closely affiliated with the Shirakaba magazine, including Takamura Kotaro, Umehara Ryuzaburo, and Kishida Ryusei. Drawing upon extensive archival research that includes numerous articles, images, and exhibitions reviews from the Shirakaba, as well as a complete translation of Yanagi Soetsu’s seminal essay, “The Revolutionary Artist” (Kakumei no gaka), Schoneveld demonstrates that, contrary to the received narrative that posits Japanese modernism as merely derivative, the debate around modernism among Japan’s early avant-garde was lively, contested, and self-reflexive.