AHI 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Male Prostitution, Nanking Massacre, Attack On Pearl Harbor
20 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Okamoto"s unique avant-garde style was deeply influenced by the west. Western idea of progress, which included nuclear technology, and this became the driving force of his artistic re-discovery of the notion of japan. The painting wounded arm (1936/49) depicts the young artist"s lyricism in style and antipathy toward elements of society. A female figure"s face and eyes features that he intensified in his late works are hidden under a huge red ribbon. But with ai-mitsu, who was born nichiro ishimura in hiroshima in 1907, his grotesqueness is one of his attractive points. His most famous and powerful work, landscape with an eye (1938), looks at the viewer as the viewer looks at it. According to otani, the point of the exhibition is to look beyond this reputation, which inevitably simplifies things, and see ai-mitsu as a more complex phenomenon. A postscript to the exhibition briefly engages war patriotism, though the much contested legacy of war painting goes without remark.
