don't believe a thing i say!

okay, april fools and all that, but i'm not completely kidding (and since i didn't finish this yesterday, it might not count anyway). sometimes in the mythologies i try to untangle for you i get some things seriously wrong for one main reason: i forget to check the dates. in fact i wouldn't be sur- prised if i haven't attributed some things to some artists that happened long before, or long after, they died. i hope you know what i mean!

let us begin with, for example, gustave courbet who died at age 58, in 1877. he was born in 1819. obviously. see his example above right? very natural clouds. no outlines. (they really tend to not have any outlines; i have been checking.) and then we have hokusai: all outlines, nothing realistic about them. while he was born in 1760, he was producing artwork until his death in 1849. quite an overlap in lives, these two. the moment of japonisme would have passed hokusai by completely, while all of courbet's training and experience, and the way he saw, were set by the time of the invasion.

now to put these generational questions into some context, may i mention that hiroshige lived from 1797 to 1858 (getting closer to courbet, aren't we?) and monet lived from 1840 to 1926. monet, the impressionists, were the first artists to imbibe from the teacup of the japanese, but the next gener- ation made things extremely interesting. there were the cowboy painters, painers of the mesas of utah and arizona, dixon, cassidy, and borg: realistic clouds with outlines.

they were the next generation; they, these brilliant western painters, were of the same generation as some of the artists we have gotten to know well over the years: henri riviere, pierre bonnard, frances gearhart, and, only slightly younger, hiroshi yoshida. yoshida did not even begin to make prints (he had been a western-style painter, as they were called then) until he was in his 40s -- one year before arthur wesley dow died!

what this boils down to is that any illustration i have given you of influences yoshida may have had on dow are completely erroneous! arthur wesley dow's birth (1857 - 1922) occurred one year before hiroshige died! dow was more a contemporary of monet than the many proponents of japonisme with whom i have linked him; dow was, as was monet, the first wave -- the primogenitor of influences of japonisme, and not any part of the gang.

henri riviere, pierre bonnard, carl oscar borg, maynard dixon, and hiroshi yoshida all died within four years of my birth. these donors of legacy are no further in the past than is world war II. these artists are of the generation of my grandparents, or great-grandparents. in other words, we still swim in their stream. there was no flood diverting it.

so with regard to clouds (and we have discussed them before; just click on the 'clouds' tag to see the other discussions), we now have a much clearer line of inheritance: it is obvious that the japanese gave us outlines and we gave them perspective. they gave us simplicity and we gave them the multi-pigmented shades of color of which the world is built.

see here the same cloud, albeit different times of day, as offered by frances gearhart and hiroshi yoshida. many similarities. yoshida's work presents far more subtleties than does hokusai's, and gearhart's far more outlining and simplifying than courbet's. but who learned from whom? do they more accurately owe each other a debt as do artists working at the same time? i think they do.

A Crown of Autumn Leaves

Our voices press
from us
and twine
around the year's
fermenting wine


Yellow fall roars
Over the ground.
Loud, in the leafy sun that pours
Liquid through doors,
Yellow, the leaves twist down

as the winding
of the vine
pulls our curling
voices—

Glowing in wind and change,
The orange leaf tells

How one more season will alter and range,
Working the strange
Colors of clamor and bells

In the winding
of the vine
our voices press out
from us
to twine

When autumn gathers, the tree
That the leaves sang
Reddens dark slowly, then,
suddenly free,

Turns like a key,
Opening air where they hang

and the winding
of the vine
makes our voices
turn and wind
with the year’s
fermented wine

One of the hanging leaves,
Deeply maroon,
Tightens its final hold, receives,
Finally weaves
Through, and is covered soon

in the winding
of the vine—

Holding past summer's hold,
Open and strong,
One of the leaves in the crown is gold,
Set in the cold
Where the old seasons belong.

Here is my crown
Of winding vine,
Of leaves that dropped,
That fingers twined,
another crown
to yield and shine
with a year’s
fermented wine.

Annie Finch

For Mabon (fall equinox), Sept. 21
copyright Annie Finch 2011

no wedgies either

No ironic commentary on their clothing, their religion, their customs, shall be done, and no rude or insulting words shall be sent them.

We will not use the words keto (Chinese hairy) akahige (red beard), and ijin (barbaric).

One should not face them with impert- inence.

When we visit a strange house, one should be wearing clean shoes.

Foreign missionaries must be respected as equal to Japanese priests.

Avoid disturbing the games or rides strangers by throwing tiles, stones or sticks, or spitting, throwing fruit peels and scraps of cigars on trains or boats where you find them.

oddly, these words appear just under that lovely photo of the horikiri iris garden. if there is a larger context, neither my french skills nor my translating (google) patience give me any real context. it may surprise you (it surprised me) to learn that the photograph was taken in 1915, and hiroshi yoshida's print of the same place is from 1928. and the book is HERE.

