To adapt John Donne’s famous phrase, no art form is an island, and Ellen Conant aims to confirm this by connecting the relatively isolated art-historical landmasses of the Edo period (1615–1868) and the Meiji period (1868–1912) via a volume of essays focused primarily on the time period 1840–90. Her purpose is to elucidate Meiji arts as part of a continuum of artistic experimentation and innovation during the nineteenth century.

In her introduction, Conant asks readers to seek the essays’ “fundamental commonality” (2). These shared themes include an examination of novel art forms in the mid-nineteenth century, a consideration of enduring Edo-period cultural traits, and an investigation of classical and contemporaneous Chinese cultures reflected in Meiji arts. Yet, the suggestion of the complexities of Meiji artistic developments is the greatest unifying element. Challenging Past and Present moves away from the typical binary structure of Meiji studies that contrasts East and West, tradition and technology, and art and craft. While some of the ground covered will be familiar to Meiji scholars, there are also many details that should stimulate a multifaceted understanding of Meiji artistic cultures for both individuals new to the field of Meiji art history and specialists alike.

Complementing this deconstructive inclination, Conant’s introduction reviews the ways in which Meiji-period arts have been studied and codified since that period. After providing synopses of the essays, Conant summarizes a number of different opinions from recent scholars on the ideologies (such as Orientalism) and political factors (such as the Japanese state’s involvement in art-historical construction) that have shaped Meiji art history. She also discusses how the Meiji arts were historicized in the mid-twentieth century, suggesting the role that the Japan-United States post-World War II political relationship and preexisting art-historical practices in Japan had to play in that formation. Finally, she describes a variety of institutions that first exhibited Meiji arts, including gofukuya (kimono shops, some of which went on to become department stores), which were vital in supporting the careers of many Meiji artists.

The essays expand received views of late Edo and Meiji art through a variety of topics and approaches, including the development of new media, thematic focuses, and audiences in mid- to late nineteenth-century Japan. For example, Allen Hockley and Doris Croissant examine early photographic work. Hockley considers the market-driven nature of tourist photography (samurai imagery in particular) that, in his view, “constructed and sustained” (117) a Western audience’s nostalgia for “traditional” Japan. Conversely, in her study of “Portrayal and Photography in Japanese Painting Theory,” Croissant suggests that the advent of photography in Japan—due to its association with realism, which was considered a Western artistic tendency—had a poisonous effect on the acceptance of portraiture as a valid art form during the mid-Meiji years as disdain developed for Western art within the government-sponsored art establishment.

Toshio Watanabe and Dallas Finn examine the practice of architecture in Meiji Japan. Watanabe’s essay connects theories of nation-building and architectural form in the writings of three prominent architects associated with Meiji Japan: Thomas Roger Smith (1830–1903), Josiah Conder (1852–1920), and Itō Chūta (1867–1954). These three are also members of an intellectual lineage, Smith having been Conder’s teacher and Conder, Itō’s teacher. All three discussed the value of Indian architectural elements to imperial architecture. Watanabe finds the origins for this in Smith’s theories of Conder’s rationale for using “pseudo-Saracenic” architectural flourishes. He also describes how Itō’s thinking was shaped by his studies with Conder, who introduced Indo-Islamic art in his classes, even though Conder also trumpeted the value of studying Western architecture as an art form. Watanabe’s delineation of this “genealogy of theory” (240) clarifies stylistic and philosophical connections in Meiji architectural developments while also taking account of the different motivations that spurred the practitioners.

The Rokumeikan, perhaps the architectural structure most commonly associated with the Meiji period, forms the focus of Finn’s essay. Rather than theorizing about the building’s illustrious days as a place for Japanese governmental leaders to entertain foreign guests, Finn provides a description of the building’s design by Conder and examines its various functions throughout its history, including its role as a ballroom, lecture and reception hall, and conference center (it was demolished in 1941). This investigation suggests how the clouds of mythology that have circulated around the building originally gathered—through fanciful descriptions in the press, for example, when the building was first built. It also clarifies some of the practical reasons for the demise of the structure. Finn offers an architectural biography here, reading the Rokumeikan as a building that served many functions and was quoted in buildings that followed, such as the Imperial Hotel and the Shibusawa Residence (237).

Introducing characteristics of the nascent genre of history painting, Takashina Shūji brings his knowledge of Western precedents (and of then-Tokyo University scholar Toyama Shōichi’s understanding of them) to bear on a discussion of Japanese adaptations of the genre during the mid-Meiji period. J. Thomas Rimer, touching on some of the same points as Takashina, discusses debates published in the 1890s between Toyama Shōichi and well-known Meiji intellectual and novelist Mori Ōgai about history painting and other genres, debates that ultimately helped educate the public about Western painting styles, techniques, and philosophical frameworks such as Social Darwinism.

While Meiji novelties do form a focus of the essays, Edo-period artistic and intellectual precedents are also considered. Six of the thirteen essays ground their studies in Edo-period explorations. For some, Edo-period references form the warp of the fabric of their historical studies. The historical introduction by Marius Jansen (1922–2000), to whom the volume is dedicated, interweaves details of Edo and Meiji histories into consideration of nineteenth-century developments. References to myriad Edo philosophical and artistic paths remind the reader, as Jansen intended (32), that Meiji history, of art or otherwise, is not a monolithic entity. In her essay, Croissant devotes three of the seven sections to explication of the Edo roots of Meiji theories of realism.

