japonisme & buddhism • part I

and i begin again, but this series will wrap itself inextricably with the previous, a story of wright, and dow, and fenollosa, and, well, we'll see where it leads us. i see there has been far too little about fenollosa up to now, other than this, which is important, so i'll be remedying that. let's start building the connections....

"In 1871, as the infant Wright was already constructing with colored blocks, Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern, starting the Great Chicago Fire that destroyed the city. When young draughtsman Wright arrived in 1887, Chicago was the booming de facto capitol of America's west. Chicago needed to rebuild and had the money to do it. The city was a 'perfect storm' of architectural thought and development.

"On his fourth day looking for work, surviving (he claimed) on ten cents worth of bananas, Wright found work in the office of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, one of Chicago's most respected architects. In a contemporary photo of Silsbee's living room a 'kakemono' painting hangs by the hearth. This may have been Wright's first exposure to Japanese art.

Even more fateful, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, America's foremost expert on Japanese art, decorated by the Emperor Meiji himself, was Silsbee's cousin. Fenollosa stayed with Silsbee on trips home. At some point Wright met Fenollosa, later recalling:

"'When I first saw a fine print it was an intoxicating thing. At that time Ernest Fenollosa was doing his best to persuade the Japanese people not to wantonly destroy their works of art.... On one of his journeys home he brought many beautiful prints, those I made mine were the narrow tall decorative form hashirakake -- these I appreciate today more than I did then.'



"Those 'hashirakake' turned Wright's thoughts eastward forever. 'The first prints had a large share I am sure in vulgarizing the Renaissance for me.'

"Wright soaked up Fenellosa's lectures on Japanese art and architecture: harmony with nature, simplification, honest use of materials, and minimal decoration. Wright wrote on Japanese houses, '... all ornament, as we call it, they get out of the way the necessary things are done or by bringing out or polishing the beauty of the simple materials used in making the building." 1

(in the following paragraph there is a link to a video of a garden; you think it will be too long, and then you'll beg it not to end.)

"When Wright went to Japan, he visited Shikoku, Nagoya and Kyoto. Wright declared the Shugakuin, a seventeenth-century imperial stroll garden in north Kyoto, as the world's greatest work of art. "All that was like an open book to me," he recalled of the garden's design, "and I knew how to read it. I could read every word in it.... It was a great educational experience." 1

1. Burbank, Jon. "Frank Lloyd Wright's Japanese legacy." World and I April 2006

at the time of shakespeare

this screen, credited to matahei by ernest fenollosa was considered a national treasure and was sent to the exhibition of 1900 in paris by the japanese government.

fenollosa was a friend of morse's and was called to japan by him. in 1911 he wrote about the screen in epochs of chinese and japaense art. more about him later, but i think his descriptions of the 'hikone screen' illuminate the screen as well as the culture as much as its background of gold.

"[the screen] represents graceful figures of men and girls and children in rich colors upon a gold ground, seated upon the mats in utterly unrestrained japanese attitudes. in the center of one screen an old blind musician is giving a lesson in samisen-playing to two girls, while a party of young people nearby play a game of go. behind those two groups a beautiful landscape screen, evidently by kano motonobu, is unfolded. another group shows us all slender girls walking, while a gay young samurai leans in a most unconventional attitude upon his long sword. this shows us a tendency to dissipation that may well become the degeneration of the whole buke class*, if not checked...."

two more gold-backed screens by this artist are known.
fenollosa places all of these works in the early 1600s, about when shakespeare was working continents away.

i believe it is of someone in these two that fenollosa says, "...the lines of the young girl seated upon the bench with withdrawn knees are among the most graceful in all japanese art."

some credit matahei with having been the founder of the ukiyo-e school of painting, but some credit others. this kind of thing happens a lot.


* he was right. the bukes were the samurai.

the new math

we've already looked at dow's moment of epiphany, the realization that what he had been looking for was the book of hokusai prints right there in his hands. let's look a little closer:

dow has now met ernest fenollosa, and is studying with him at any possibility.

