Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition
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| Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition 読売アンデパンダン展 | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Unjuried art exhibition |
| Frequency | Annual |
| Locations | Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan |
| Inaugurated | 1949 |
| Most recent | 1963 |
| Organized by | Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper |
The Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition (読売アンデパンダン展, Yomiuri Andepandan Ten), affectionately nicknamed "Yomiuri Anpan,"[1][2] was a famously permissive, unjuried, free-to-exhibit art exhibition held annually in Tokyo, Japan from 1949 to 1963. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, the exhibition was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and played an important role in the emergence of postwar avant-garde and contemporary art in Japan.
Historian Thomas Havens has called the Yomiuri Indépendant "the chief vehicle of postwar democracy for young visual artists in Japan who lacked connections with the clubby fine arts establishment" and "a bazaar of new ideas and materials."[3] Among artists who exhibited artworks at the Yomiuri Indépendant included Genpei Akasegawa,[4] Shūsaku Arakawa, Nobuaki Kojima,[5] Tetsumi Kudо̄,[6] the Kyūshū-ha group, Natsuyuki Nakanishi,[7] Tarō Okamoto, Ushio Shinohara, Mitsuko Tabe, Jirō Takamatsu, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi,[1] and Jirō Yoshihara.[1]
The Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition was established by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in 1949 in an effort to "democratize the art world" and foster free thinking and free expression.[8][9] The mastermind behind the exhibition was journalist Hideo Kaidō, a member of the Yomiuri's Culture Section.[1][8] Kaidō detested the prewar hierarchy in Japanese fine art, in which small cliques of artists and art critics known informally as the Gadan (画壇) effectively controlled access to juried exhibitions such as the government-sponsored Nitten Exhibition and selectively advanced the careers of chosen protégés while blocking the paths of others.[1][10] For its part, the management of the Yomiuri newspaper hoped that by sponsoring the exhibition the paper would harvest positive public relations and distance itself from the paper's recent collaboration with Japan's authoritarian wartime regime.[11]
Originally, the exhibition was called the Nihon Indépendant Exhibition (Nihon Andepandan Ten), but this title was vigorously protested by the Japan Communist Party-affiliated Japan Fine Arts Association (Nihon Bijitsukai), which used the same name for its own exhibition. Finally in 1957, the Yomiuri relented and changed the name to "Yomiuri Indépendant," at which time the problem of the two rival "Nihon Indépendant" exhibitions was finally resolved. Around this same time, artists began to affectionately nickname the show the "Yomiuri Anpan." "Anpan" was an abbreviation of "Andepandan," but also a deliberate pun on sweet red bean buns, called "anpan" in Japanese.[12]
Revolutionary space
In the early years, the works shown at the exhibition tended to be rather conventional paintings submitted by older, well-established artists and artistic amateurs.[1] However, in the second half of the 1950s, the exhibition gradually transformed into an artistic revolutionary space.[13]
In the late 1950s, it was still extremely difficult for unestablished younger artists to have their artworks shown in public venues. Access to galleries and exhibitions was restricted by selection committees dominated by established art societies that often screened entries in accordance with personal connections and ideologically-driven standards.[4] Among the two independent, unjuried exhibitions at that time, the Nihon Indépendant was dominated by socialist realism, reflecting its close association with the Communist Party and prevailing art trends at the time, leaving Yomiuri Indépendant as one of the only choices for aspiring young artists outside of the socialist realist mainstream to show their work.[4]
For example Genpei Akasegawa, a younger, unestablished artist at that time, initially submitted works to Nihon Indépendant, but felt increasingly unwelcome there amidst pressure to conform to socialist realist artistic orthodoxy.[14] Although Akasegawa and other artists initially resisted submitting to the Yomiuri Indépendant because its corporate sponsorship by a major mainstream newspaper represented an affiliation with capitalism that was unpalatable to many artists, the narrow orthodoxy of the Nihon Indépendant made the Yomiuri Indépendant their only remaining choice.[14] Artist Ushio Shinohara later recalled, "We entered our works into the Yomiuri Indépendant because that was the only place we could show them. There were hardly any museums or galleries in those days, and no patrons."[3]
For many of these younger artists, the two weeks of the Yomiuri Indépendant constituted the premier event of the year, and they would spend much of the rest of the year preparing to showcase their creativity and hopefully one-up their peers in terms of daring and audacity.[15] Akasegawa later recalled how in the final years of the 1950s, a sort of competition emerged at the Yomiuri Indépendant to see whose “painting” could extrude most from the surface of the canvas. First the artists used sand, then glass and nails, and then larger and larger “found objects” until finally the objects escaped the picture frame entirely and “slipped free of the canvas to stand proudly on the floor.”[4] By 1958, the traditional artists had abandoned the exhibition, leaving behind radical new forms of painting, bizarre assemblages of found objects, and strange installations.[16] By 1959, the art critic Tamon Miki declared that the Yomiuri Indépendant gave him "the feeling of a performance space rather than of an exhibition site."[9]