cherry blossoms

School Entrance Ceremony Amid Radiation Fear in an
Exclusion Zone Near the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor

In Japan, April’s cherry blossoms signal a symbolic beginning, a new stage in life. On April 6th, along with school children across the nation, Iwaki City, within the 40 km radiation exclusion zone, held many school entrance ceremonies for elementary, middle and high schools.

Iwaki's Yumoto Daini Middle School’s ceremony was a bit different: not only were there 33 new students, but refugees living on the school grounds and some members of the Self Defense Force also attended. Overall 107 people participated in the ceremony. Headmaster Sawai Shiro may have exceeded his authority in taking the humanitarian step of granting permission for the refugees to remain on campus as the school year begins, at the risk of being punished later for breaking rules.

School Entrance Ceremony at Yumoto Daini Middle School,
Iwaki City, Fukushima

Local sources report that in the first week or so after the nuclear crisis began, Iwaki City experienced difficulties in receiving supplies like food and fuel because many agents refused to deliver.Since early April, refugees who had evacuated outside the prefecture started returning. Restaurants in downtown Iwaki are reopening and many convenience stores boast reasonably well-stocked shelves, while gas, water and electricity have been restored. Iwaki City has repeatedly confirmed that “radiation is at a stable level which is not harmful to human health.” Iwaki officials explain that this judgment is based on figures provided by the Fukushima prefectural government regularly updated since March 11.

Principal Sawai began his welcome speech by saying, "I am glad to be able to confirm that all 33 new students are participating in this ceremony amidst a disaster that had forced many people to leave Yumoto.""In our district,” he continued,“some people survived by drinking water from their bath for weeks as there was no running water. I want you to care for each other especially for anyone who is in trouble." He concluded, "You young students, are the future of Japan. Now, we should be bound as one beyond differences in ideas, position or self interest."

Though all the new students attended, not all teachers were there. As a result of the catastrophe, personnel for the school was frozen and new teachers were not dispatched to the school, Sawai explained. As a result of the lack of teachers, there will be only one class run by a teacher for each grade.

School Doctor Informs Children “The radiation problem is already finished.”

Following the principal’s speech, the school’s doctor in his white coat stated matter-of-factly that, based on science, people should know that the worst of the earthquake damage had passed and that radiation leakages from the Fukushima Daiichi plant were decreasing and would soon fade away.

“The radiation problem is already finished,” he told the children and their parents. “You can go to school and go outside without any problem. You should not fear malicious gossip.”

While the doctor’s assurance that all major risks have ended would certainly raise eyebrows among most people outside the prefecture, many locals share this belief. We note the difference in perspective between radiation experts and people assessing the issues at a distance and those on the ground facing the destruction of their livelihood. While rumors of the dangers of radiation continue to swirl, many locals are even more afraid that rumors will destroy their businesses and any hope of securing their livelihood and rebuilding their communities.

Ikarashi Yoshitaka, 33, is one who is particularly keen on restoring his business and the local economy, a goal that leads him to downplay warnings of radiation risk.“It is just an emotional thesis that ours is ‘a city in danger!’” he insisted. Together with dozens of volunteers from across Japan, Ikarashi has visited many areas throughout the radiation exclusion zone. He confidently asserts that his $600 made in U.S "Geiger counter" has detected no abnormal amount of radiation.

Ikarashi is troubled by the fact that the milk business he manages suffered a 90% drop in sales as a result of radiation fears. Some farmers have been forced to throw away their milk, and at least one local farmer is rumored to have committed suicide over the ruin of his business.

Following the government announcement of level 7, Ikarashi observed that “residents will not listen; they don’t trust the government. The greatest concern for locals is to restore their towns and I’m doing my best to restore Iwaki City.”

Honma Hiroshi, 56, on patrol with the SDF in Iwaki comments: “I’m surprised that local people are so calm. Even within the 30 km radiation exclusion zone, they don’t even wear special anti-radiation clothes (Taibex). Even after the level 7 announcement, there has been no panic in the city."

Desperation over the destruction of the local economy appears to have provoked an unscientific optimism concerning radiation in some local communities struggling to get back on their feet.

Makiko SEGAWA in Fukushima 1

men & women for all seasons: 1903 (the calendars)

the wiener werkstatte began just as the important journal,
ver sacrum, ended. while it had published calendars before, the participants outdid themselves, going out in glory, with their calendar for 1903, which also happens to be the only one nearly completely traceable today.

i will admit how i've cheated at the end,
but in the meantime, a little info.

Between 1897 and 1932, the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) served as magnets for Austria’s avant garde. Unlike modernists in other European countries, these Austrians shared no concrete stylistic program, but rather were united by their belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork): a completely coordinated visual environment.

Although the Gesamtkunstwerk’s proponents anticipated many aspects of modern design, their underlying ideology was essentially conservative. The architect Josef Hoffmann and the designer Koloman Moser, collaborators at the Secession and co-founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, wanted to recapture the aesthetic values of the preindustrial era, to make whole a world that seemed to be fragmenting. Vienna’s artists and artisans were engaged in a communal project aspiring to offer nothing less than spiritual redemption.

