koloman for all seasons: 1900 (the calendars)

it can be said without exaggeration that japanese art and the japanese aesthetic made an impact upon virtually every turn-of-the-century artist, even if a direct link with specific japanese originals cannot always be identified. the japanese to interior design, decoration and the applied arts shaped the attitudes of european artist towards their work.

european painters and graphic designers were similarly influenced by japanese prints, adopting the luminosity of their bright colours, the pulsating rhythm of their lines and dots, the heightened expressiveness of their simplified outlines and their juxtaposition of decorative areas on the pictorial plane.

both vincent van gogh and william morris were great admirers of japanese prints. liberty began importing large consignments of goods from the far east from 1875 onwards.

charles rennie mackintosh was another who appreciated japanese art. it is clear, too, that vienna also came into close contact with japan.

at the risk of over- simplifi-cation, there were three main reasons why japanese art met with such an enthusiastic response in europe around 1900. firstly, industrial expansion in the 1870s had created new consumer wealth and given rise to a demand for exotic luxury items.

secondly, artists, craftsmen, designers and architects were hungry for fresh forms and motifs with which to replace the exhausted vocabulary of naturalism and history painting.

thirdly, the threat to the quality of life posed by an increasingly industrialized society was giving rise to a new spirituality, one which sought to counteract humankind's alienation both from inner and outer nature.

viennese artists were able to admire the oriental collec- tion in the austrian museum of art and industry. as part of the new trend in art around 1900, the work of koloman moser and josef hoffman is characterized by the seemingly contradictory components of floral arabesques and squares. these characteristics are also found in japanese design, however, where organic and geometric motifs are harmoniously combined.

furthermore, the japanese artist craftsman was a figure for whom the 'lower' applied arts and 'higher' fine arts enjoyed the same status -- an equality which the wiener werkstatte also championed. the formal expression of zen made a rapid and direct impression on viennese architecture; interior and exterior were allowed to flow smoothly one into the other by means of simple design and thoughtful use of materials.

objects made up of simplified forms translated emptiness into the round, whereby the specific character of the material remained visible. 'while telling us about his travels, a gentleman who knows japan well described a tea ceremony at the end of which the empty teapot was passed from hand to hand and the delicacy of its work admired by the guests.

this appreciation of artistic beauty formed the high point of the ceremony. apparently there is nothing unusual about this; it is an everyday habit to pay special attention to the quality of an object and the artistic work which is an inseparable part of it. to the european of today, such things sound like pure fiction." (josef august lux)

alongside frank lloyd wright in america, the artists grouped around josef hoffmann succeeded -- albeit not always comp- rehensively to the western-trained eye -- in transferring into their own work the vision of beauty in japanese art: the realistic prompts the absolute perfection of the decorative, and the self-contained consummateness of the decorative becomes the supreme revelation of the spiritual. 1

a man for all seasons: 1911

The Rabbit leaps
The mouse outcreeps
The flag out-peeps
 Beside the brook.

The ferret weeps
The marmot sleeps
The owlet keeps
 In his snug nook.

The apples thaw
The ravens caw
The squirrels gnaw
 The frozen fruit;

To their retreat
We track the feet
Of mice that eat
 The apples root.

The willows droop
The alders stoop
The pheasants group
 Beneath the snow.

The catkins green
Cast o'er the scene
A summer sheen
 A genial glow.

The snow dust falls
The otter crawls
The partridge calls
 Far in the wood

The traveller dreams
The tree-ice gleams
The blue jay screams
 In angry mood.

Henry David Thoreau

1813

.我宿や鼠と仲のよい蛍
waga yado ya nezumi to naka no yoi hotaru

my dwelling--
mingling with the mice
pretty fireflies

issa


ASSAULT

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

Edna St. Vincent Millay


(only one living bird!)

haiku by issa, translation by David G. Lanoue from here

the end of time (the calendars)

imagine the republican response to part of
obama's recovery plans included not only the arts,
but also an eagle with the body of a palette.

but this we had. it ended coincidentally, with this work. clearly an example of a travelled japonisme, we still see the simplified shapes, but the outlines have disappeared.


At its height in 1936, the Federal Arts Project employed 5,300 visual artists and related professionals [and included] several major endeavors: a murals project executed more than 2,500 murals in hospitals, schools and other public places; an easel painting division produced nearly 108,000 paintings; a sculpture division produced some 18,000 pieces; a graphic arts workshop; a photography project served mainly to document the Works Progress Administration; a scenic design division provided models of historic stage sets and architectural models for planning and educational use; a poster division; and a stained glass division centered in New York.

The Federal Art Project also compiled a 22,000-plate Index of American Design, dispatching artists to record a wide variety of American designs in furnishings and artifacts from the colonial period on. The Arts Service Division provided illustrations and the like to the WPA's writers, musicians and theaters. The Exhibitions Division organized public showings of all WPA artists and students.

Hundreds of teachers were employed by the Art Teaching Division in settlement houses and community centers; in the New York City area alone, an estimated 50,000 children and adults participated in classes each week. The FAP also set up and staffed 100 arts centers in 22 states; these included galleries, classrooms and community workshops and served an estimated eight million people. These local centers also received some $825,000 in local support; some survive to this day.

