the last midnight

during this same period, quickly approaching the last midnight of the edo era, while france was growing ever more "refined," and "classical," some very different things were happening in england, and, not unrelated, i don't think, in japan as well.

i didn't have any idea when i began this series that it would end with such elegance, such synchronicity, and probably to say 'end' is wrong anyway.

"When I am asked, 'Who was the greatest artist of all?', I reply that I can never quite decide whether to pick Turner or Hokusai. These two men were near contemporaries: born in 1760, Hokusai was 15 years older than Turner and died in 1849, just two years before him. Both men were hard at it as full-time pupils flora about seven and devoted themselves entirely to art for the whole of their long lives. Their output was prodigious: Hokusai finished more than 30,000 drawings plus more than 500 illustrated books. Turner's drawings and watercolours number more than 20,000, in addition to 900 oil paintings, many of them very large.

"Both started as urchins in huge cities, London and Edo (Tokyo), but expanded their universe to take in the whole of nature. This process of observing and recording was never-ceasing. Turner was trying to find new ways to paint mist, vapour, water eddies and wind-flung distances in his late seventies. Hokusai wrote at the age of 74, 'I produced nothing of much value before I was 70. But I am now really beginning to learn. By the time I am 110, each individual dot or line I draw will possess its own life.'" *

but there are wondrous other coincidences. take for example turner. now, remember john cozens, son of andrew? well, john was ill, and he began to see a doctor named dr. monro. monro was a great fan of cozens' paintings, and was an amateur painter himself. he soon had collected a great collection of the work of the younger cozens.

now we have already suggested, quite convincingly, i believe, that cozens the elder had gotten his hands on some of the japanese work arriving into the netherlands; dutch painting was popular in britian at that time, and we know the dutch also had japanese scrolls. it is not a far leap to assume that john had seen them as well.

dr. munro also took art students, occasionally. when he did, a major practice he'd lead them through was to copy, over and over, the cozens paintings. one of his two leading students you may not have heard of -- his name was thomas girtin. but the other, his friend and schoolmate you have. it was jmw turner.

about 6000 miles to the west, the imported artwork from holland was having a major impact. shiba kokan was a japanese painter who had gotten ahold of a dutch book on 'how to draw.' being one to tend to the rational, even scientific, he was quickly convinced that european painting was superior to that in japan and quickly sought to learn all he could. he could not read the dutch, but he could grasp the principals, such as perspective and modeling, from the book's illustrations.

"Many of the masters of ukiyo-e showed their enthusiasm for this Europeanizing trend, including the young Katsushika Hokusai, a student in Shiba Kokan's workshop."1 hokusai completed a series of "prints in the western style" just as the century turned to the 19th; with framing, perspective, and some shading/shaping, hokusai was helping to usher in the changes that would immediately follow his death.

hokusai died in 1849 and turner died in 1851. admiral perry arrived in 1853.

two men, half-a-world apart, on such similar paths, as though meeting each other in spirit just before their cultures met again in the world.

in the hokusai prints it is easy to see, once one is told, how much he has borrowed from the western styles, becoming organized, scientific, and sound. just as turner abandoning himself to the moment, losing everything, losing perspective, losing even shading, and in losing these, gaining finally his freedom to paint.

*Johnson, Paul. Spectator. (March 27, 2004)

of spice boxes and kings

remember back when reagan was in office and they were saying that he was responsible for tv shows like dallas because of using gold-rimmed china and being just generally high-falutin'?

and king edward in england -- he liked his women full of figure and so this became the trend? and ruskin thought raphael was the bomb, so we went all classical again?

well the same thing happened in france around the same time (which means it had nothing to do with what anyone said or thought were their reasons, but rather some collective unconscious uber-reason which i am not going to guess at at the moment) because napolean thought it should.

nor can i guess why classicism reminds me of nothing more than, well you see. certainly not because of napolean's famous instruction to josephine: i'm back from the war tonight--don't wash! he called them her spice boxes. really!

all i know is that this impression is inescapable when one begins to research just what art was going on in france just before the fateful franco-japaneseo meeting, the work that was allowed to be shown in the salon, the work that revealed man's (and woman's, apparently, and still an issue) perfectibility, noblest callings (read 'politically correct'), and beauty of form.