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

bamboozled?

as a quiet, ubiquitous symbol, the bamboo has featured in japonisme wherever it occurred. whether it's pictured, or used, or imitated (silver bamboo handles, for example), it has become an instant communication of the east.

it's interesting, however, to look into its usage in japan itself. where it's found, or wherever i was able to find it anyway, wasn't necessarily where i had expected.

yes, it can be found on kimono textiles, and on crafts, like the inro.

in the west there were few instances of crafts where it wasn't used. it's irresistible because it's so graceful, so simple, so emblematic of all that we had accepted the east to be.

in japanese prints, however, there seem to be unexplained limits to it's usage: we will see it, again, as a pattern on kimono.

and, as we've seen before, one might find bamboo in a book of style suggestions.

we will also see it as part of a kabuki backdrop, and it's always used to geographically
place tigers.

but, it seems, and as far as i could find, picturing bamboo groves or forests almost never existed until late in the 19th century. this one hokusai image is the only one i could find. compare their frequency to that of pines.

the yoshida's, father and son, loved them, as did many other artists on into the twentieth century. i can not only find no reason for this, but not even any mention of it.

now this is not to suggest that the bamboo is not beloved in japan. in fact, The sound of the wind in this bamboo forest has been voted as one of 'one hundred must-be-preserved sounds of Japan' by the Japanese government. 1

but although hiroshige did use bamboo's wonderful verticality to accompany the flight of a bird (a sparrow), as did others, the forests and groves were rarely seen.

as 'meaningless,' and quite lovely decoration, though, it could be found in droves throughout europe and the americas.

may we be reassured that these appearances reflected our passion for the illusions we'd formed of japan?

and if so, were these illusions perpetrated by the japanese themselves, or by us?

and, at last, does it matter at all? fashion is as fluid as the wind; listen, you can hear it now. it's a sound which must be protected.

instead, gratitude is a fine option. thank you to tiffany. thank you to rookwood. gratitude to habert-dys. thank you to heintz.

translation is an odd art. what appears to be literal can really only be approx- imate, romanticized, inspirational.

which is quite acceptable.

mid-century....... japonisme? :: part three

"'Young architects, forget Rome, go to Japan!' exclaimed Walter Gropius after his return to Cambridge from the Far East in the early 1950s." 1

But many had al- ready gone. In 1930 Richard Neutra was invited to speak in Japan, as he was considered one of the best suited modern architects to indicate the way of adapting Japan's age-old building techniques.

"The synthesis of Eastern and Western accomplishments in building... involved the integration of two seemingly dichotomous elements -- Nature and geometric structural forms. The importance of bringing the two together, Neutra said, was introduced to him early in his career." 1

"As the Japanese have already successfully turned the 'Buddhist universe' into architecture, the West gradually discovered their achievements in visual arts, architecture and later in philosophy as well.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Gerrit Rietveld, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and many others took inspiration from Japanese building heritage in creating modern architectural space of the West." 4

The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by John Entenza's (later David Travers') Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig and Eero Saarinen, to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.

The program ran intermittently from 1945 until 1966. The first six houses were built by 1948 and attracted more than 350,000 visitors. While not all 36 designs were built, most of those that were constructed were built in Los Angeles; a few are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and one was built in Phoenix, Arizona. A number of them appeared in the magazine in iconic black and white photographs by architectural photographer Julius Shulman. 2

Charles and Ray Eames' contribution to this experiment included their own home. With its open plan and its integration of structure with landscape, the Eames house translated into high-tech forms the democratic ethos Frank Lloyd Wright had earlier explored in his prairie houses. With the Eameses, as with Wright, the Japanese influence is pronounced, evident not only in the simple, tatami matlike rhythm of walls, floors and ceilings, but also in the attempt to displace Western ideas of art with the Eastern art of living. 3

These houses epitomized the nature of "mid-century modern" architecture.

"As a romantic tendency colors the modern architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a classic predisposition flavors that of Philip Johnson.

In Johnson's work every element is placed in symmetrical response to some other and each bears a close and logical relationship to the total design...

Less evident, but no less important a Japanese charac- teristic, is the use of a standard unit of measure throughout the residence. It determines the proportional relations of house parts in the same way that the ken assures the Japanese builder of pleasing visual effects." 1

We have seen both outright attribution and denial of attribution to inspiration from the Japanese.

"Johnson, however, had political theories of his own. He laid out his position on race in an article for the Examiner titled 'A Dying People?' He opened the article by warning that Americans were failing to reproduce in sufficient quantities, predicting deserted ghost towns and a massive population decline. Midway through the article, however, Johnson displaced population decrease in absolute terms with a decrease in the population of the white race, writing: 'This decline in fertility, so far as scientists have been able to discover, is unique in the history of the white race.'

The decline Johnson was predicting would be only among whites, the non-whites apparently not worthy of consideration as part of the population. 'In short,' Johnson wrote, 'the United States of America is committing race suicide.' Only by thinking in the broader terms of the greater good of the race could whites save it:

…by their lack of will to live and grow, [Americans] themselves accelerate the already rapid decline in births. I have heard many educated men talk in this way: --Well if we are not the fittest to survive, nature will wipe us out. The Japanese may be more fit to survive. Remember Darwin.--" 5

Remember Darwin indeed. The hatred is not new. The spread of ideas is not new. The need for time to accept and to own what is new: these are build into our very genes.

For better and worse.