Beyond the Modern Beauty
Subtitle: Takehisa Yumeji and the New Media Environment in Early Twentieth Century Japan
Contributors: Lippit, Yukio; McCormick, Melissa; Lippit, Yukio; McCormick, Melissa; Wang, Eugene
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Description: This thesis focuses on the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) and his diverse range of graphic production, from illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women, referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" (Yumeji-shiki bijin) in newspaper illustrations, coterie magazines, postcards, frontispieces, posters, and advertisements. Such works circulated widely and within the context of a growing female readership and the emergence of a new media environment that transformed the print medium from its "floating world" profile of the previous century into a technically diverse medium of modern visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. Yumeji's graphic works participated in the generation of new kinds of modern identity. An extensive consideration of Yumeji's life and works reveals his role in the cultivation of a new demography of viewers and readers.
Notes: Keywords: Media, Modern Japan, Prints, Takehisa, visual culture, Yumeji.

Thesis Ph.D. Harvard University 2014