ABSTRACT
FROM A VANTAGE POINT at the dawn of a new century, the larger contours of the development of a modern Japanese art, which began more than a hundred years ago, now seem possible to discern. Certainly from the 1890s on, with the beginning of instruction at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) in 1889 and the development of various exhibition systems, the creation of museums, and the establishment of other art-related groups and organizations, the ebb and flow of various forces-artistic, political, and cultural-were at last to find a framework to repair to or rebel against. Indeed, such a tentative framework might have been established more than a decade earlier, in 1876, with the establishment of the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō). Yet during that period between the closing of that school in 1883 and the opening of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, the significance of the shifting movements of artists, patrons, and the nascent public, all of which were to help set the direction for a number of crucial activities during the next decades, remains hard to grasp with any certainty.
