Up to the 1950’s, there had not been much interest in modern Japanese art amongst the general public. At that time, the periods after the Meiji era were not yet considered as a part of history. This situation saw some change in the 1960’s. With the year 1968 marking the 100th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, the momentum for looking back to the Meiji era heightened throughout Japan.
However, for another several decades, the study of modern Japanese art was still being carried out “on the spot” by museums and research institutions, with studies at universities only starting in earnest as late as in the 1990’s. This change not only means that, with the arrival of the Heisei era, Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras could finally be seen as distant “past” and therefore as a part of “history”, but is also closely related to the fact that around that time efforts to overcome the mutual distrust that had existed between museums and universities began to be made.
The task of museums is to carry out a huge amount of painstaking foundation work, including storage and management of their collections and the compilation of primary sources concerning the artists, organize and analyse them and finally to hold exhibitions. In contrast, academics at universities are concerned only with historically recognized artists, and would even write research papers without ever setting their eyes on the actual piece. Nevertheless, university academics are still generally regarded to have higher authority as researchers than museum curators.
In addition, for a long time museum curators weren’t even eligible for Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research. In other words, for many years the government did not acknowledge museum curators as researchers. Not a few curators found this situation unfair and such resentment led to their distrust of university academics. This kind of mutual distrust often prevented museums and universities from sharing their research results.
This environment began to change in the 1990’s. Around this time museum curators started to move to universities as academics and began presenting to the public through their universities both their awareness for existing problems and research results accumulated at museums. Thanks to this move, there were now researchers who could see things from the viewpoints of both museums and universities. This development made the research environment considerably more flexible, and as a result, contributed to today’s popularity of research in modern Japanese art history.