| EXHIBITIONS REVIEW

Modern Mindgames

Sixty years after WWII ended, New York’s Bard Graduate Center examines how textile design helped to promote wartime agendas in Japan, Britain and the US.

The mindgames of propagandists continue, even in our media savvy age, to prove extremely effective. But while much energy is expended on examining the role of propaganda in the print and broadcast media, the association of propaganda and textiles remains little explored. It is this aspect that provides the theme for ‘Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain and the United States’ at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture. The show is curated by Jacqueline M. Atkins, curator of textiles at Pennsylvania’s Allentown Art Museum, and editor of the impressive catalogue. The first comprehensive study of civilian textiles with wartime motifs as Home Front propaganda, it includes essays on topics which range from food to film to femininity. A key contribution by John Dower, Professor of Japanese history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, addresses ’Japan’s Beautiful, Modern War.’ Dower’s paradox proves the key to understanding the body of material from Japan – most of it previously unknown –that forms the main

focus of the show. In a further apparent paradox, many of the garments included here were not intended to be seen publicly: jacket linings and underkimono for men, or shrine-visiting kimonos for young boys or babies would reinforce messages to the individual and within the family circle. The modernist or downright militaristic images these garments carry reflect Japan’s passionate commitment to modernity in the wake of centuries of isolationism and ancient tradition. The ability to manufacture weapons and wage modern war was one of the proudest boasts of this essentially militaristic society. In place of the traditional images of samurai warriors, designs involving tanks, planes, warships and marching soldiers appear to have been enthusiastically received. The finest examples seen at the Bard are resist-dyed and painted in the yuzentechnique on silk but many others, evidently intended for wider diffusion, are printed on lower quality fabrics. Among these are the meisen haori(short jackets of lower grade silk) produced in the 20s and 30s with designs aimed at a new generation of forward-looking Japanese women. Alan Marcuson, a collector of this material and lender to the show, has been struck by the evident vitality of a tradition that many Japanese now find hard to acknowledge. In a sample of 150 printed textiles on early rayon, low quality wool or silk virtually no design was repeated. Textiles from Britain and the US provide an enlightening counterpoint. The Allied examples,

arguably more decorative than propagandistic, are all intended for women and designed to be seen. Items such as blouses, dresses and headscarves transpose the themes and exhortations of the day into a decorative context. In Britain Jacqmar headscarf designs brought a light touch to recurrent wartime preoccupations. An early 40s design features a border containing familiar propaganda phrases such as “Bedsteads into bullets”, “Rubber into aircraft” surrounding a hotchpotch of recyclable items from bicycles to hotwater bottles. Also by Jacqmar, London Wall (left)is a tiled design of popular slogans such as “Save for Victory”, “Lend to defend the right to be free”. Similarly in the US the central slogan on a stars-and-stripes scarf, “Remember Pearl Harbour”, is flanked by slogans such as “Right is might” and “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”. Until 5 February 2006

CRAZY FOR CHINA Chinese art is on a determined march to the West with three landmark exhibitions in three European cities: ‘China: the Three Emperors’ at Royal Academy in London until the 17th April 2006, ‘Glanz der Himmelssöhne’ in Cologne (see feature this issue) and ‘Du Ciel à la Terre’ (‘Between Heaven and Earth’) at the Musée des Arts Asiatiques in Nice, which shows treasures from the National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, China. It also coincides with the year of France in China and the ‘Week of Zhejiang – Reflections of China’ co-sponsored by the Conseil général des Alpes-Maritimes. The textiles on show in Nice range in date from 2500 BC to late Qing, and are displayed in a beautiful mise en scènedevised by the

Italian architect Andrea Bruno, inviting the visitor to go back in time, starting from the most recent, commercialpieces to archaeological silk fragments, almost certainly sacred offerings. The earliest piece dates to Neolithic times when silk was first being cultivated in China during the Liangzhu Culture. This silk brocade fragment (right) has recumbent lions, Buddhist deities, marching elephants and ‘merchant’ figures pulling camels within roundels formed by interlaced arches, each with the two figures mirrored, as if

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reflections in a stream. At the foot of the merchant figure the inscriptions of the symbol husuggest that he is a foreigner, travelling on the Silk Route. Until 16 January 2006