Yorozu Tetsugorō, to all intents and purposes, has been categorized as a yōga (Western-style) painter since his lifetime. In contradistinction to nihonga (Japanese-style) painters, he conceived major works in Western-inflected subjects and themes, executed them in oil on canvas, and expressed keen awareness of the latest artistic developments in Europe. If Yorozu's position in the bipolar arena of Japanese modern art appears to be a fait accompli, Alicia Volk's In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art critically reassesses the very frameworks, historical and historiographical, that have reduced the artistic dynamism in the early twentieth century to a simplistic East/West, native/foreign duality. By presenting a multifaceted art world fueled by inter-group and intra-group, inter-generational and intra-generational, national and international, debates and dissents, Volk masterfully unravels the knotty strands that coalesced to shape one individual artist's perception of self and his work within existing academic, institutional, and professional structures.

In Pursuit of Universalism is a thematic analysis of modern painting in Japan through the case study of Yorozu, whose oeuvre, incidentally, coincided nearly perfectly with the Taishō period (1912–1926), a short imperial reign that also witnessed a burst in artistic creativity and experimentation. On several major fronts, Yorozu's work represented a rupture with extant practices and attitudes: the deliberate departure from traditional modes of painting; the practice of art for the sake of art and the individual rather than the nation; and the desire to transcend the increasingly entrenched binary of yōga and nihonga. Even more expressive of the new times that Yorozu inhabited was his status as a home-grown oil painter – someone who did not travel abroad for artistic training nor study at the feet of a foreign instructor to attain credibility or achieve recognition as a professional oil painter. Despite spending his entire career in Japan, Yorozu was attuned to cadences of international modernism. This was possible due to the recently fluid circulation of print media (books and journals), artworks, and people between Japan and Euro-America during his time, and also in no small part due to Yorozu's personal quest for achieving a truly universal art.

In the introduction, Volk sets up the book's double query into the place of Yorozu in modern Japanese art and the place of modern Japanese art in art history, writ large. In discussing Yorozu's proposal of “X,” an art that spans the East–West divide to achieve a new and higher artistic form, Volk is at the same time presenting a challenge to modern art historical writing that gyrates around the Euro-American core, oblivious to centrifugal attitudes. Neither Yorozu nor Volk accepts the universality of the Western paradigm, and the book's five major chapters solidify their case for locating a “third space that allowed for the possibility of inhabiting both ‘Japan’ and the ‘modern’ at the same time” (p. 9).

The first chapter explores the framework of modern art in Japan in the Meiji period, the decades preceding Yorozu's debut in 1912. Using the term “reverse Japonisme,” Volk explains with admirable clarity and concision the peculiar condition of Japanese modernity. Defined against two imagined opposites – the Western Other and the premodern Self – modern Japan conceived a national art and history shaped by Euro-American definitions of Japanese uniqueness. The parallel development of not one, but two, major modes of painting (nihonga and yōga) during this period mirrored the modernized non-Western nation's schizophrenic self-image as like the West yet not. Nonetheless, artists of both stripes, even those practicing in foreign media, agreed that a style distinctive to Japan was to be sought, although, as Volk demonstrates, their belief in essentializing national–cultural differences would impede rather than facilitate the next generation's creative development.

A germ of dissension unfurls in Chapter 2 through Volk's close reading of Yorozu's Tokyo School of Fine Arts graduation work Nude Beauty. Performing formal, conceptual, theoretical, and historical analysis on this one painting, she deftly elicits far-reaching implications of a work that might otherwise be described as no more than a student's “enthusiasm for [European] post-Impressionism” (p. 237). By the standards of 1912, nudity was not the painting's most controversial feature; her beauty, or the lack thereof, was. To deliberately flout beauty (“bi”) and skills (“jutsu”) was a conscious attack on his teacher Kuroda Seiki and the institutionalized yōga that the latter personified. In fact, Nude Beauty, for its antinatural composition and indelicate brushwork, would not qualify as art (bijutsu) at all under Meiji rubrics. Volk convinces the reader to see Yorozu's painting as a calculated critique, or parody, of European-derived academic art and its grandiose claims to be both universalist and indispensable to the nation.