"At the middle of the 19th century in France, the art world was officially dominated by the Academy of Fine Arts. They set the standards for French painting and held an annual art show, 'the Salon.' Artists could only get their work into the Salon if it was approved by the Academy's 'jury,' and the jury had very set ideas about what should, and should not, be called art. "

and another thing: "Nudes were okay in historical and allegorical paintings, according to the jury, but to show them in daily life was strictly forbidden." 1

so why did all these classicists show so many armpits? why did the pre-raphaelites show everyone with their elbows tucked in tight? don't you just want to go out and do a thesis on just this very subject?

next time a further look at that moment in art history, the end of the edo years, the end of classicism, and the beginnings of a whole new world.

but wait! there's more!

the edo era was slowly drawing to a close. that long, poetic, peaceful, isolationist time would soon run right up into the face of the black ships of admiral perry. during the period, japanese art began to look like what we have come to know as japanese art.

but there were cracks in the dike. as iconic as a print may be, like hokusai's famous great wave, its story may come as a surprise.

"To Westerners, this woodblock seems to be the quintessential Japanese image, yet it's quite un-Japanese.

"Traditional Japanese would have never painted lower-class fishermen (at the time, fishermen were one of the lowest and most despised of Japanese social classes); Japanese ignored nature; they would not have used perspective; they wouldn't have paid much attention to the subtle shading of the sky.

"We like the woodblock print because it's familiar to us. The elements of this Japanese pastoral painting originated in Western art: it includes landscape, long-distance perspective, nature, and ordinary humans, all of which were foreign to Japanese art at the time. The Giant Wave is actually a Western painting, seen through Japanese eyes. Hokusai didn't merely use Western art. He transformed Dutch pastoral paintings by adding the Japanese style of flattening and the use of color surfaces as a element." 1

now, this doesn't just contradict many things i've learned about japanese prints, their intro- duction to the western world of normal people rather than just royalty and biblical figures as appropriate subjects for art, for example. but it also, quite con- trarily, may answer my question of why we saw peasants in those very early dutch paintings!

how ironic is it that the image most frequently reproduced, with varying degrees of craft, beauty, and sanity, should call for response so strongly, perhaps, because it is so far less foreign than what's come before.

next, as we continue our timeline, we'll hear
hokusai's own thoughts on all this, and see a whole lot more.

18th century, part II; the bits

 now as we've seen in culture after culture before, a thriving middle-class nurses the arts and 18th century japan was no different. with the edo period, the long isolationist era, peace and prosperity reigned across the land.

kabuki theater, poetry -- humorous and serious, the novel, the visual arts -- prints, paintings, and illustrated books -- and the sexual ones -- the courtesan districts, for example, prospered. and as a sort of visual chronicle of these growing realms, ukiyo-e -- images of this floating, ephemeral, world, was born as well.

what began as painting quickly turned to (at first) black-ink, occasionally hand- colored, prints, due to their ease of reproduction and the money there-by to be made. not surprisingly, spring painting was among the first genre to achieve major popularity. (it would be the waves of censorship that would bring back the landscape.)

the full-color print, however, was soon to follow, and it was primarily used in the spring painting; it was a natural hit, given all the newly- found free time. here's where we get to that debate again, though.

many, including the artist himself, attribute its invention to haranobu suzuki, late in the 18th century. but there is debate. some credit hu cheng yen, in china in the 17th century. "This was the medium the amateurs of spring painting had been looking for." 1 some, though, credit the jesuits for introducing this to the chinese (if they had only known!).

some point to the witch paintings of hans baldung grien, a german artist in the early 16th century, but since there is very little information about his full-color process, i believe it was the tool known as the pen which provided the reds, yellows and blues.

in any case, does it matter? it would not be the first time technology travelled east while philosophy/ design travelled east, nor, as you know, would it be the last. but as i said, haranobu said he was the man. "The inventor of the color printing was Suzuki Harunobu (1725-1770). Harunobu had begun with the printing from the three or four woodblocks, gradually enlarging the number of the blocks to seven or nine." 2 (note how the prints are still somewhat 'primitive' to what our eyes are used to, as does the color.)

