著者

清水 友美

出版者

成城大学大学院文学研究科美学・美術史研究室

雑誌

成城美学美術史 (ISSN:13405861)

巻号頁・発行日

no.22, pp.1-41, 2016-03

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From the Meiji to the Taisho period, a nudity controversy surfaced several times. Hakuba-kai, which was led by Seiki Kuroda, considered the nude the basis of Western art, but the Japanese did not have sufficient knowledge of western art to understand. This lack of knowledge caused the dispute. Subsequently, authorities regulated nudity in exhibitions and publications for a long period of time. Regulation of nudity has already beenstudied, but we need to investigate the kind of nudity regulated and the regulations that influenced painters and their activities. This paper investigates the Hakuba-kai Exhibition, Ministry of Education Art Exhibition (Bunten Exhibition), and Nika Art Exhibition from the viewpoint of regulation, focusing on the transition of the depiction of the nude woman from the Meiji to the Taisho period. Before the Meiji period, women and men wore clothing that allowed them to accomplish their work. Their ideas about covering the body were not hindered by western morality-based conventions. However, by imitating western culture to enforce "Ishiki kaii jyourei, the ordinance designed to emulate foreigners'propriety," the thought planted in the Japanese mind was that nudity was obscene. Thereafter, authorities regulated publications with nude images. Kuroda's Le Lever, which was exhibited at the 4th Domestic Industrial Exposition, served as a challenge to authority and generated the nudity controversy in newspapers. Afterward, police required that Kuroda's "Nude," which was exhibited at the 6th Hakuba-kai Exhibition in 1901, be covered with a cloth below the waist. That is, this is the "koshimaki (waistcloth) incident." The incident was the outcome of the Security Police law implemented in 1900 and led the painters of Hakuba-kai to draw nude women with waist coverings. Police and the Ministry of Education continued to regulate nudes in art after the Bunten Exhibition. The Ministry of Education told painters that they must eliminate nude images from their works, and this caused a situation in which many nude drawings were disqualified from winning awards. The Minister of Education ultimately declared that police must not invade the winning work of the Bunten Exhibition in 1917. Partially clothed woman continued to be exhibited in the art at the Bunten Exhibition, and for a short time painters drew an idealized nude. They gradually began to draw frontal nudes and increasingly created work that made the nudes in their art unrealistic. This phenomenon was common at the Nika Exhibition. Following Cubism and Fauvism, the Nika Exhibition included drawings of nude women. The characteristics of the nude images of art in the Nika Exhibition were women reclining on a bed, posing with their arms or legs held up to exaggerate their physical features, and showing nude women indoors. The authorities initially regulated art with nude woman lying in bed drawn by Sotaro Yasui. After the 5th Nika Exhibition, they stopped controlling nudity. Painters no longer presented the female form realistically. They exaggerated. The nude images drawn from the Meiji to the Taisho periods were influenced by both the regulations and because of the regulations, the numbers of works exhibited were almost influenced. Then regulation standards gradually changed from the viewpoint of bodily exposure to the viewpoint of depicting the body in realistic situations such as a nude woman reclining in bed. Considering this history, painters had to be conscious of regulations restricting the depiction of nude women, which was historically part of the depiction of women. The important issue is that these artists tried to express their ideas even though they were conscious of the regulations.