Not far into Alicia Volk's fascinating study of the Japanese oil painter Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–1927), the reader becomes aware of an unsettling fact: Yorozu, who in the 1910s and 1920s defined his own project in conversation with paintings and writings in Europe and Japan, is even today considered an artist whose significance is confined to Japan. Volk's rigorous historical reconstruction of Yorozu's project is a powerful argument in favor of (re)inserting him within a truly global history of modernist art. Her demonstration of the ways in which the artist's work was intertwined with contemporaneous developments at home and abroad suggests that confining Yorozu to the story of modern Japanese art is not only narrow-minded, but ahistorical as well.

At the same time that we follow Yorozu's engagement with expressionism, cubism, abstraction, and new explorations of the subject-object, figure-ground relationship, we become aware that our own tendency to confine him to the status of a local, rather than international, master also has a history. While Yorozu saw himself engaging visually and philosophically with Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky—as well as with his Japanese colleagues—geopolitical and socioeconomic factors literally kept him in Japan. Unlike the leading Japanese oil painters of the previous generation, Yorozu was unable to study abroad because of a lack of funding and an unwillingness to place his art in the service of government-sponsored ideals. In Tokyo and in his hometown in Iwate Prefecture, Yorozu's potential patrons deeply understood the nanga ink painting tradition, but they had little access to the paintings and ideas with which his oil paintings were in dialogue. Finally, Japan's place in the early twentieth-century Western cultural imagination meant that even Japanese painters who were active in Europe were largely invisible to their European colleagues, so that the melding of East and West that many European and American writers foretold took place largely on European and American terms. This reduced the potential for the multiple-sided exchange inherent in what Yorozu perceived as oil painting's status as a universal mode of expression not bound to a national style. Volk's study not only elucidates this trajectory, but also discredits the legacy of its one-sidedness: namely, the perception that Japanese oil painters were perpetually on the receiving end of European “influences.”

Drawing on the writings of Yorozu and his contemporaries (almost all appearing in English for the first time), In Pursuit of Universalism follows the painter's artistic development through four main chapters that are preceded by an introduction and first chapter that establish the broader art historical context. Chapter 2 reconstructs the significance of Yorozu's Nude Beauty (1912) in the context of Japanese oil painting in the 1910s; with it, Volk establishes the local meanings of a painting that might otherwise appear to be a casual experiment in the style of Van Gogh, Gauguin, or Matisse. By the end of the chapter, readers are aware that nothing about the painting was casual, and visually may find themselves wondering how they could have missed the roughly painted, bulging red fabric around the figure's waist or the pink cloud that amplifies the aureole of her breast. Chapters 1 and 2 are ideal for assignment in courses on cultural, literary, or artistic exchange between Japan and the West.

Beginning with Nude Beauty, Yorozu phrased his own career as a response to problems inherent in the current state of oil painting both in Japan and abroad. Chapter 3, “Inventing the Self: The New Woman and the Revolutionary Artist,” and chapter 4, “Expressionism and the New Period of the ‘Primitive,’” plunge us more deeply into these problems. We follow the painter's search to clarify the relationship between selfhood and painterly expression, oil painting and painting in sumi ink, problems embodied by his use of the term “X” to express the as yet unarticulated goal of his own work. It was a torturous search, and the reader can at times feel a bit lost, especially because Volk is careful not to impose her own interpretations of “X” in the midst of reconstructing Yorozu's development. The epilogue is illuminating in this sense, for here Volk offers a convincing interpretation of “X” and links it to trends in Japanese intellectual history. Readers seeking a similar level of analysis for the notion of the primitive, however, may find themselves with unresolved questions, in part because we discover that Yorozu's notion of the primitive (genshi) was not directly engaged with the widespread—and deeply problematic—ways in which his European counterparts linked this phrase to their engagement with the art of so-called primitive cultures.

Chapter 5, “Unified Rhythm: Toward a Universal Painting,” admirably profiles the early twentieth-century capacity of the term “rhythm” to describe a range of pictorial effects in the West and Japan. Volk highlights the process whereby certain discursive terms coalesced to help people feel that they were seeing the same thing in a painting. Here, an articulation of how the notion of rhythm slips primitivism in through the back door, so to speak, would strengthen her suggestions about twentieth-century universalism's tendency to remain determined by power imbalances.

At times I found myself yearning for a more sustained analysis of the visual features of Yorozu's individual paintings in the manner of Nude Beauty. At several points, Volk approaches a discussion of what one of the painter's colleagues described as the “overall sense of defiance” in his female nudes (p. 148), but we are left with an implicit understanding of what this recurrent trait might have meant in the context of prewar Japanese society and the landscape of gender relations introduced in chapter 3. Still, as one of the most sustained and skillful analyses of a modern Japanese painter in many years, In Pursuit of Universalism is highly accomplished, and its accomplishments will continue to grow as readers probe the works of Yorozu and his contemporaries.

Volk's book is the first recipient of the Phillips Book Prize offered by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. It deserves to be read by all historians of modern art and East Asian culture and contributes to the growing field of East–West cultural exchange. In addition, literary historians will find it an interesting case for comparison with their own field, for, as Karatani Kōjin has written, visual art was different because “[t]o put it concretely, the Japanese [literary] classics could not be read abroad” (“Japan as Art Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Fenollosa,” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001], 45). The ways in which Yorozu's paintings were and are legible outside Japan deserve further thought.