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Professor Toshio Watanabe

TrAIN Core Member - Director

I grew up in a transnational environment. My father is Japanese and my mother German from Transylvania in Romania. I was born in Bern, Switzerland, but grew up in Japan. I studied at the Universities of Sophia (in Tokyo), Tokyo, London (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Basel, where I completed my PhD. I first started to teach at the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, where I ran the MA in History of Art and Design. Then I came to Chelsea in 1986, initially as the Head of Art History, later becoming Head of Research and now the Director of the TrAIN Research Centre.

I am an art historian, studying mostly the period 1850-1950, and am interested in exploring how art of different places and culture intermingle and affect each other. I have worked in the field of Anglo-Japanese relationships in art, and publications in this field include High Victorian Japonisme (1991. Winner of the Prize of the Society for the Study of Japonisme), Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue 1850-1930 (1991, Japanese edition 1992, co-edited), and Ruskin in Japan 1890-1940: Nature for art, art for life, (1997, Winner of 1998 Japan Festival Prize and of 1999 Gesner Gold Award).

Currently I am the Principal Investigator of the three year TrAIN research project ‘Forgotten Japonisme: The Taste for Japanese Art in Britain and the USA, 1920s-1950s’, funded by the AHRC. I am interested in dealing with any relevant medium, whether architecture, design or painting, but more recently I have been concentrating on investigating the modern Japanese garden in its transnational context. I am also fascinated by the history of Japanese art history and would like to examine more how Japan’s struggle with modernity was affected by not only Western but also other Asian cultures.

Links

  • Research Staff Profile : Chelsea College of Art & Design

Related Projects

  • Nation, Identity and Modernity

    Nation, Identity and Modernity, Visual Culture of India, Japan and Mexico, 1860s-1940 was funded by the AHRC (then AHRB) between 2001 and 2004. A collaboration between The University of Sussex and the University of the Arts London, this major research project was led by Professors Partha Mitter, Oriana Baddeley and Toshio Watanabe.
    Find out more about Nation, Identity and Modernity

  • Transnational Correspondence

    Transnational Correspondence is a collaboration between TrAIN and PPGAV, the centre for fine art research of the School of Fine Arts, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. It stems from ongoing research carried out by TrAIN Research Fellow Dr Michael Asbury into the comparative reception of Brazilian art at national and international levels.
    Find out more about Transnational Correspondence

  • Projects_images_fj_thumb

    Forgotten Japonisme

    Led by TrAIN Director Professor Toshio Watanabe, Forgotten Japonisme is a major three year research project funded by the AHRC. Between October 2007 and October 2010, this project will explore a previously neglected period in the study of Western attitudes towards Japanese art: from the 1920s to the 1950s.
    Find out more about Forgotten Japonisme

Related Events

Related People

  • Nicola Stylianou

    Current PhD - Producing and collecting for Empire: African textiles within the V&A; Museum

    Despite billing itself as “the world’s greatest museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity” during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century it was the V&A’s general policy not to collect African artefacts. This was largely due to a curatorial division between objects associated with “art” and “ethnography.
    Find out more about Nicola Stylianou

  • Shu-fang Huang

    Current PhD - The Traces of a Traveller, Textile-Based Narrative

    Textiles possess plasticity, changeability and intimacy. Used by artists to represent symbolic or metaphorical meaning, this material has been become a privileged medium for expressing creative ideas.
    Find out more about Shu-fang Huang

  • Anna Basham

    Completed PhD - From Victorian to Modernist: the changing perceptions of Japanese architecture encapsulated in Wells Coates’ Japonisme

    This thesis chronicles the change in perception of Japanese architecture from the Victorian era, where it was little recognised, to its becoming an inspiration for inter-war modernist architecture and lifestyle; it aims to record how Japanese art, particularly the way in which it was displayed, underwent a similar renaissance, and the part played by architect-engineer, Wells Coates, in this reversal of opinion.

    Japanese ‘influence’ on British design from the mid-1850s until the development of Art Nouveau is generally accepted, but during the inter-war period inspiration from Japan is less readily acknowledged.
    Find out more about Anna Basham

  • Piotr Splawski

    Current PhD - AHRC Studentship for the project Forgotten Japonisme

    Piotr Splawski has recently commenced his PhD research after being awarded the AHRC Studentship attached to the TrAIN project Forgotten Japonisme. In common with research being carried out by others involved in this project, he aims to challenge a widely accepted, yet tacit, conviction that negative attitudes towards Japan in the West between 1920 and 1960 inhibited the development of the taste for Japan.
    Find out more about Piotr Splawski

  • Helena Capkova

    Current PhD - Interpreting Japan : Central European Architecture and Design 1920 – 1940

    Central Europe has historically been an area with rich cultural networks and significant centres such as Prague, Berlin or Vienna. These centres were cultural melting pots with multilingual and multicultural environments accommodating a mixture of nationalities.
    Find out more about Helena Capkova

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