besides the madonna

it is said that mary cassatt received the inspiration to attempt her long series of mother and child portraits from utamaro's portraits of the same.

up to that point this was hardly a legitimate subject for fine art.

is it not then reasonable to think that pioneering photographer gertrude kasebier benefitted from the same inspiration?

and isn't it interesting that war had always been considered fit.

saturday evening girls

as a response to unem- ployment, lack of education, and dismal living conditions amongst north boston immigrants, a local library organized a group for jewish and italian teenaged girls. for at least one night a week it got them off the street, and it got them reading.

as the women running the program began to recognize the girls' real needs, a program was begun wherein the girls were taught a trade: pottery making. and thus paul revere pottery was born.

today at auction a lovely SEG bowl might fetch $21,000.

[In the above example, the artist] interpreted Queen Anne's lace in a stylized manner with a heavy black outline [as in japanese prints] from several points of view and at varying stages of bloom. Broad bands shift from white through three shades of blue to a grayish yellow-green, which merges with the plants' foliage. This effect reveals the influence of color theories espoused by tonalist artist Arthur Wesley Dow. [and as seen in the japanese prints] 1

and, wonderfully, somehow, i think, this was not an anomaly. newcomb pottery, marblehead pottery, arquipa pottery, and others as has very similar circumstances as their beginnings.

essences

while photo- graphers in the west struggled to define them- selves, to them- selves and to the world, as artists, many japanese printmakers were going through a similar process. ironically, it was due to the popularization of the camera that interest began to falter in woodblock prints in japan, as one impor- tant function they had ful- filled was to document.


artists in france were going through a related process, breaking free of the documentarian, glorified, idealized portrait of life that was still what was considered appropriate as real art in france. impressionists and printmakers were hotheads; this would all blow over. documentation was no longer a goal of




many of the fine arts, and thus artists were freed to explore the sensations, impressions, of a particular place, rather than its precise dimensions.

The Quiet Landscapes of William B. Post

William B. Post (1857-1921) of Fryeburg, Maine, was an influential member of the Photo- Secession, the group that first championed art photography in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. A colleague of Alfred Stieglitz, Post was active from the mid-1880s through the 1910s, producing platinum prints.

Post frequently captured the seasonal changes to the Maine landscape in his sensitively printed photographs such as Intervale, Winter of 1899. The most widely exhibited photograph during his lifetime, this image also appeared as a photogravure in Stieglitz's famous magazine Camera Work. The high horizon line, the expanse of snow in the foreground, and the limited tonal ranges of the trees suggest his creative ability to invent new compositions and poetic harmonies influenced by Japanese art. His use of a narrow, vertical format and choice of floral subjects in other pictures also relates to Asian scroll paintings.

Like many painters, photographers, and designers of his day, Post absorbed the craze for Japonisme after a trip to Japan in 1891. He began showing his photographic work in New York the following year, and in 1893 he showed the young Stieglitz how to use a hand-held camera.

[yes, this article, reviewing a show that has been making the rounds for a year or so, is about post, but, as clearly seen in the last paragraph, it could be about ivan bilibin, in his little vertical print. it could be about coburn or white, whose photographic histories resemble that of post in many ways. and of course riviere's 36 views of the eiffel tower fits right in.]

Water Lilies

•
If you have forgotten water lilies floating
On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon shade,
If you have

forgotten their wet,
sleepy fragrance,
Then you can return and
not be afraid.

But if you remember, then turn away forever
To the plains and the prairies where pools are far apart,
There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies,
And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your heart.

(and)...................................................— Sara Teasdale

towards less obscure....

a book i took out of the library today (great photographers--a time-life book, published in 1971) says this about the photo to the right:

'[clarence h.] white's preference for unassuming subjects is seen in this view of his home town, newark, ohio. with meticulous care, he creates a still life of geometric patterns, exaggerating the foreground for effect and cropping the width of the print to accentuate the tall, skinny telephone poles.'

ummm....

for some reason, there still seems to be very little recognition of the obvious japonisme in photographs, even when they are readily acknowledged in woodblock prints.

clarence h. white learned his style from arthur wesley dow; while the japanese prints themselves were hitting europe, it was dow who brought the design philosophy to americans.