The totalizing tendencies of the Secession were manifested both in its evangelical mission and in its attempt to achieve a synthesis of multiple art forms. Not only painters, but also architects and designers were admitted to the organization. “We recognize no difference between high art and low art,” the Secessionists declared in Ver Sacrum. “All art is good.” A pronounced interest in the applied arts was expressed in the type of work shown at the Secession as well as in the care lavished on customized installations.

The Secession’s most ambitious and successful Gesamtkunstwerk was its 1902 exhibition devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven. This multi-media presentation included interior design, sculpture, graphics, painting and music, but the best remembered contribution was probably Klimt’s raised frieze, which encapsulated the reigning artistic philosophy with unparalleled concision. Quoting Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” (the poem set to music in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) in the mural’s final, redemptive panel, Klimt proclaimed his solidarity with the poet and the composer as emissaries of aesthetic deliverance.

The philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk was unabashedly elitist: the self-anointed would lead, all others must follow. And though the Secession ostensibly comprised a community of like-minded individuals, its members were not particularly inclined to democratic compromise. In 1905, friction between the Secession’s more traditional easel painters and the Gesamtkunstwerk devotees caused the latter group (including Klimt, Hoffmann and Moser) to walk out en masse.

The Wiener Werkstätte, established in 1903, now became the sole institution uniting Austria’s more advanced artists. While painters such as Klimt and, a bit later, the Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele were drawn into its orbit, the Werkstätte was first and foremost a design collective. As a result, the organization’s interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk was less introspective, more practical and expansive than had been the case at the Secession.

In 1932, after several brushes with bankruptcy, the Wiener Werkstätte closed its doors for good. Despite its ultimate demise, however, the Werkstätte left a powerful legacy. In addition to anticipating the meshing of form, function and construction intrinsic to modern design, the Gesamtkunstwerk concept has done much to shape the way we relate to objects. The creation of a cohesive “look”—from Donna Karan separates to Ralph Lauren home furnishings—has by now become a given of the upscale lifestyle to which many Americans aspire. Global capitalism and a highly evolved advertising industry provide our contemporary design moguls with a breadth and reach that Hoffmann, in his wildest dreams, could never have anticipated.

The premium charged for design and marketing, above and beyond the raw cost of manufacture, has become enormous today, when both discount sneakers and $150 Nikes are produced in the same Filipino sweatshops. To be sure, this is not the preindustrial Eden imagined by the Wiener Werkstätte’s founders, and present-day design sensibilities are more eclectic, less philosophically charged, than the early twentieth-century Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet objects continue to provide comfort in times of uncertainty, and the attempt to find comprehensive solutions remains seductive, even though we should know that such schemes never really work. 1

Ver Sacrum was a magazine publishing the works of most important artists of Viennese Secession between 1898 and 1903. The prints published in this short-lived but extremely important periodical are very valuable - names like Gustav Klimt, Emil Orlik, Koloman Moser or Alphonse Mucha are among those who published here. Some of the artists became famous in part thanks to the magazine. 2

Ver Sacrum was the major publication of the Vienna Secession movement, a group of artists who banded together in Vienna at the turn of the century to challenge what they saw as the conservative, academic bent of the city's art establishment. Their membership included the artists named above as well as Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and others.

Ver Sacrum was published from 1898 to 1903, running essays on art theory as well as original artwork by the members and other artists whose work influenced them. In conjunction with the magazine, a yearly calendar was published, this being the last of them. In printed, illustrated wrappers which show some toning, else fine. 3

now i fess up. the december just above is actually just november with the first part changed. wrong number of days and all. it's got the correct image, but i could not find the month form itself. and the image for june is by the correct artist, but is not the original from the calendar. that, i couldn't find either, and finding work by this artist at all was difficult because she was russian, and there are about 4,683 spelling variations for her name.

but again, i don't know of anywhere you will find even this much of the completed calendar.

and mr van hoytema: we'll return next.
i've completed several more months!

Maurice Denis : Earthly Paradise

The Beautiful Icons

I believe that Art should sanctify Nature; I believe that Vision without Spirit is futile; and the mission of the aesthete is to erect things of beauty as imperishable icons.

From the age of fourteen, Maurice Denis recorded in his Journal his ardent desire to be a Christian painter. At the Lycée, he met Vuillard and Roussel, and at the Académie Julian, he became friends with Bonnard, Ranson and Sérusier. These young artists, who shared the same ideas about creating a synthetist, idealistic kind of art, founded the group called the Nabis, from a Hebrew word meaning “prophet.” Their aim was to render in comprehensible signs the inexpressible ideal, the secret language of God, of love and emotion. Denis, dubbed “the Nabi of the beautiful icons,” became their spokesman and theorist. His striking Easter Procession, a mystical symbolist painting, shows “figures of the soul” wandering along the “path of life” in search of their vocation, through the wavering blue shadows of a sacred grove. In the distance, nuns kneel before an angel who is guiding them along the way toward their calling.