Chapter 3 follows Yorozu's new trajectory after rupturing with the academy and essentially forsaking a secure career path. Assuming the identity of a revolutionary artist modeled on the examples of Cezanne, Matisse, and van Gogh, he saw art as a means for self-cultivation and expression. Yorozu aligned himself with the subversive Fusain Society and submitted Woman in a Boa for the inaugural exhibition. This chapter, like the last, shows off Volk's extraordinary ability to handle one work with depth while concurrently invoking breadth. She walks the reader through a tour of parallel works, calling attention to the painting's formal resemblance to those by van Gogh and Matisse and its stylistic departure from those by Kuroda, and then proceeds to examine the distinctive local and personal intonations of the painting's subject and style. Volk explains this work as unusually “resonant with contemporary social realities” because of Yorozu's unconventional treatment of the central female figure. She was not a timeless beauty (bijin), but a new woman (atarashii onna) – the independent, fearless modern female acting as a potent symbol for individual subversion in Taishō society. Painting her in the manner of the European avant-garde amplified Yorozu's manifesto on modern Japanese selfhood as timely and radical.

Chapter 4 chronicles a low period of uncertainty and experimentation for Yorozu, ultimately driving himself to a nervous breakdown and physical retreat from Tokyo. To his own betterment or detriment, this was the time of the artist's formulation of the “X” concept. Not a search for stylistic innovation, but for “the expression, through pictorial means, of the ‘true,’ ‘primitive,’ or ‘original’ self of the artist” (p. 152), the concept's lofty order pushed him to seek inspiration from an assorted array of artists, theories, and painting modes, from Wassily Kandinsky's theory of abstraction to his former teacher Nagahara Kōtarō's experimental crossbreeding of Western media and traditional format. An unsuccessful bid to exhibit what Volk calls “the largest and most ambitious oil painting of his entire career,” Three Bathers, defined the period's denouement. Yorozu's destruction of the work, which depicted a European subject in sumi, mounted on a folding screen, marked his resolute abandonment of easy fusions of external elements.

In the final chapter, Yorozu found promise of a resolution to his “X” dilemma in nanga, traditionally a rebellious and emancipated form of East Asian painting. Idealized as the third path that rose above the diverging trajectories of the subjective Eastern art and objective Western art, nanga, according to Yorozu, facilitated expression of the artist's interiority and personality in ways that European Expressionism could not. Invoking the concept of “rhythm,” Volk asserts the artist's turn to historical art as “not a form of retreat but as the first and necessary step forward” (p. 159). A concept that had circulated from East to West and back again to East illuminating a universal art unrestrained by time and place, rhythm was understood by Yorozu and his generation as a modern descendant to the premodern nanga principle of kiin seidō (“spirit resonance and vital movement”). In this chapter, Volk privileges the artist's theoretical formulation of rhythm in the 1920s, sprinting through a series of visually fascinating but disjointed works that represent Yorozu's refreshed pictorial attempts at achieving “X.” Not one of the final three large figural paintings, reproduced in color in the book (Plates 14–16), receives the same penetrating treatment as Nude Beauty and Woman in a Boa. The reader, having been overindulged by Volk in the first half of the book, could find this second half (Chapters 4 and 5) comparatively difficult to absorb without the same holistic approach. The lack of resolution is, however, also a factor of Yorozu's career having been interrupted in midstream at the age of forty-one.

An epilogue situates Yorozu in the company of contemporaries, Nishida Kitarō and the Japanese Surrealists, who grappled with similar big questions about “[transcending] individual and national identities and [becoming] truly cosmopolitan” (p. 209). Ultimately, achieving universalism gnawed at him so urgently and persistently precisely because his geo-cultural location in Japan automatically denied him a seat in the center of the global art praxis; one wonders if, had he been a European, would he have spent a fraction of his time worrying about keeping pace or gaining parity with non-Europeans? Volk ends the book by lamenting the lack of progress since Yorozu's time in the Euro-American-centric practice and writing of modern art, in that non-Western modern art is still not being engaged beyond its non-Westernness. The reader is easily swayed by Volk's forceful and eloquent argument for recognizing Yorozu Tetsugorō as a modern artist whose work was equally energized and enervated by the schism that kept and still seems to keep East and West apart. Joining a small but steadily growing number of publications in the English language on the art and architecture of early twentieth-century Japan, Volk's book deserves praise for being a substantially rigorous and provocative probe into the search for universalism in a differentiated world.