Many artists who have since become famous were part of FAP. Philip Guston, Moses Soyer, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jacob Laurence, Ivan Albright, Marsden Hartley, Philip Evergood, Mark Tobey -- these were just a few of the painters for whom the FAP provided a living and the chance to find "a new orientation and a new hope and purpose based on a new sense of social responsibility."

Interviews and photographs of former slaves were compiled by the WPA between 1936 and 1938. Factors led to radical writers finding both a voice and an audience in 1930s America, creating, among other things, the "Living Newspapers" associated with the Federal Theatre Project. Federal arts programs provided work for unemployed musicians, dancers, actors, painters, photographers, sculptors, and various other artists and educators as part of the New Deal.

the wpa's projects explored race, gender, class, and the axis of politics and art. projects brought murals to post offices, it created the indian arts and crafts board in 1935 to preserve and promote native american culture, and theater projects dealt with issues of black and white experience from new perspectives.

[eventually] The New Deal cultural programs were marred by censorship. When WPA chief Harry Hopkins announced the formation of the Federal Theatre at the National Theater Conference in 1935, he referred to a theme that would figure importantly in the development and demise of the FTP and other components of Federal One:

I am asked whether a theater subsidized by the government can be kept free of censorship, and I say, yes, it is going to be kept free from censorship. What we want is a free, adult, uncensored theater.

Despite Hopkins' pledge, the first act of censorship took place six months later. The first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia, portrayed Haile Selassie and Mussolini in the wake of the Italian invasion. When the New York FTP unit tried to get a recording of President Roosevelt's speech on Ethiopia to use in the production, the White House became alarmed at the content of the piece and banned the impersonation of any foreign ruler on the Federal Theatre stage.

State and local WPA officials were the most frequent transgressors of Harry Hopkins' stated intention. When the New York City WPA director was looking to purge his program of radical artists, he spotted trouble in a four-panel mural at Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Airport: he had three panels torn down and burned after he saw a figure who looked like Lenin and a plane with a red star that looked Soviet. The artist was fired, though he brought in his source photos to prove that the Lenin look-a-like was really an early parachutist and the plane a U.S. model.

Illinois's WPA administrator shut down Paul Green's Hymn to the Rising Sun, the second production of the Chicago Negro Company, while the opening night crowd was milling around in the lobby. He sputtered that the play, was "of such a moral character that I can't even discuss it with a member of the press." The play dealt with the use of chain-gang labor in the South; its moral character didn't prevent it from opening later in New York, to rave reviews.

The chilling effect of continuing [investigative] hearings, headlines about "red artists," and the rumblings of World War II brought a reorganization of Federal One in June 1939, signalling its final decline. Finally, the War put an end to all federally-subsidized artwork save that related directly to the war effort. The WPA was formally ended by
a presidential proclamation in 1942. 1

(see also Online WPA Exhibits, New Deal Arts,
and, of course, The Calendar.

a man for all seasons: 1910

1816

.我国は猿も祈とうをしたりけり
waga kuni wa saru mo kitô wo shitari keri

in my province
even trained monkeys
offer prayers!

1819

.名月の御名代かや白うさぎ
meigetsu no gyomei dai ka ya shiro usagi

are you the harvest moon's
representative?
white rabbit

Instead of seeing, as some Westerners do, a man on the moon, Japanese people perceive the outline of a rabbit. Shinji Ogawa notes that gyomei dai or gomyô dai means a "representative" in this context. The rabbit is representing the moon on earth, Issa quips.

1802

.湯の里とよび初る日やむら燕
yu no sato to yobi-somuru hi ya mura tsubame

today they're flying
in the bathhouse town...
swallow swarm

Mura in this haiku is not "village"; it refers to something that is bunched together with other things of the same class, i.e., in this case, a flock; Kogo dai jiten (Shogakukan 1983) 1602.

1810

.此門の霞むたそくや隅田の鶴
kono kado no kasumu tasoku ya sumida no tsuru

at the gate
so many in the mist!
Sumida River cranes

year unknown

.木がらしや塒に迷ふ夕烏
kogarashi ya negura ni mayou yû-garasu

winter wind--
he can't find his roost
the evening crow

Hiroshi Kobori comments on the word, kogarashi ("winter wind"). In early Japanese poetry, this refers to the wind that blows through trees, breaking branches and turning the leaves brown. By Issa's time it means "a dry windy day during the late autumn-deep winter season."
It is classified as a winter season word.

1824

.神の猿蚤見てくれる小春哉
kami no saru nomi mite kureru ko haru kana

sacred monkeys
pick each other's fleas...
a spring day in winter

Literally, the monkeys are "the god's monkeys" (kami no saru), implying that the scene is taking place on a sacred mountain,
probably near a Shinto shrine.

"Little spring" (ko haru) refers to mild, clear weather in the
Eleventh and Twelfth Months.

all haiku by issa, and translations, and commentary from here

another 1897 poster calendar (the calendars)

i find it so interesting that two of the three major artists
in the turn-of-the-century realm of graphics
in america both did the same thing at the same time.

they had to know each other. louis rhead and edward penfield,
joined with will bradley, were bright lights then,
and have, astonishingly, stayed bright.

but i can't find any mention of the two,
rhead and penfield, together. were they friends?
competitors? or were their publishers competitors?

i wish i knew.

is it more a modern-day obsession
that we want to know all about
the personal lives?

nahhhhh.

calendari