OBERLIN, OH.- In response to the rapid rise of cities and industry in early 20th-century Japan, artists often portrayed nostalgic, idealized images of the natural world and traditional rural life. Works in the exhibition Nature and Nostalgia in Early 20th-Century Japanese Art, on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum through June 16, embody the wish to escape to an earlier, simpler time more in harmony with nature and tradition. The quiet serenity of these works from the 1920s and 30s—large folding screens, color woodblock prints, and a painted kimono—often belies the turbulence of the era. A centerpiece of the exhibition is a six-panel painted screen, Egrets with Willow, recently acquired by the museum.

Works in this new exhibition link to the past through the artists’ choice of subject matter from well-established genres—landscapes, birds and flowers, beautiful women, and famous sites. To these, artists added a new subject: scenes of traditional rural life. Despite the conservative themes of these paintings and prints, their style reflects the progressive nature of the period. The works blend traditional Japanese mediums and techniques with elements of Euro-American art, such as drawing from life, shading, and linear perspective, which had been popular in Japanese prints since the early 18th century. In painting, this synthesis is known as Nihonga, and in prints, as shin-hanga. Balancing tradition and modernity, realism and idealism, the works on view reflect the contradictions and tensions of a rapidly changing nation.

“The show is both visually beautiful—the works themselves are aesthetically spectacular—and speaks to a tightly focused subject and time period that represents an interesting phase in Japanese art, when contemporary techniques informed traditional styles,” says Kevin R. E. Greenwood, the museum’s Joan L. Danforth Curator of Asian Art. On loan from the collection of Douglas and Elaine Barr is a pair of folding screens, The Salt Makers, that depicts a large group of fishermen gathered on a beach, making salt on broad mats by dehydrating seawater. The landscape surrounding the villagers is painted in the decorative blue-and-gold style, a tradition dating to the late 16th century.