Turning Japanese II

This was the state of the art of printmaking in 1850,
the dark silence before the dawn of the Japanese
influence on everything:

Then the tsunami hit: and the stories
of the means of that onslaught are many.

Perhaps, since the woodblock prints were supposedly used
as wrapping paper on ceramic imports,
they were inadvertently discovered
by painters buying ashtrays.

(That's what they told me on the sightseeing tour to Giverney.)

There were the scholars, vendors, and pilgrims,
many of whom have been discussed here, whose
curiosity drove them to Japan itself as soon
as they could. They were inspired, profoundly awed,
and they looted the back rooms for whatever they could
for museums and private collections.

Extremely important, too were the Universal Expositions
which bloomed on every shore and brought
artist, craftsman, and person-on-the-street
into direct contact with the Japanese items themselves.

To explore the variety in more depth, check out this.

There were entrepreneurs on all shores (also previously
covered here), who opened shops, started magazines (or both),
to display and sell the imports; or in Japan where they began
to marshall artists to produce what the West wanted.

Now, I'm not saying that each artist pictured here was
introduced to Japanese arts and crafts in one of these ways.
What I am saying is that every single one (and all the more
who are not featured here) was influenced none the less.

No longer was the body's content as important as were its bones.
And all of the other Japonisme-y things: flat planes of color,
asymmetry, outlines. Consciously or unconsciously,
people had begun to see differently.

The language changed, and changes still.

charles
clive

fly like an eagle

Music is most sovereign
because more than anything else,
rhythm and harmony find
their way to the inmost
soul and take strongest hold
upon it, bringing with
them and imparting grace.
—Plato, The Republic

The cranes are flying ...
—Chekhov

And here it comes: around the world,
In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo,
the dancers
Hit the floor running
(the communal dancefloor

Here, there, at intervals,
sometimes paved,
Sometimes rotted linoleum
awash in beer,
Sometimes a field across which
the dancers streak

Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt
In a township of corrugated metal roofs)
And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse

Strains of premeditated art,
is now improvisation,
The desperately new, where to the sine-curved
Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside

The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates
The death and cremation of history,
Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes,

And a girl wearing a skull
That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain,
Get up and dance together, sort of,
age thirteen.

Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions
Of shootouts,
of tortured ones in basements,
Of cold insinuations before sex

Between enemies,
the jubilance of the criminal.
The girl tosses her head and dances
The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal

For a pair of stockings, a scarf,
a perfume,
The boy dances stealing the truck,
Shooting his father.

The point is to become
a flying viper,
A diving vulva, the great point
Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself

Into far other habitats, or seed
That travels a migrant bird’s gut
To be shit overseas.

The creatures gamble
on the whirl of life
And every adolescent body hot
Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor

Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots,
These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip
My hair and vibrate my pelvis

Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise
That imitates history’s catastrophe
Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive,

Maybe we’ll all survive. . . .

At the intersection of poverty
and plague
The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced
Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

Alicia Ostriker

“Saturday Night” from The Little Space:
Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998.
Copyright © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker.

more cranes

PASTORAL

If it were only still!—
With far away the shrill
Crying of a cock;
Or the shaken bell
From a cow's throat
Moving through the bushes;
Or the soft shock
Of wizened apples falling
From an old tree
In a forgotten orchard
Upon the hilly rock!

Oh, grey hill,
Where the grazing herd
Licks the purple blossom,
Crops the spiky weed!
Oh, stony pasture,
Where the tall mullein
Stands up so sturdy
On its little seed!

Edna St. Vincent Millay


PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

(it is interesting to me how easily children's books illustrators adopted so much from what they saw in the japanese prints. and them passed it on, generation to generation, to their students.)

perseus and the children

several days ago i talked about ethel mars and maud hunt squire. i wasn't able to find many images by them, but pk at bibliodyssey has unburied some treasures.

the couple illustrated children's books together, and pk has offered up four: 'Children of Our Town,' 'The Adventures of Ulysses,' 'The Heroes,' and 'A Child's Garden of Verse.'

i am filled with astonishment at the obvious traces of the japanese influence in these seemingly unrelated images; not a fan, kimono, or painted screen to be found.

but the wonderful line is there, along with the asymmetry, the use of large foreground framing images, even the way the water is drawn.

check 'em out. & thanks, pk.

flowers from our shores

it occurred to me this evening that though many of my favorites from this era are women, i show you the work of more men than women.

well... there are a lot more to choose from, in the west, and in the east there are only men to choose from. but i want to remedy that a bit tonight. i've mentions some of these women before, but here's a little context.

Edna Boies Hopkins studied under Dow at the Pratt Institute in 1899 and 1900, learning block printing and Dow's principles of composition. She then taught design at the Veltin School for Girls in New York City.

Hopkins taught the wood-block technique to Ethel Mars (1876-1956), a friend from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Ohio, who moved to New York in 1900.











Mars in turn taught Maud Squire (1873-1955), also an art student from Cincinnati living in New York. By 1906 each of the three women had settled in Paris, and together they formed the nucleus of a group of American print makers.

In 1910 they were joined by Margaret Jordan Patterson, who had studied at Pratt in 1895, and although she had not enrolled in Dow's classes, she credited him as her teacher.


Patterson, who was also a textile designer, learned the wood-block technique from Mars.1



Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1996 by Lindsay Leard

(margaret jordan patterson, mjp, edna boies hopkins, ebh, ethel mars, maud squire, mjp, mjp.)