Table Of ContentBACHELOR
JAPANISTS
JAPANESE
AESTHETICS
& WESTERN
MASCULINITIES
CHRISTOPHER
REED
B A C H E L O R J A P A N I S T S
Modernist Latitudes
Modernist Latitudes
Jessica Berman and Paul Saint-Amour, Editors
Modernist Latitudes aims to capture the energy and ferment of modernist studies by con-
tinuing to open up the range of forms, locations, temporalities, and theoretical approaches
encompassed by the field. The series celebrates the growing latitude (“scope for freedom
of action or thought”) that this broadening affords scholars of modernism, whether they
are investigating little-known works or revisiting canonical ones. Modernist Latitudes will
pay particular attention to the texts and contexts of those latitudes (Africa, Latin America,
Australia, Asia, Southern Europe, and even the rural United States) that have long been mis-
recognized as ancillary to the canonical modernisms of the global North.
Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and
Proust, 2011
Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism, 2011
Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, 2014
Nico Israel, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, 2015
Carrie Noland, Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric
Regime, 2015
Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time, 2015
Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, 2015
Thomas S. Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life, 2016
Carrie J. Preston, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching, 2016
Gayle Rogers, Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature,
2016
Donal Harris, On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines, 2016
Celia Marshik, At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture,
2016
C H R I S T O P H E R R E E D
B A C H E L O R J A P A N I S T S
JAPANESE AESTHETICS AND WESTERN MASCULINITIES
columbia university press New York
columbia university press
publishers since 1893
new york chichester, west sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reed, Christopher, 1961– author.
Title: Bachelor Japanists : Japanese aesthetics and Western masculinities /
Christopher Reed.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] | Series: Modernist
latitudes | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026230 | ISBN 9780231175746 (cloth : acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231175753 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231542760 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics, Japanese. | East and West. | Masculinity in art.
| Masculinity in literature. | Queer theory.
Classification: LCC BH221.J3 R44 2016 | DDC 111/.8509—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026230
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Design: Lisa Hamm
Cover Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY
CONTENTS
A Note on Names and Terms ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Bachelor Japanists 1
Queer and Away: Three Case Studies 5
Japanism and/as Modernism 8
Japan as Origin and Opposite 10
Alternative Identities 17
Japan and Orientalism 19
Visuality and Japanism 26
Sight and Subversion 31
1. Originating Japanism: Fin-de-Siècle Paris 37
Modernism and Japonisme 37
The First Japoniste(s) 38
The First Fictions of Japonisme 47
vi contents
Alternative Origins, Other Fictions 50
Japonaises and Japonistes: Women in the Spaces of Japonisme 56
Bachelor Japoniste Quarters, Part 1: The House-Museum
of Henri Cernuschi 69
Bachelor Japoniste Quarters, Part 2: The Maison des Goncourt 76
The Afterlife of the Maison des Goncourt 93
Bachelor Japoniste Quarters, Part 3: Hugues Krafft’s Midori-no-sato 99
A Coda About Japonisme’s Beginnings 110
2. Bachelor Brahmins: Turn-of-the-Century Boston 117
Japanism in the Athens of America 117
Imagined Aristocracies and the Politics of Taste 127
Implications for Institutions: Art History and Museums 135
Fictions Enabling and Exclusive 141
Fictions of Japanism and Gender 146
Japanism and/as Religion 150
The Private Space of Brahmin Japanism: W. S. Bigelow’s Tuckanuck 159
The Public Space of Brahmin Japanism, Part 1:
The First Museum of Fine Arts 165
The Public Space of Brahmin Japanism, Part 2:
The Second Museum of Fine Arts 171
Bachelor Japan 182
A Japanism of Her Own: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s House Museum 185
Last Words: Japanism Re-viewed 198
3. Sublimation and Eccentricity in the Art of Mark Tobey:
Seattle at Midcentury 201
Spectacles of Libertad 201
Spirituality and/as Sublimation 204
Engaging the East: Seattle and Devon 215
Approaching the East with Bernard Leach 221
Counter Encounters: Tobey and Leach in China and Japan 225
Invoking the East: “White Writing” 237
Reorienting Seattle with Morris Graves and John Cage 246
A Marketplace of Ideas: Globalism and Regionalism
in the “Northwest School” 258
The Avant-Garde and Its Exclusions 267
contents vii
Japanese-American: Aesthetics of Affiliation in the Postwar Era 277
Disorienting Eccentricity: Japanism and/as the New Normal 283
Conclusion: On the End of Japanism 291
Notes 295
Bibliography 383
Index 411
A NOTE ON NAMES AND TERMS
To avoid intrusive anachronism, my approach to
rendering Japanese terms and names is consistently inconsistent. For the
order of family and given names, I have followed my sources, adopting
whatever practice seems standard in reference to the person in question.
In cases that might seem ambiguous, I follow common library practice in
underlining the first letter of the family name at first instance; thus, Osamu
Noguchi and Okakura Kakuzo. Similarly, rather than consistently imposing a
current specialist orthography for commonly used terms in my older Western
sources, such as Noh, I maintain the older romanization.
