A pioneering look at an immensely creative period in Japanese art that developed amid the Cold War.
 
Alicia Volk brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk’s groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere—at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices—and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds.
 
Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond United States-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art.
 

Alicia Volk is professor of Japanese art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement and In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art, a recipient of the Phillips Book Prize. She has been a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, an Ishibashi Foundation-Japan Foundation Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the University of London, and a Fulbright Research Scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo.
 

Preface
Notes to the Reader

Introduction     Terra Incognita: Art in the Ruins
1     Democratizing Japanese Art: Autonomy, Authority, and the Art World
2     Monument to Defeat in War: Out of the Ruins, a Bright Dawn
3     Cold War Alignments: Modernism and Populism in Creative Prints and People’s Prints
4     Listen to the Voices of the Sea: Memory and Monumentality in War and Peace, and War
5     Art and Women’s Liberation: History Has Given Us Our First Chance
Epilogue     The Limits of Peace and Freedom, and the Ends of Art under the Shadow of Empire

Acknowledgments
Glossary of Major Artists and Art Organizations
Notes
Bibliography
Index