Summer Travel Grant 2018 Recipient
Michael DeAngelis
Student Affiliate
MA in Art History

My name is Michael DeAngelis and I am a third-year candidate for my Masters in Art History, with a focus on modern Japanese painting. I am in the process of writing my thesis on Kawabata Ryūshi (1885-1966), a Japanese painter, and his activities during World War II. To support my research, I received the EWCA Summer Travel Grant. This allowed me to travel to the Ryūshi Memorial Museum in Ota, Tokyo, Japan and view Kawabata’s artwork firsthand. This provided an especially valuable opportunity because of the nature of Kawabata’s paintings. Kawabata worked in a style known as nihonga (日本画), or neo-traditional Japanese painting, but innovated within the style by producing large-scale artworks with intense colors meant for the exhibition hall, called kaijō geijutsu (会場芸術). Because of the size of his paintings, details are not easily captured in photographs. With my firsthand observation, I was able to make important analysis of these otherwise unnoticed details. Without this opportunity afforded by the EWCA Summer Travel Grant, my thesis would not have been as thorough.