Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945

Deco Japan introduces Japanese art in the art deco style through nearly two hundred works of metal, ceramics, lacquer, glass, furniture, textiles, painting, prints, and graphic design. While exhibiting spectacular craftsmanship and sophisticated design, these works convey the complex social and cultural tensions in Japan during the Taisho and early Showa epochs (1912-1945). Including essays by an international team of a dozen scholars, this book investigates how Japanese deco signaled the nation’s unique history and cosmopolitanism.

The era’s diverse vitality is expressed in its most ubiquitous subjects―the moga, or modern girl, the emblem of contemporary urban chic, and nationalist icons including dragons, phoenixes, and heavenly lions. Signaling the expanding realms of artistic creation and consumption, the objects here range from fine art objects made to impress the public at national art exhibitions to goods mass produced for the modern home.