창작과 평가: 요로즈 데츠고로 <풍선을 든 여인>을 중심으로

서지정보

ㆍ발행기관 : 한국미술연구소 ㆍ수록지정보 : 美術史論壇 / 33권
ㆍ저자명 : 다나카 아츠시

영어 초록

For the approximately the past 15 years I have been commenting on the art historical research conducted at the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo. Art history as a scholarly discipline was brought to Japan about a century ago as part of modern Western academic study. Relative to that, we continue to analyze the discourse that occurs in art history studies today. This symposium addresses this issue of appraisal. Appraisal for art historians is the determining and defining of a work’s overall value as art. We analyze how the appraisal of an art work is determined. We intentionally consider, from multiple angles, how this issue will continue into the future. Art historians stand before the work, observe it, feel it, and consider it on the basis of their own awareness and accumulated insight. Through these means they assign an appraisal or evaluation, all in order to better appreciate the work. If that appraisal is not adequate, then they go on to examine the work from other angles, such as the environment of the artist or the physical work itself, and even go so far as to trace the process by which it was created.
I agree with this general process. And, as part of my continuing work in the study of modern Japanese art, I will relook at two of my articles, add new information discovered since their publication, and look to create a basic course of lectures from these. The articles in question are “Research Note: The ‘New Woman’ and ‘Woman with a Balloon’: What Lay behind the Creation of Yorozu Tetsugorô’s Woman with a Balloon and its Expression,” published in Bijutsu Kenkyu No.398 in August 2009.
Originally, modern art in Japan as well as in all of East Asia developed on the basis of the influence from modern European art. Researchers today frequently use the term “reception” to speak of that introduction of foreign culture. The use of the term “reception” assumes that the receiver is central to the equation. However, in the case of modern art, there was a time when Japanese students could see original European art works only by studying abroad, and more often than not were limited to reproduction prints.
Yorozu Tetsugorô(1885–1927) was one of the first painters in Japan’s modern art scene to personally and directly “receive” modern European art, including Post-Impressionism, Italian Futurism, abstract painting and Cubism. My article reexamined Yorozu’s Woman with a Balloon in this regard. First, I considered the question of subject and the impetus behind the creation of the work. Yorozu is thought to have painted this work in 1913, and I surmised that the image painted was both symbolic and avant-garde for its time, given the debate about the “new woman” in contemporary Japanese media by figures such as Hiratsuka Raichô(1886–1971).
However, questions still remained about the painter’s creative role. This can be addressed by an examination of Yorozu’s sketchbook of the period. In general, a sketchbook is an important resource that vividly conveys a painter’s thoughts and ideas before they are formalized in a finished painting. This is one of the sources of the proposed dating of Woman with a Balloon. We can see that Yorozu had drawn a sketch of a map of the world on the first page. It is not clear why Yorozu did that. In essence, a map is nothing more than a miniature representation of geographic forms, planar in expression and fitted with set symbols and terms. However, in Yorozu’s case, he did not draw the map as a simple schematic, rather he depicted it as a painting. From another standpoint, Yorozu may have had a world map in mind; in other words, he may have created a relative image of the world itself. Thus we can see from this single-volume sketchbook, that creativity itself is a rich and diverse array of factors. Then, doesn’t this volume allow us to more deeply understand the work in question, and indeed, doesn’t it allow us to arrive at yet new evaluations for the work.
I would like to detach from the set concept of evaluation and look back rather on the artist’s creative process in terms of the concepts of “reception” of foreign culture and creativity. This article examines the materials related to his works to a fine degree and thus uses an evidential basis for the exploration of the issue of appraisal. The rest of the symposium consisted of research reports by four Japanese and Korean scholars.

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