"In May, Fenollosa, with a certain flair he had for the dramatic, opened a door and showed Dow two magnificent screens by Okio. Dow looked at them in silence for a space and then exclaimed, 'Why can't I do that?' (The subject was a pine covered with snow.)

To this question Fenollosa replied, 'You can do it if you dare, but you don't dare.'

Dow instantly replied, 'I will dare!'

This pleased the Orientalist and he exclaimed, 'You will, you will, and I dare you to do it.'"

clearly, this was a moment of discovery for dow, of synthesis and excitement. he began seeing in a new way, one that, from his own perspective, returned to the basics in art, what all cultures had at some time done, the essential line, with everything extraneous removed.

the clarity of his vision was such that he went on to formulate, and to develop ways of teaching these insights to others, work that some say became more important than making art itself. he is credited for having changed the way art is regarded and taught in this country radically, and his methods were the staple of american art education for many years.

•

okay -- so we have a moment of person discovery, life-altering, piercing and pervasive. so.... um.... -- what about all these other guys??! was it worldwide epiphany-itis?

i went to the jung pages and apparently the descriptive phrase i wanted to use, 'collective unconscious,' doesn't actually mean what i have always taken it to mean, so that won't work, unless i am allowed to redefine (or expand its definitions) the concept to what i always thought it meant and what fits in rather well here, namely that there is some mysterious (until science figures it out) connection of every human's mind that rises and falls with the tide and explains how one idea can occur in many places at the same time.

spontaneous combustion?

wasn't this the stuff of impressionism, anyway? the release of detail in pursuit of truth?

artists throughout the west were paring down, simplifying, following ideas they had imbibed from the japanese prints; did each and every one of them feel themselves to be a solitary traveler?

it's such an interesting phenomenon-- i wish i knew the name for it.

when things change, we each want to name it, to own it, and to think we know the reason why.

The Book of Tea : 茶の本

THE CUP OF HUMANITY

Tea began as a medi- cine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism — Teaism.

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentiallya worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.


The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. 1

thus begins 'the book of tea,' written by Kakuzo Okakura in 1906. known to many as a scholar, particularly when it came to japanese art, it is perhaps not surprising that he wound up in boston.

as okakura was also a scholar of english, his life took some very interesting turns in the early years of the explorartion of japan by americans (usually from boston!): "Kakuzo Okakura, the connoisseur, curator and cultural historian mentored by Ernest Fenollosa, the Tokyo philosophy professor instrumental in shaping Japanese fine arts policy, mentors in turn John La Farge, the painter most responsible for bringing Japanese aesthetic ideas and methods to American art.

La Farge makes a pivotal trip to Japan in the company of Henry Adams, whose lifelong friend John Hay was later responsible for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Fenollosa's own obsession with Japan had been inspired by Edward Sylvester Morse, a principal Western figure at Tokyo Imperial University, who in 1881 delivered a seminal set of lectures in Boston on Japanese folkways.

Also fired by Morse's lectures were Isabella Stewart Gardner, who founded a museum of her own, and the astronomer Percival Lowell. Gardner became Okakura's intimate friend and probable lover during his years as curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Lowell's writings on Japan became a major source for his sister Amy's Japanese-inflected poetry. Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, who disputed control of the Imagist movement in poetry, met in Paris in 1913, the same year that Mary Fenollosa, Ernest's wife, altered the course of Pound's career -- and of 20th-century poetry -- by giving him the notes her late husband had made while studying Chinese poetry with Kakuzo Okakura."

The story of Okakura, who emerges as something like the book's hero, embodies still other ideas. Having had a thorough education in both the new Western learning and the traditions of old Japan, he became his country's leading cultural ambassador -- but not before La Farge had taught him how to ''be Japanese'' for American audiences, how to suggest, through a certain sad charm, the wisdom of the East.

