Mokutarō Kinoshita’s Acceptance of Édouard Manet: A Study

Abstract

　A physician who was also a novelist and art critic, Mokutarō Kinoshita (1885 –1945) made statements calling for the acceptance of Édouard Manet, an artist representing nineteenth-century France, during the “Conventions of Painting” dispute that took place between April 1911 and February 1912. This paper will study statements by Kinoshita and consider how his perspective on art, and in particular painting, related to his acceptance of Manet.

　The dispute began with Kinoshita’s criticism of works by rising artist Shintoku Yamawaki, in which he used the words “conventions of painting.” Kinoshita’s views on painting appear to have been influenced by an assessment of Manet made by German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe in his book Paul Cézanne (1910). In fact, in arguing the importance of accepting Manet, Kinoshita borrowed Meier-Graefe’s terminology, describing Manet as “the mediator of tradition.”

　In 1913, a year after the dispute ended, Kinoshita introduced a founder of the abstract art movement, Wassily Kandinsky, in his “Anti-Naturalism Tendencies in Western Painting” [“Yōga ni okeru shizenshugiteki keikō”], published in the journal Bijutsu shinpō. In Kinoshita’s interpretation of Kandinsky, his perspective on painting has clearly been shaped by the influence of Meier-Graefe, as noted above. The fact that Kinoshita’s acceptance of Manet seems to have arisen more from the perspective he gained through Meier-Graefe than from Manet’s actual works may have set the course for the nature of Manet’s acceptance in Japan from that time on.