In some cases, the primary subject matter of the essays falls into the transitional period straddling the decisive political event of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Hockley and Sawatari Kiyoko focus their essays on the cusp between the Edo and Meiji periods in Yokohama, as the port was established as a major center for international artistic as well as economic exchange. Christine Guth grounds her study of “Meiji Response to Bunjinga (literati painting)” in the pre-Meiji biographical details of her Japanese subjects, namely Kido Takayoshi (1833–1877) and Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924), and in reference to the artistic and political activities of Edo-period bunjinga practitioners, such as Rai San’yō (1780–1832) and Watanabe Kazan (1793–1841).

Certain essays in the volume include details of Edo history that are informative but not critical to an understanding of the essay’s primary topic. For example, in Clare Pollard’s study of potter Miyagawa Kōzan’s (1842–1916) establishment of a ceramics business in Yokohama, Edo-period details such as early Japanese involvement in international expositions provide a broad framework for interpreting the milieu in which Kōzan operated, but they are not crucial to an analysis of Kōzan’s “bold change of direction” (133) that led him to move his operations to Yokohama in 1870. What makes this article highly instructive is a detailed investigation of the early Meiji Yokohama ceramics market, in which patronage was shifting and in which understanding of Western taste—especially for Satsuma nishikide, stoneware with overglaze enamels originally made in the Satsuma domain on Kyūshū in the eighteenth century—was critical to financial success.

On the subject of expositions, Conant herself contributes a chapter on “Japan ‘Abroad’ at the Chicago Exposition, 1893.” Indicating what she sees as a gap in coverage, she examines Japan’s participation in the fair from political and cultural perspectives. She also considers the reception of the Japanese exhibits by U.S. audiences. After summarizing the planning of the exposition by U.S. designers and architects, Conant covers a range of topics related to the Japanese presence at the exposition, including the government’s political and economic strategies in constructing their contributions and the variety of exhibits on display in a number of locales throughout the site. For example, she describes the “sample texts and other instructional aids” (261) in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, along with the better-known displays in the “Hō-ō-den” and in the Palace of Fine Arts. Conant reinforces these descriptions with contemporaneous commentary from the U.S. press. Her analysis of that historical criticism from a contemporary standpoint is most useful, as it traces both accuracies and inaccuracies.

This volume also strongly reasserts the impact of Chinese artistic theory and practices on Meiji art worlds, sources of influence that have been largely neglected since Ernest Fenollosa’s notorious dismissal in the 1880s of bunjinga as an art form (which Guth discusses in her essay). Jansen’s chapter contains the most numerous China references. For example, it traces the etymological roots of fukko (“revival”) and ishin (“renewal”) in the Chinese language, notes the continuing impact of Confucian thought on Edo- and Meiji-period scholars, names the painters who absconded from the chaos of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) collapse through the port of Nagasaki, and emphasizes the tendency continuing into the Meiji period of Japanese to compare their cultural traits to Chinese precedents. Jansen’s knack for harnessing just the right historical details to lend broad insight shines here as it does in his many writings devoted to illuminating modern Japanese history.

Croissant takes up some of the same examples of Chinese resonance in Japanese artistic culture—the impact of language as well as specific immigrant painters on Japanese painting practices—albeit from the angle of portrait-painting theory. She offers the Chinese etymological origins of a number of important terms such as shashin (xiezhen) and sha’i (xie yi) to help communicate the atmosphere in certain Edo and Meiji painting circles in which participants were aware of these nuances. She also compares Chinese and Japanese theories about portraiture, noting their distinct characteristics. She makes clear that Japanese portrait painters were cognizant of differences between portrait painting theories in China and Japan, and thus successfully conveys the intricacies involved in developing the genre in nineteenth-century Japan.

Three other essays bring China into their considerations. Guth recounts the codification of literati painting in seventeenth-century China literally as a footnote to Edo and Meiji “appropriation” of bunjinga styles. She also refers to contemporaneous Meiji views of nineteenth-century China as a “sick old man” (compared to the “lively youth” of Japan) (188), which underscores the complexity of Japanese perspectives on China during the Meiji period. In his essay on Kanō Hōgai’s paintings of the bodhisattva Kannon (Avalokiteshvara), Martin Collcutt includes comparative analysis of three specific Chinese paintings in his exploration of Hōgai’s sources and ultimately concludes that Minq/Qing popular Buddhist imagery was an important influence on the formation of Hōgai’s paintings of Kannon as Compassionate Mother. Thus, Collcutt continues the job begun by other scholars, such as Hosono Masanobu and Takeuchi Naotsugu, of dispelling the myth that this theme was unique to Hōgai. As a whole the volume repositions China as a continuing philosophical and artistic presence in Japan during the Meiji period, not one overthrown by the presence of Western models.

The objective of this compendium is stated early in the introductory essay: “to reveal that the period 1840–1890, as seen progressively rather than retrospectively, was profoundly innovative” (2). As with any compendium, the efforts are uneven, but collectively these essays do bind the two periods on either side of the political, “Restorational” divide and connect ideas and styles across cultural divisions. They suggest the flow of inspiration and ideology across time through individual artists and others who carried the ideas forth from one period to the next as well as through the conventions and cultural constructs that remained in place despite a shift in governmental structures.

Without a doubt, Challenging Past and Present will also help spur an even broader focus on Meiji visual production including advertising and other art forms, such as textiles and lacquer, which in turn will lead a new generation of scholars down multiple paths to increasingly complex and sophisticated understandings of Meiji artistic cultures.