The Printed Encounter: Woodblock Modernism in Germany and Japan, 1885–1915

How did artists, writers, and intellectuals in Japan and Germany come to recognize one another as participants in a shared aesthetic project during the formative decades of modernism? This dissertation examines the various robust networks of exchange connecting Japanese and German modernists between 1885 and 1915, taking shape in the form of collecting, exhibitions, encounters, and publications. Modernist expression consequently emerged as aesthetic products of these ongoing and simultaneous processes of mediation, interpretation, and rearticulation. Both nations gradually developed frameworks through which their artistic traditions and contemporary experimentation were understood as mutually meaningful resources for confronting similar questions about autonomy and inheritance in the disorienting landscape of modernity. 

The dissertation focuses on the printed page as the primary site through which these encounters were made possible. In particular, coterie magazines (dōjinshi)—specialized, self-published periodicals created by and for small communities, often eschewing mass-market appeal in favor of avant-garde innovation—circulated curated fragments of artistic knowledge across borders, allowing its readers to engage with traditions, debates, and developments that would have otherwise remained both linguistically and geographically out of reach. These publications functioned as spaces where the contours of modernism were continually (re)negotiated as materials arriving from abroad acquired new significance as they moved through different social and cultural contexts. By tracing the circulation of these materials, this dissertation reconstructs the very methods through which Japanese and German modernists fashioned increasingly interconnected conceptions of modernist practice.

At the center of this study is the woodblock print, a medium that occupied ambivalent positions in both Japan and Germany. Burdened by weight of its cultural significance yet uniquely suited to mechanisms of reproduction and circulation, the woodblock became a kind of mirror through which artists from both nations explored a contested relationship between historical inheritance and modern expression. German Expressionists returned to the woodcut in search of an alternative to academic realism and increasingly industrialized modes of image production, while Japan’s sōsaku hanga movement reworked the collaborative legacy of ukiyo-e to advance ideals of individual authorship. Although these developments emerged from distinct circumstances, the woodblock tradition became a shared point of reference through which broader questions about authenticity, reproduction, and artistic identity could be negotiated. 

This project contributes to ongoing efforts challenging center-periphery models whose legacies continue to structure the historiography of modern art. Existing scholarship has typically approached German and Japanese modern print culture as separate developments linked primarily through narratives of unilateral influence. By contrast, this dissertation examines the reciprocal and often indirect forms of engagement that shift attention away from identifying sources and toward understanding the mechanisms through which artistic practices became meaningful across cultural boundaries. Methodologically, it combines close visual and textual analysis with broader histories of print culture, the economy of translation, and provenance of collecting practices. Importantly, it treats publications as surrogate exhibition spaces that assemble images, texts, and interpretive frameworks into new constellations of meaning, enabling geographically dispersed artists and intellectuals to encounter one another’s work and to situate their own artistic projects within an increasingly global horizon.

The dissertation begins by examining Berlin’s Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft (German-Japanese Society), one of the earliest bilateral cultural organizations to facilitate sustained social and artistic exchange between Japanese and German participants through exhibitions, publications, lectures, and collecting activities. By analyzing the society’s journal, Ost-Asien, and its associational programming, the chapter demonstrates how certain members actively reframed the Japanese art canon within German discourse as a living artistic tradition of contemporary relevance rather than a static, ethnographic relic, thereby establishing the conditions that made subsequent forms of exchange possible.

The second chapter traces the emergence of Japanese coterie magazines (dōjinshi) and the overlapping communities that formed around them. It situates the dōjinshi within the broader development of Japan’s modern art publishing infrastructure and examines how these magazines acted as laboratories for aesthetic experimentation. Interwoven throughout are the brief yet rich history of Tokyo’s Pan no Kai group, and the experiences of German artists Emil Orlik and Fritz Rumpf in Japan, both of whom reveal how direct encounters with Japanese aesthetic life—its traditions and practitioners—shaped their personal printmaking trajectories. By bridging these narratives, this chapter showcases the productive interplay between mediated and lived forms of cultural exchange.

A third, thematic chapter investigates how artists and critics in both countries conceptualized the woodblock print as a modern medium. Drawing on essays, manifestos, reviews, and theoretical writings, it examines debates surrounding originality, reproduction, historical (dis)continuity, and artistic expression. By juxtaposing German and Japanese discussions of these issues, the chapter reconstructs the conceptual terrain through which these artists came to recognize one another as interlocutors engaged in related aesthetic concerns despite their different historical circumstances.

The fourth chapter centers the 1914 Der Sturm exhibition of woodblock prints in Tokyo as a pivotal moment in the intensification of German-Japanese modernist exchange. Through a close study of the exhibition’s organizers, catalogue, critical reception, and participating artists, the chapter considers how German Expressionism was interpreted and mediated for Japanese audiences. It concludes by shifting from the macrohistory of an international exhibition to the microhistory of Tsukuhae, whose visual ecosystem aptly reflects how global modernist currents were negotiated within the deeply local and intimate space of a three-person artistic collective.

The fifth chapter examines the relationship between Japanese art and members of Der Blaue Reiter. Through an analysis of collecting practices, sketchbooks, translations, and the modernist magazine Kamen, it explores how Japanese visual and intellectual traditions informed German modernist thought while also tracing the transformation of German aesthetic concepts within Japanese print culture. Attention is given to translation as a creative act through which artistic ideas were not merely transmitted but fundamentally reconfigured on both a cultural and linguistic level. 

Finally, a brief conclusion reframes the dissertation through my experience working on the research, curatorial, and administrative dimensions of the exhibition Expressionisms: Japan, Germany, and China at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It considers the fragmentary afterlives of the cross-cultural exchanges that constitute this study, paying particular attention to the decisive role private collectors continue to play in the stewardship of this history’s material legacies. Interviews with two major local collectors of sōsaku hanga offer a contemporary lens to reflect upon the contingent processes of preservation and circulation by which Japanese coterie magazines end up in private hands.