Making A Beautiful Connection
Shiseido and New York University kickoff exhibit displaying the history of Japan’s beauty ideals
By Heather Harlan

Shiseido is well known in the United States for its makeup, perfume and skin care products. But what many Americans may not realize is that the Japanese cosmetics giant is also a long-time contributor to the arts both in Japan and throughout the world. Recently, the company continued that tradition with a $500,000 endowment to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery to support cultural and artistic endeavors.

The endowment is the largest award given to the gallery since it’s establishment in 1975. Located on Washington Square Park at the center of NYU’s Greenwich Village campus, the gallery each year holds numerous exhibitions spanning a wide range of visual arts including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, architecture, decorative arts, video, film and performance. It also maintains the NYU’s permanent art collection of 6,000 artworks from around the world.

NYU president L. Jay Oliva said the donation was made to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the founding of Shiseido America, the company’s U.S. subsidiary, as well as to mark a historical connection to the university and the city.

Shiseido’s link to New York City began many years ago. Its first managing director, Noburo Matusmoto, received a bachelor’s degree in commercial science from NYU’s business school in 1912. During his years in New York, Matsumoto met his future business partner, Shinzo Fukuhara, who would later become the first president of Shiseido. Fukuhara was the son of Shiseido founder Arinobu Fukuhara. In 1908, Shinzo Fukuhara went to New York to study pharmacology at Columbia University. He later went to France, where he immersed himself in the Paris art scene and became a skilled photographer. In 1915, he designed the company’s camellia trademark and ran the company’s design department, while Matsumoto handled the business operations.

Four years later, in 1919, Fukuhara established the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo, now the oldest existing art gallery in Japan. The company also maintains the Shiseido Art House, which displays Shiseido’s historic product designs, posters and advertisements. The company also publishes Hanatsubaki (Camellia), an avant-garde magazine of culture and fashion.

In 1988, director of the Grey Gallery Lynn Gumpert visited Tokyo and saw an exhibit tracing the history of Shiseido, including its introduction of Western cosmetics to Japanese women at the turn of the 19th century.

“I already knew about Shiseido’s continuing cultural role, both as a design innovator and as a force in the arts and society,” said Gumpert, who is an expert in Japanese art. “But I’d never before seen such a large presentation of Shiseido’s product designs and graphic works: print advertisements, television commercials, posters. I was tremendously impressed.”

A few months later, Gumpert received a call from Noriko Fuku, an independent New York-based curator who serves as a cultural advisor to Shiseido. “She wanted to know whether the Grey Art Gallery would be interested in organizing an exhibition of our own, using these and other materials from Shiseido’s corporate collection,” Gumpert recalled. “I leaped at the chance.”

Gumpert immediately began planning Face To Face, Shiseido and the Manufacture of Beauty, 1900-2000, which will be on view at the Grey Gallery next September.

While they were planning the exhibit, Shiseido made an offer Gumpert couldn’t refuse: to fund not only the exhibit, but also other programs at the gallery through a $500,000 endowment, which will increase the gallery’s funds from $2.1 million to $2.6 million.

“It makes a huge difference,” Gumpert said.

The endowment is unrestricted—meaning it can be used for any program at the gallery. Gumpert envisions a unique center for the study of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern art and added that the money would be used to enhance the gallery’s collection artwork from both regions.

“We strive to interact with the academic departments of New York University and serve the needs of a student population,” she said. “NYU has a number of strong Asian departments, and approximately one-third of our incoming students are either Asian American or Asian.”

Using materials primarily drawn from the Shiseido archives, Face to Face will examine the role of cosmetics in shaping and promoting ideals of beauty over the last century. More than 250 prints, posters, photographs, advertisements and works of decorative and fine arts will be included in the show.

“Together they tell a story about changing attitudes toward makeup and beauty in the 20th century, hence the title Face to Face,” Gumpert said. “Obviously, it’s a topic that touches on aesthetics, the roles of women in society, and the ways in which modern life encourages us to construct our own identities. The subject also involves many cultural interactions between East and West, which is another meaning of Face to Face.”

