famous last words

japanese prints are certainly very interesting, as japanese prints -- in other words as long as they stay in japan.







a people should not appropriate what belongs to another race; in so doing, they are apt to make stupid mistakes.













there would soon be a kind of universal art, without any individual characteristics.

-- renoir 1

white ducks

Darkening waves –
cry of wild ducks,
faintly white.

Ocean waves are dark,
only calls of ducks
faintly lighten in the sky.

Dusk falls upon the sea as
ducks call
faintly in the whiteness.

The sea darkening . . .
oh voices of the
wild ducks
Crying, whirling, white.

The sea darkens;
the voices of the wild ducks
are faintly white.

The sea grows dark.
The voices of the wild ducks
turn white.

By that fallen house the pear-tree stands
full- blooming... an ancient battle site.

Shiki


The Groundfall Pear

It is the one he chooses,
Yellow, plump, a little bruised
On one side from falling.
That place he takes first.

Jane Hirshfield


Study of Two Pears

I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

Wallace Stevens


May Day

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple
Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

Sarah Teasdale

lichts camera pattern

(via) (via)

the prints are old and the wallpapers are new, then, as now, the designs, the colors wake us, warm us, cheer us and make us glad.

(artwork clockwise: maxfield parrish, marcel poncin, william merritt chase, and utamaro. wallpapers left to right tradeworth, ritva kronlund, romo, and two from fromental. please recognize that the colors here may be just plain darn wrong.)

an element always interesting to consider, but never wholly knowable, is intent. even the person who believes they know their own intent may not. so how to speak of the international flow and flux of art and ideas.

to what extent, and i'm sure it was some, was the west's fascination with japan and all things japanese a search for (the illusion of) the simpler life. the industrial revolution had made cities louder and dirtier; how attractive then the 'peaceful'

(unencumbered by the last two century's innovations) images of that eastern nation, or even the coasts and countrysides of their own.


even the japanese, meiji period on out, designed to that desire in the west, so here we have japanese art from that period, plus several, again, of the pictorialist photographers who, along with their leader stieglitz, were busy making a new branch of art.

how much of this all was 'conscious,' the grasp and re-creation of a more bucolic reality than ever may have existed? and to whom?

(via youtube)

via the wonderful estampes japonaises

sada yacco

along with sarah bernhardt, loie fuller, misia, and cleo de merode, sada yacco captured the imagination and the hearts of artists and the public alike during the time of the early century.

known as japan's first female actor, she then parlayed her fame with a world-wide tour. she danced with fuller in fuller's own theater,
and brought over her own troupe of japanese players.

(here read the inter- view with ms. sada- yakko by yone nogu- chi. and find many photos of sada (and fuller) at the 1900 world exposition in paris. by the way, the painting of sado in a lavender kimono is by Tavik Frantisek Simon, whose work we saw here.)

while fred- erick cayley robinson's allegiance to the pre- raphaelite movement is obvious, and explicit, to my eye, given the outlining of forms, the asymmetrical balance on his canvases, and, to some extent, his subject matter, he was influenced by the japanese as well.

it's not surprising; he studied in paris at the very moment when japonisme was in bloom, the prints being shown and collected,





the work inspiring illustrator and painter (and jeweller, etc.) throughout the town. japonisme once removed?



obvious also is the charles rennie mackintosh influence. cayley robinson held a professorship at the glasgow school of art,



in mackintosh's wonderful building. the elongated simplification of form can be seen in the work of many artists from 'the glasgow school.'

cat moon

THE CAT AND THE MOON

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round
like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared
at the moon,
For, wander and wail
as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minna- loushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minna- loushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

-- W. B. Yeats, in 1919

another element from which we can imagine the line straight through to modern art is the 'outside the box' phenomenon.











by this i mean literally going outside the lines.

frames are made deliberately too small to fit the people in them.

as in the cases we've seen before, these are sometimes

framing strategies, or perhaps for emphasis' or design's sake.






perhaps hiroshige (or utamaro) was just sitting there one day and had a creative inspiration: why must this always look like that???

and found it didn't.

wave

in finding the ability to simplify
we begin to learn to
understand essentials.