In the Shadow of Empire

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.

• PrefaceNotes to the ReaderIntroduction     Terra Incognita: Art in the Ruins1     Democratizing Japanese Art: Autonomy, Authority, and the Art World2     Monument to Defeat in War: Out of the Ruins, a Bright Dawn3     Cold War Alignments: Modernism and Populism in Creative Prints and People’s Prints4     Listen to the Voices of the Sea: Memory and Monumentality in War and Peace, and War5     Art and Women’s Liberation: History Has Given Us Our First ChanceEpilogue     The Limits of Peace and Freedom, and the Ends of Art under the Shadow of EmpireAcknowledgmentsGlossary of Major Artists and Art OrganizationsNotesBibliographyIndex

"For those whose exposure to Japanese art is primarily to works of premodern Japan—temple bells, ukiyoe prints and such—the book should be a revelation. . . . Volk shows us that Japanese artists in the turbulent period from the 1930s to the 1950s produced works of art worthy of our consideration."