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Bert Winther-Tamaki
Associate Professor, Art History
School of Humanities
Associate Professor, Visual Studies
PH.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Phone: (949) 824-2875
Fax: (949) 824-2509
Email: dewinthe@uci.edu
University of California
Department of Art History
2210 Humanities Gateway
Mail Code: 2785
Irvine, CA 92697
Research
Interests
History of Modern Japanese Art and Visual Culture. Asian American Art. History of interactions between Japanese and American art worlds.
URL
www.humanities.uci.edu/arthistory/faculty/bwinther.htm
Research
Abstract
My work focuses on the role of the visual arts in the construction of modern national identities, especially in early and mid-twentieth-century Japan. I am particularly intrigued by artists whose positions partly outside Japan complicated the artistic identities they developed in various media: Isamu Noguchi, Minoru Yamasaki, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Fujita Tsuguji. My book, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years, examines the contribution of discourses about abstract ceramic sculpture, avant-garde calligraphy, abstract paintings, and place designs to modern Japanese cultural identity. In two articles on Isamu Noguchi, I consider the different cultural significations of a range of sculptural and design materials (clay, stone, metal, plastic) in his thinking and practice.
I am currently working on a study of the vast and diverse archive of images of human bodies painted in Japan during the middle decades of this century in oil-on-canvas. This medium was regarded as and referred to as “Western Painting” (yôga), though the artists and most of the subjects depicted were Japanese people. I analyze Japanese discourses of the painted body and argue that people’s passionate investment in these pictures was due to their belief that they were molding new Japanese subjectivities, that they were repainting the body politic.
Publications
Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth co-author with Louise Cort. Washington, D.C.: The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and
American Artists in the Early Postwar Years.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.
"The Asian Dimensions of Postwar Abstract Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics" in Alexandra Munroe, ed. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), pp.145-157.
"Global Consciousness in Yôga Self-Portraiture" in Jaynie Anderson, ed. Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence: the Proceedings of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art. (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2009), pp.847-851.
"Asian Possessions of the Cubist Body: 'Home from Home'" Cubism in Asia; Unbounded Dialogues, International Symposium Report ed. by Yasuko Furuichi. (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2006), pp.304-311.
"Oriental Coefficient: The Role of China in the Japanization of Yôga" Modern Chinese Literature & Culture 18:1 (Summer 2006), pp.85-119.
"Oil Painting in Postsurrender Japan: Reconstructing Subjectivity through Deformation of the Body" Monumenta Nipponica vol.58, no.3 (Autumn 2003), pp.347-396.
"Stone Pied-à-Terre and Space-Age Steel:
Isamu Noguchi and the Credo of Truth to Material" in
Isamu Noguchi, Sculptural Design (Weil am
Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum, 2001), pp.186-
218.
"Minoru Yamasaki: Contradictions of Scale in the
Career of the Nisei Architect of the World’s Largest
Building" Amerasia Journal. vol.26, no.3 (Winter
2001), pp.162-188.
"Yagi Kazuo: The Admission of the Nonfunctional
Object into the Japanese Pottery World" Journal of
Design History vol.12, no.2, (June 1999), pp.123-
141.
Yukinori Yanagi; Image, Nation & Transnation.
Co-Editor, primary author, with essays by graduate
students of the Visual Studies Ph.D program. CD Rom.
University of California, Irvine. 1998.
"Embodiment/Disembodiment in Japanese Painting
During the Fifteen Year War" Monumenta
Nipponica vol.52, no.2 (Summer 1997), pp.145-
180.
“Mark Tobey, White Writing for a Janus-Faced America,”
Word & Image vol.13, no.1 (January-March
1997), pp.77-91.
“The Rejection of Isamu Noguchi's Hiroshima
Cenotaph: A Japanese American Artist in Occupied
Japan,” Art Journal vol.53, no.4 (Winter 1994),
pp.23-27.
Professional
Societies
College Art Association
Association of Asian Studies
Japanese Art History Forum
Last updated: 09/11/2009
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