The exhibition will be divided into four sections covering four time spans. The first cluster concentrates on the years around 1900, when Shiseido’s founder, Arinobu Fukuhara, traveled to Paris and visited the Universal Exposition, said Gumpert.

“The Paris fairs in 1867, 1878, and 1889 helped introduce Japanese art to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists; the Chicago fair in 1893 brought Japanese architecture to the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright. And the influences ran in the opposite direction as well. The 1900 fair fed Fukuhara’s infatuation with French art and culture,” Gumpert explained.

The artwork in this section will include a selection of nishiki-e, vibrant colored woodblock prints depicting scenes of the modernization of Tokyo life: cars on the streets, women in traditional dress using telephones and even women at the toilette, she said.

The exhibit will also display makeup tools used in Meiji Japan as well as prints that belong to the artistic genre known as bijin-ga, or, paintings of beautiful omen. Shiseido products and designs, as well as early 20th century perfume bottles by Baccarat and Lalique, which have been collected over the years, will also be presented.

The second section of the exhibit focuses on the period after World War I, and the development of Japanese modernism, an artistic movement in which Shinzo Fukuhara became a key player. After completing his studies in pharmacology at Columbia University, Fukuhara visited Paris, where he frequented museums, met artists and became an accomplished art photographer. When he took charge of Shiseido in 1916, one of the first things he did was establish a design department, which he later headed.

“The importance of Shiseido’s design department for the development of Japanese modernism really can’t be overstated,” Gumpert explained.

The company hired accomplished artists such as Ayao Yamana and Sue Yabe to design posters and advertisements. At the same time, the company began promoting a notion that was novel in the West as well as in Japan: that women should feel free to use cosmetics openly to make themselves up, in the sense of creating characters for the social stage, she said.

“Japanese modernism strove to dissolve the barriers between the fine arts and the applied arts, to transform daily life through the arts. In its way, it’s a movement that brings to mind the Constructivists in the Soviet Union and Bauhaus in Germany, and it began at the same time,” Gumpert said.

“But with Japanese modernism, you have a corporation, Shiseido, as one of the major actors.”

The third installment looks at the 1960s and ’70s, when pop art dominated the world’s art scene. During this period, the United States replaced France as “the main point of reference for Japanese artists interacting with the West.”

Here Shiseido is shown in relation to advertisements for all-American beauty companies like Estée Lauder and Cover Girl, again to chronicle changes in ideals of beauty. One of those changes is found in the Shiseido tanning campaign. Some of their lines, including the Beauty Cake and Sun Oil products were considered “absolutely radical,” at that time, Gumpert said, since the ideal until then had been for the skin to be as pale as possible. Another innovation was Shiseido’s use of “Eurasian” models, Tina Chow and Bonnie Lutz, presenting an “ideal of beauty that was neither Asian nor European but a union of both.”

The final section will cover the mid-’60s to the present, a period during which Shiseido introduced its traditional Japanese aesthetics-inspired Zen product line.

“It was an extraordinary and very innovative example of something we can now see everywhere in contemporary life: a global, borderless culture existing side-by-side with forms of national self-representation,” Gumpert said. “In other words, there’s no longer just one ideal of beauty. Side-by-side with the elegance and refinement of Zen, you have another sort of Japanese aesthetic that’s cute, playful, and deliberately kitsch.”

Executives at Shiseido said that the exhibit and the new endowment are a chance for the company’s activities to come full circle, and reconnect with an important part of its roots.

“For us, this exhibition is both an honor and a homecoming,” said Isao Isejima, chairman and CEO of Shiseido Cosmetics America LTD. “Our first president, Shinzo Fukuhara, lived in New York City early in the 20th century. It was here that he attended university and here that he frequented art galleries, confirming his lifelong dedication to the arts.

“Our connection to the Grey Art Gallery is all the stronger because our second president, Noboru Matsumoto, went to New York University, where he studied business,” said Isejima. “We hope this exhibition will make a contribution to the cultural life of New York, just as New York has contributed so much to Shiseido.”