Alum Andrea Horbinski at the ICC Sophia University
Alum Andrea Horbinski traveled to Tokyo, Japan, where she presented at Sophia University's Institute of Comparative Culture on “Dual Legacies: MAVO, Manga, and the Avant-Garde in Interwar Japan” on June 15, 2018. In her talk, she explored the role that the radical 1920s art movement MAVO played in the work of the two most influential mangaka of the 1930s, Yanase Masamu and Tagawa Suihô, both of whom were MAVO members.
Find out more here!
From the website:
The leading creators of the two most significant movements in manga in the 1920s and 30s, proletarian and children’s manga, have a common origin in the short-lived but extremely generative radical art movement MAVO. Both Yanase Masamu (1900-45) and Tagawa Suihô (1899-1989) participated in MAVO in the early 1920s, and after its demise they put its principles into practice in their manga: Yanase was particularly influenced by German artist George Grosz (1893-1959), while Tagawa’s smash hit manga Norakuro (1931-41) incorporated diverse influences that ranged from Constructivism to Charlie Chaplin. Not coincidentally, the wartime state took a dim view of both men's work, but MAVO and the European avant-garde thus exerted a lasting influence on the history of manga overall, as the manga output of both men challenged the existing consensus on what “manga” was, extending its scope in terms of subject matter, artistic strategies, and audiences.