ABSTRACT
LOOKING AT the phenomenon of late Meiji and early Taishō art from a broad perspective, an outside observer like myself cannot but be astonished by the rapid growth of a genuine popular interest in Western-style visual arts. The Meiji period, of course, was the time when a voracious curiousity, and an often overwhelming admiration, for Western arts, literature, and ideas helped transform the aesthetic presuppositions of Japanese intellectuals, artists, and the public at large. Still, in order to be understood and appreciated, new cultural products must be made widely available. In that regard, as might be expected, a new venacular literature was the quickest to show such transformations. After all, in the case of fiction or poetry, the reader is only separated from the writer by a printing press and a publisher. When a public audience is involved, however, the process requires the creation of institutions capable of providing a place, and a context, in which new kinds of arts can be appreciated. The slow and often painful development of the New Theatre Movement shows how difficult it was during this period to make manifest in stage productions the new ideals of the theatre inspired by European example. In the case of Western painting, which also requires a public, the rapid acceptance and growing interest on the part of a larger audience developed with remarkable swiftness. The various sorts of cultural institutions needed to create and sustain such a public—museums, exhibitions, magazines, catalogues, lively discussions among critics—developed relatively slowly during the nineteenth century in Europe, yet similar institutions were created, and appreciated, with lightning rapidity in Japan during the middle and later years of Meiji. By the turn of the century, many important elements in the apparatus were in place and in use.