The Poetic Arabesques of Art Nouveau

To start with, the pure arabesque, as plain as possible; a wall is empty: fill it with symmetrical brushstrokes of shapes in harmonious colours (stained glass, Egyptian paintings, Byzantine mosaics, Japanese wall hangings).

Anticipating Art Nouveau, Denis wanted to rethink the interior decoration of the “modern house.” Ladder in the Foliage, designed for a ceiling, was the first of many large-scale decorative paintings. He also created patterns for wallpaper and designs for stained glass, tapestries and ceramics. Posters, books, fans and even blinds became vehicles for incorporating art into everyday life, transcending the distinction between architecture, writing and painting.

The Nabi Avant-garde

Remember that a picture – before being a war horse or a nude woman or an anecdote of some sort – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Together with his fellow Nabis, Denis opened up a new direction for Post-Impressionist modernism, taking his inspiration from the painting of Gauguin and Van Gogh and making the picture, rather than the subject, the priority. The maxims of this bold new generation were violent colours, simplified shapes and emphasis on line – an approach that Matisse and the Fauves would embrace, too. Denis, even more than Bonnard or Vuillard, took his famous precept to the limit in his small paintings, often executed on simple pieces of cardboard, as in this Sunlight on the Terrace. With its emphatically decorative impact, this little experimental landscape, now famous, is really a covert flirtation with the abstract.

For Love of Marthe

Our two souls leaned towards each other in a slow movement. I was sad that I could not weep; she was so infinitely beautiful. Mysteries were being celebrated in the velvet depths of her eyes, and I was unworthy to witness them.

The gentle, affectionate Marthe, the artist’s wife and muse, was to give him seven children and the joy of family life. His art, inspired by love, portrayed her as the Wise Virgin in a Garden, the Princess in a Tower, the Woman Asleep in the Enchanted Forest, the triumphant Mother and the Italian Madonna. Marthe at the Piano is a young man’s declaration of love to his sweetheart, symbolized by a bouquet. They had the same tastes in music (Marthe was a gifted musician) and in avant-garde literature and theatre – the reference here is to the playwright Maeterlinck. Their friends included the composers Debussy, Chausson and Vincent d’Indy and writers Mallarmé, Valéry, Gide and Claudel.

Italy and the “Return to Order”

The classical methods, which best display the artist’s good faith and commitment by ennobling them, nevertheless tend to diminish the expression of his own emotions and personal taste. His originality is obscured and, as it were, disappears in the breadth and perfection of the formula.

In 1898, Denis’s friend André Gide had shown him the beauties of Rome. The artist had previously illustrated Gide’s Le voyage d’Urien, an indispensable book for contemporary bibliophiles (our exhibition shows several of the little-known drawings for this book). Convinced that the way forward for modern art was to return to classical order, from this period onwards Denis sought to impose on his work a new concern for order and discipline. A whole generation was to follow his lead in seeking new solutions, including Picasso in the postwar period and Le Corbusier in La leçon de Rome. Henceforth, Denis continued to revisit Italy, still his favourite destination despite many other trips abroad, including a few days (and three lectures ) in Canada in 1927.

A Time of Harmony

At Perros, Silencio. It is striking how appropriate the house is to my life, made up as it is of my children, painting, the beach and my studio. And then there are the woods, and lastly solitude, and the most beautiful sunsets.

Brittany, a traditional region that inspired many French primitivist artists, was Denis’s favourite place for summer vacations. At Silencio, the house in Perros-Guirec that he purchased in 1908, he created an Arcadian existence. September Evening celebrates his daughters playing happily on the beach and Marthe nursing their first son. This very modern seaside holiday scene, bathed in the golden light of sunset, becomes a timeless family idyll.1

Montreal Musem of Art

Febrary 22 to May 20 2007

Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion

(from top right: denis; toshihide migata; speer;
toshikata mizuno; hanko kajita; kurzweil; toshikata mizuno; keishu takeuchi)

love & destruction

max kurzweil, a founding member of the vienna secession, lived a charmed life, filled with love, sunlight, and the sparkling waves. though he may have been outshone by his fellows (klimt, moser), he was an enthusiastic contributor to the movement's journal ver sacrum (sacred spring), loved teaching as well as being a father.

or so it appeared until he killed himself in 1916 at the age of 49. he made this print of his wife in 1903.

kanae yamamoto was an innovator as well, being a pioneer in the sodaku hanga movement in which unlike the generations before him, the artist himself carried out the whole process of creating the prints, from cutting the wood to doing the printing. he also joined with others in the movement to start their own magazine, hosun (little things).

having come from a modest family, kanae was supporting himself as an illustrator from an early age. while in europe to explore the art movements there, he became aware of the socialist movements gaining strength, and when he returned to japan, he worked tirelessly to bring art education to children and the poor.

having developed the obsession, though, he began to ignore his own artwork. just before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 64 he destroyed all of the woodblocks of his works with a hatchet.

(thanks to bibliodyssey for turning me on to kanae.)