The figure of Kakuzo Okakura, better known in Japan by his pen name Tenshin, looms large over modern nihonga (Japanese-style painting). Not a painter of distinction himself, his importance was as a critic, curator and organizer. As the founder of what is now Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Geidai) in 1889 and the Japan Fine Arts Academy (Nihon Bijutsuin) in 1898 he had a profound impact on the Japanese art world; as assistant curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and author of several important works in English he deeply influenced Western views of Japanese aesthetics. He is generally regarded as the true father of 20th-century nihonga.
Except in Kyoto.
When Tokyo emerged as the capital of the booming modern Japan, the old capital that had been the nation's heart and real cultural center for so many centuries got pushed into the background. The towering figure of Tenshin and the immense clout of Geidai have obscured the fact that the country's first modern art school was founded in Kyoto in 1880, nine years before Geidai, and that Kyoto painters were building a new Japanese painting style while Tenshin was still an unknown English student.
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