Exhibition ‘Undressing Paintings: Japanese Nudes 1880-1945’ Opened

On November 15, the exhibition titled ‘Undressing Paintings: Japanese Nudes 1880-1945’ opened at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (until January 15, 2012). It traced how Japanese artists depicted naked figures after embracing Western nude painting, featuring 98 artworks, primarily oil paintings. It consisted of three chapters: Chapter 1 ‘Creating the Nude’ covered the mid-to-late Meiji period when Japanese artists forged an ideal body image based on Western art; Chapter 2 ‘Deconstructing the Nude’, examined the Taishō period when body images were deformed or fragmented; and Chapter 3 ‘The Nude Anew’, focused on the 1920s to 1940s when reconstructed body images were depicted. The exhibition outlined the process by which the genre of ‘nude’ was established, despite friction with society such as the Nude Painting Controversy. It adopted an original approach that considered not only the modelling of the body image, but also perspectives such as the location of the nude and distinctions between standing and reclining figures. (Japanese)