during the 17th and 18th centuries, as prosperity flourished, more and more dutch books (except those on religion) were allowed into japan. books of botany and anatomy, history and works by german copper-plate artists. we can see their tell-tale footprints everywhere. just as we can see the simplification of line, a shift in perspective, and a new awareness of the moment in the west in all the arts.

the 18th century

the longer i look into the 18th century the more confused i get. it was a time of great social and technological change.

as much as i may be learning, there are too many gaps in my know- ledge for me to put together anything that feels cohesive, or even comprehensible. so why don't i just toss some stuff out here and when i'm done (this will take several posts) we'll see if anything has come clear.

now if you look at the two images above you might assume that they are somehow related. are they? i think even knowing the answer doesn't answer the ques- tion. (even diagramming its frac- tals explains nothing of this.) 1

the line on top is from an 18th century british painter and theoretician named andrew cozens (reputedly the bastard son of peter the great). his son robert followed him in form as well.

"In 1759 Andrew published An Essay to Facilitate the Invention of Landskips, Intended for Students in the Art, setting out in brief his method for composing with the aid of ink blots and citing the precedent of Leonardo da Vinci, who had recommended looking for images in crumbling walls as a means of assisting the invention. " 2

this was new? the japanese were following their chinese teachers at the same time without having read this essay.

the work of the dutch, however did become popular in great britian after 1700, so i can't see it as inconceivable that dutch traders brought in artwork along with kimono, and that the british saw that too.

what a stunning and dramatic departure we begin to see, as from constable, for example. well, departure from european art, anyway.

I think that's enough for the moment. i don't know that i'll ever get any definitive answers, here, but my eyes can be informed.

yes, mountains just look this way. we can all see it. at least it's true to our eyes, now. but if that's true, why didn't western painters paint it that way until after they met the japanese? and why isn't anyone mentioning it?

the 17th century

we have seen what landscape painting looked like in japan and the netherlands before 1600, when the two met, so now we shall look at the 17th century's products, and question who influenced whom.

a booklet i have from the national gallery of art reads, "The Dutch school of painting, arising in the early seventeenth century and already in decline by its end, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of art.

"Unusual, first of all, is the abrupt- ness with which it appears; suddenly, about 1620, there is a Dutch school, fully-developed, a school which has its origins in sixteenth-century Netherlandsish painting to be sure, but which is quite unexpectedly original.

"Unusual, too, is the extraordinary number of great artists who worked in such a small country during so short a period of time. Finally, the solid excellence of their painting is remarkable and what might be called the homogeneity of their view of life and their interpretation of it, the consistent way in which they express their land and its people.

"They are, in fact, so Dutch! They stand apart from the artists of the other schools of seventeenth-century painting in Europe, even that of the Spanish Netherlands, just to the south. Dutch painting of the great age reveals the period and place of its origin in every passage of paint as legibly as they may be read in the label on the picture frame." 1

now we also read, "Folding screens called the Namban-byobu were produced in great number by artists of the Kano School from the end of the sixteenth through the seventeenth century. These screens were Japanese in style and technique.

"On the other hand, Church taught Western art techniques for the production of icons and other works of religious art which were necessary for the propagation of Christianity.

"But the Western-style of expression seen in the Edo period, the adoption of a realistic style of expression employing methods of perspective and shading, is in a different category from Namban-byobu and those religious works." 2

we read, "some suggest that "In the late 1620s van Goyen shifted to simpler motifs -- a few cottages along a village road or in the dunes, like in this painting -- and he achieved unification and depth by a leading diagonal and by a tonal treatment that subdues the local color and is expressive of atmospheric life." 3

this sounds to my ears like the very description of japanese art.

i'm very curious about your impression to these; did the japanese influence the dutch as much as the dutch influenced the japanese?

we may get more clues as we progress further into the edo period, and the beginnings of ukiyo-e. the dutch created everything we've defined as japanese? let's see what you think.

i want you to understand that i really do not like any of this at all. it throws so much of what i think i know into question. hokusai, hiroshige, so not japanese-y? stay tuned.

halleluljah

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