The P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor in Japanese Art, professor of art and archaeology, and director of the Program in East Asian Art and Archaeology, Andrew Watsky transitioned to emeritus status on July 1, 2024, after sixteen years of teaching Japanese art history at Princeton (2008-24, including seven years as director of the Tang Center) and fourteen years at Vassar College (1994-2008).

Andy’s most recent essay was for the “Art Matters” section of the Princeton University Art Museum’s magazine, and that title encapsulates concisely his dedicated career as a scholar of Japanese art, his commendable teaching at Princeton University, and his tremendous contribution to the Japanese art collection at the Art Museum. For art historians, a commitment to art would seem somewhat natural, but what is distinctive about Andy’s approach is his continuing sense of “art as matter.” Ever since his childhood in the suburbs of New York City—which made visiting museums there a part of his education—Andy has savored his experience of dealing directly with artworks, the material objects themselves. And both this immediacy and intimacy with art have helped shape his scholarship and invigorate his teaching.

As with many art history majors in the late 1970s, Andy mostly studied Western art during his undergraduate years at Oberlin College. In 1980, he earned a fellowship to teach English in Japan. He remained there for six years, and the experience changed the path of his life, honing his inclination toward a visceral feeling for artworks whose materiality relates to our senses and actual physical being.

During his last four years in Japan, Andy worked for a contemporary art gallery in Tokyo. The proprietor of the gallery, Akira Ueda, taught Andy about premodern Japanese art, including tea culture, and sometimes served him tea in sixteenth-century Japanese bowls. The often unadorned and irregular pottery was originally made not just to be looked at, but also held in one’s hands. Through this tactile sense, the user can enjoy the feel of the surface and weight of the bowl along with the warmth generated by the hot tea. Japan’s long and rich artistic legacy and its subtle and sophisticated culture gradually grew on Andy. 

When he returned from Japan in 1986, Andy began his doctoral study of Japanese art at Princeton under the guidance of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu, a distinguished scholar of Japanese painting. From the outset, Andy did not extol the Western notion of fine arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—that had been introduced to Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century, nor the independence of material mediums that dominated art-historical scholarship until the mid-1990s. Instead of taking the trodden path of focusing on painting or other individual mediums of art, he chose a topic for his dissertation that manifested his methodological approach to art as an ensemble, an assemblage of diverse mediums of object types.

Completed in 1994, Andy’s dissertation explored the Chikubushima sanctuary, a religious site that dates to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as an ensemble of various mediums—architecture, painting, lacquer, metalwork, and woodcarvings. (Andy’s award-winning book based on his dissertation—Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan—was published in 2004 by the University of Washington Press.) Afterward, he further developed this method of organizing visual materials and research ideas. For example, his current book project concentrates on an ensemble of tea objects associated with the circle of the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Riky.. The book interweaves discussions on tea objects that also encompass the accompanying textiles and boxes, as well as various texts on tea culture, including a tea treatise, diaries of tea practitioners, and inscriptions left with objects. In addition to the conceptual framework of an ensemble or assemblage that crosses the boundaries of art mediums, Andy’s research also demonstrates a synchronic mode of exploration. Through this line of thinking, he can present the multilayered dimensions and complicated fabric of sixteenth-century Japanese art and culture. Historical threads, such as the struggle for power between warrior leaders and Japan’s nascent contact with Europe, help further characterize this period as a tumultuous time, full of vigor and color. This kind of synchronized look at sixteenth-century Japan brings out a richer picture of the interwoven sociocultural, political, and aesthetic elements during this period. 

A close look at artworks penetrates Andy’s teaching, including his courses on woodblock prints and tea objects. Teaching directly with objects has been a guiding principle for many Princeton professors in art history. As for Andy, his courses are not only organized around the Art Museum’s collection but also designed in creative ways that enable students to understand what it means to “encounter” an object, both visually and aesthetically. The seminar ART 425, The Japanese Print, stands out as a landmark in the curriculum of the Department of Art and Archaeology, not for the purpose of attracting a large number of students (the capacity being only twelve) but because it provided an intimate and truly memorable experience with Japanese prints for the enrolled students. In the class, students learned about early modern Japanese prints, including their facture, use, and consumption. More importantly, thanks to the limited number of students, they were able to access the originals in the museum for close observation and study. And most impressively, each semester an art dealer brought a group of prints to the seminar for students to examine. The students then had the privilege (and the responsibility) of deciding which one would be acquired for the Art Museum at the end of the semester based on the quality and theme of the print and how it would contribute to the museum’s growing collection of Japanese prints. With this purpose in mind, students had to study the prints in detail, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, understand the process of purchasing a work for the museum, and decide how it would complement the museum’s current holdings.

The print so chosen is but one example of how Andy has helped the Art Museum acquire Japanese art for teaching and for its collection. His contributions to the museum have been transformative. According to Cary Liu and Zoe Kwok (respectively, the emeritus and current curators of Asian art), before Andy, the museum’s Japanese collection was of high quality but small in quantity. During Andy’s tenure, the museum has witnessed the significant addition of 145 works. Often in conjunction with the curators, Andy was involved to one extent or another with these important acquisitions. Among them, the paintings, prints, and tea objects dating from the Muromachi (1336-1573) to the Meiji period (1868-1912) are the most conspicuous. To facilitate this growth, Andy mobilized his connections with art collectors and galleries in both Japan and America, exercising tremendous patience, perseverance, and skill. He also organized multiple trips to Tokyo with the curators (and twice with James Steward, the Nancy A. Nasher-David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, Princeton University Art Museum) to visit galleries and locate artworks to consider for the museum’s collection. These trips reflect Andy’s time and commitment in helping the Art Museum navigate the refined protocols of the Japanese art market. 

In addition, Andy co-organized two exhibitions for the Art Museum. The exhibition Chigusa and the Art of Tea in Japan, which opened in October 2014, featured a ceramic jar made in China but repurposed in Japan as a tea object (gaining the name Chigusa) and other objects used in tea practice. An edited volume titled Around Chigusa: Tea and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan, featuring essays arising from the conference accompanying the exhibition, was published in 2017 by the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art. The other exhibition was Picturing Place in Japan, which opened in October 2018. Developed through graduate teaching over several years and working closely with the New Orleans collectors Kurt A. Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter, the project led to the donative sale of fifteen important paintings and a ceramic work to the Art Museum.

Andy’s legacy finds further testimony in the Ph.D. students he has advised. His students consider Andy’s mentorship as being incredibly generous, considerate, and inspiring, even down to the minute details of their dissertations. Those who have graduated under his guidance specialized in topics as diverse as medieval Japanese Buddhist painting featuring the afterlife, collaborative paintings in Edo Japan, nineteenth-century illustrated books, Korean ceramics in Japan, and the construction of a Chinese painter’s tradition in early modern Japan. The scope of these topics well demonstrates Andy’s broad expertise. His students have also gone on to find curatorial or teaching jobs in Japanese art, including at the University of Washington, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, and Hong Kong University. 

When asked to reminisce on his time as a professor, Andy looked off into the distance and softly recalled that one of his best undergraduate students did not become a professional art historian but instead a practicing veterinarian. “It is good to know that a veterinarian likes and knows Japanese art history,” Andy said. That is the sign of a true teacher (and cat lover) with a passion for Japanese art.

Written by members of the Department of Art and Archaeology faculty.