Organizer and Chair: Victoria Weston, University of Massachusetts
This panel presents material from the multi-authored book, Copying from the Master and Stealing his Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting. The theme of the book and panel is artistic training in Japan, focusing primarily on case studies of learning sites. The rhetorical frame is the pedagogy developed in Kano-school studios, pre-modern Japan’s version of an authoritative painting academy. The Kano were painters-in-attendance to the Tokugawa house and the samurai elite. One of the great achievements of the Kano school was its ability to maintain its prestige and influence over the course of several centuries, even into the Meiji era (1868–1912). Over time, their academic studios not only trained innumerable Kano painters who then disseminated the school’s style throughout the country, but also produced some of Japan’s most individualistic painters, men and women who succeeded in establishing new styles and schools independent of their Kano affiliation. The Kano essentially defined the structure of painting pedagogy in pre-modern Japan. They did this by identifying a dialectical structure that opposed technical training with innate talent. Our case studies trace the origin of this ideology and its resulting permutations in the nineteenth century. This material fits into the interdisciplinary discourse on the nature of learning in Japan.
Talent, Training and Power: The Kano House in the Seventeenth Century
Karen M. Gerhart, Northern Arizona University
This paper lays the foundation for the panel by discussing the origins of Kano teaching ideology. Gerhart outlines the expansion of the Kano school in the seventeenth century and the concomitant need to canonize training methods so that the school could produce more masters equipped to fill patron demands. In the earliest text relating Kano views on painting, the 1680 Gado yoketsu (Secret Keys to the Way of Painting), Kano Yasunobu (1613–85) developed his theory about two types of artists: those who produced art by means of their natural talent (shitsuga) and those who produced art through systematic training (gakuga). The text suggests that the Kano family valued training above talent for the simple reason that innate talent cannot be reproduced, whereas methods of painting that can be taught can also be transmitted from one generation to the next. Perpetuation of Kano style meant sustained elite patronage and the health of the large family-based business enterprise. This was the rationale for the development and utilization of funpon, model paintings or drawings for training students. This body of models created a received canon of approved Kano work that could then be disseminated, through repeated copies, to the growing network of Kano studios.
Copying from Beginning to End?: Student Life in the Nineteenth-Century Kano School
Brenda G. Jordan, Florida State University
Jordan discusses the structure of student training in nineteenth-century Kano studios using the experiences of two well-known masters, Kawanabe Kyosai (1831–1889) and Hashimoto Gaho (1835–1908). Gaho was trained in the elite Kobikicho studio, Kyosai in the second-tier Surugadai studio, both located in Edo. Their experiences, recorded in memoirs, speak to the uniformity of Kano pedagogy and demonstrate how the dialectic of technical training versus innate talent worked in practice. The cornerstone of technical training was funponshugi, or the copybook method. In memoirs, both painters speak of endless hours spent drawing from funpon (model images) and how the funpon were handled and treasured by the teaching masters. They record their efforts to do life drawing (shasei), a method not sanctioned by Kano orthodoxy, yet tolerated. Both artists reveal that while Kano curriculum centered on shaping and honing a conventionalized technical syllabus, means were also found to nurture the innate proclivities of remarkable pupils. This body of experience is our benchmark for understanding orthodox artistic training when controlled directly by Kano masters.
In the Studio of Painting Study: Transmission Practices of Tani Buncho
Frank L. Chance, Independent Scholar
Funponshugi (copybook method) was the principal training tool defining Kano education, but it was also an effective training tool employed by independent masters. Tani Buncho (1763–1841) was arguably the most important literati painter and painting teacher of the early nineteenth century. He was trained in a Kano studio, but became an independent master who avidly explored the many styles flourishing in the period. As a literati painter, he worked in a tradition that valued individuality, creativity, and heterodoxy. However he, too, used funpon as part of his teaching arsenal. His teaching practice made eclectic use of contemporary painting method; thus funpon were used alongside lessons in life drawing and examples of Western paintings. Thanks to a number of documents from Buncho’s hand, a great deal can be reconstructed about how this master taught, how he challenged and preserved the pedagogy of his own training, and what values he sought to instill in his students.
Institutionalizing Talent and the Kano Legacy at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, 1889–1893
Victoria Weston, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Art schools first came about in Japan during the Meiji period, and they profoundly changed the teaching of painting. This paper focuses on the development of the curriculum at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which was first established by Kano painters under the auspices of the Ministry of Education as the new national art academy. While the school continued the Kano practice of technical training through funponshugi (copybook method), it added two crucial parts to the curriculum. First, it expanded the stylistic breadth of the curriculum by having Kyoto masters teach shasei (life drawing). In this, the school sought to develop a national painting that embraced much more of Japan’s artistic heritage. Second, the curriculum overtly emphasized the cultivation of individual creativity, particularly in its teaching of shin’an (new designs). Although the school originally emphasized creativity for practical reasons—it had to rely more on talented students because it could not spend the ten or more years typical of Kano studio training—this gave license to individual expression and thus fostered a proliferation of styles rather than the style of any single school.