gertrude kasebier studied with dow as well, and, obviously, in the same place.












as did margaret jordan patterson.








isn't it fascinating to note that what is so obvious to many of us now could have been so obscure as recently as 1971.

there will be a lot more on this, some wonderful photos.
blueinall

together we sing

max klinger was born in leipzig and was consi- dered a surrealist for his visually and psycho- logically complex images. he worked in all media, including etching, painting, and scupture, to equal success.

gertrude kasebier was an american painter who turned to photography in her late thirties. she was a founding member of the photo- secession movement which brought to photography the same values as had been brought to all of the other arts, crafts, philosophies, etc.

ninko tsukioka was known for his work in sosaku hanga style, around the beginning of the twentieth century.

shinji ando was born in 1960, and studied art at the tokyo national university of fine arts and music.

salt

i have begun to explore today the occurrences of japonisme in russia. illustrated here are two pieces from ivan bilibin, who embraced in his work all of the trademarks of the style, and one, or i should say 'yet another,' poster for the musical 'the geisha.'

but i have found that the poetry movement was effected as well. anna akhmatova was known to have adopted the thinking of what they called 'acmeism.' in the description below, doesn't it sound very much like a combined attitude of craftsman philosophy and japanese awareness?:

'Acmeism, a school in modern Russian poetry, formed after fracturing away from Symbolism -- then the dominant school of the Russian literary scene, which often used words as symbols to express high romanticism in the prophetic and portentousness of the beyond. To the Acmeist, the role of the poet was not to be an oracle or a diviner but a skilled worker. They revolted against Symbolism's vagueness and attempts to privilege emotional suggestion over clarity and vivid sensory images. ...the manifesto for Acmeism... calls for poets to seek beauty in the natural and physical world of their environment -- to be industrious in language and vision in order to reflect the realness of the subject.' 1

i could only find two poems online of anna akhmatova's for which i liked the translations, so while this poem's subject may have nothing to do with this blog's central ideas, perhaps, if we can listen solely to the language, we will hear the clarity that the description predicts.


Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Anna Akhmatova

Translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz


From Poems of Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Granted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency. All rights reserved.

inheriting the wind, and the water...

hiroshige was a fireman. his family was too poor for him to try to make it on his own as an artist.


but he had had the artist's spirit since he was a child, and spent many years working, travelling, and being inspired by hokusai, slightly his predecessor.

the patience paid off because when he made it big, he made it with images from his travels; drawn from life, they were of great interest to a populace that was developing into a 'middle class,' one that travelled itself.

as we have discussed, while his work still appears to us as purely japanese, western artistic characteristics (shadows, reflections, and perspective) had begun to make an appearance in his work, along with great gradations of color--a result of

both his acquaintance with western art, and his involvement with a printing industry that was improving rapidly.

when we see the work of the yoshidas, of kawase hasui, of fletcher, phillips, riviere or any of the rest of the direct descendants of hiroshige's experimentation we have mentioned here, we can remember hiroshige's death poem:

i don't want to set
the world on fire.
i just want to start
a flame in your heart.1

(oh please please forgive me. the real one is here.)

as eve said....

EVE OVERLOOKING THE GARDEN

The garden has ignited.
It’s feverish. Even the white clematis
flutters with sun,

and the red lilies and coral bells
burn back at it. Windblown petals
of cardinals flash

across the buttery primroses:
a good year for gardens.
Everything shines.

I write this standing at my window.
I don’t go down into the garden.
From here I see everything

at once, all the flowers trapped
in color, in their showy, slow
ignition — petal, pistil, leaf and stamen

separating off. Perhaps
there is a way
out of such fiery

gorgeousness. It must
be wearing. Even at night
when I’ve gone blind
I hear this splendid confusion

of harmonics, what only can be
the sharp yellowing
of gloriosas, the speckle-

throated oranging
of the Canada lilies.

—© John Engels


Is there anything new under the sun?
Certainly there is.
See how a bird flies, how flowers smile!

—© yone noguchi

(source)

(i think it is also worth mentioning that since in both cultures, what was most often being painted were the upper classes, it is not surprising that this interest was shared.)