And after learning to perform an identity he already possessed, he went on to write a series of books -- most famously, ''The Book of Tea,'' whose explication of the principles of the tea ceremony had a pro- found impact on, among many others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger -- in which he explained Japanese culture to the West, and in so doing explained it to himself, discarding received ideas about the imitativeness and femininity of Japanese traditions in favor of notions of creativity and vigor. 2

(from a review of the wonderful book,
THE GREAT WAVE: Gilded Age Misfits,
Japanese Eccentrics,
and the Opening of Old Japan,
by Christopher Benfey.

(with thanks for inspiration
to the floating bridge)

the dragon painter

from Mary McNeil Fenollosa in 1905. among the first americans in japan, fenollosa documented the closing of one age and the opening of the next. we have heard of her husband here, and now we hear her voice itself.

from THE DRA- GON PAIN- TER

On such a midsummer dawn, not many years ago, old Kano Indara, sleeping in his darkened chamber, felt the summons of an approaching joy. Beauty tugged at his dreams. Smiling, as a child that is led by love, he rose, drew aside softly the shoji, then the amado of his room, and then, with face uplifted, stepped down into his garden. The beauty of the ebbing night caught at his sleeve, but the dawn held him back.

It was the moment just before the great Sun took place upon his throne. Kano still felt himself lord of the green space round about him. On their pretty bamboo trellises the potted morning-glory vines held out flowers as yet unopened. They were fragile, as if of tissue, and were beaded at the crinkled tips with dew.

Kano's eyelids, too, had dew of tears upon them. He crouched close to the flowers. Something in him, too, some new ecstacy was to unfurl. His lean body began to tremble. He seated himself at the edge of the narrow, railless veranda along which the growing plants were ranged. One trembling bud reached out as if it wished to touch him.

The old man shook with the beating of his own heart. He was an artist. Could he endure another revelation of joy? Yes, his soul, renewed ever as the gods themselves renew their youth, was to be given the inner vision. Now, to him, this was the first morning. Creation bore down upon him.

The flower, too, had begun to tremble. Kano turned directly to it. The filmy, azure angles at the tip were straining to part, held together by just one drop of light. Even as Kano stared the drop fell heavily, plashing on his hand. The flower, with a little sob, opened to him, and questioned him of life, of art, of immortality. The old man covered his face, weeping.

The last of his race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea.

Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist, — to die as one, — this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an abomination of pink stucco with Moorish towers at the four corners. He might even have been elected president of the new Academy, and have presided over the Italian sculptors and degenerate French painters imported to instruct and "civilize" modern Japan.

Stiff graphite pencils, making lines as hard and sharp as those in the faces of foreigners themselves, were to take the place of the soft charcoal flake whose stroke was of satin and young leaves.

Horrible brushes, fashioned of the hair of swine, pinched in by metal bands, and wielded with a hard tapering stick of varnished wood, were to be thrust into the hands of artists, — yes, — artists — men who, from childhood, had known the soft pliant Japanese brush almost as a spirit hand; — had felt the joy of the long stroke down fibrous paper where the very thickening and thinning of the line, the turn of the brush here, the easing of it there, made visual music, — men who had realized the brush as part not only of the body but of the soul, — such men, indeed, — such artists, were to be offered a bunch of hog bristles, set in foreign tin.

Why, even in the annals of Kano's own family more than one faithful brush had acquired a soul of its own, and after the master's death had gone on lamenting in his written name. But the foreigners' brushes, and their little tubes of ill-smelling gum colored with dead hues! Kano shuddered anew at the thought. 1

no fish swims a straight line

so i am sitting minding my own business reading my email, and suddenly an announcement brings this: a rug. i study the website where it's featured. i know this print. it's by candace wheeler. candace wheeler is, however, mentioned nowhere.

so my first thought is of jr burrows & company, where i have seen the gorgeous lace curtain of this design for many years. i was fortunate enough to find mr burrows himself, a most fascinating fellow. with his help i was able to pinpoint his source: a portier (curtain hung over a doorway) designed by wheeler, and currently in the collection of the incredible mark twain house.

he further pointed me to a photo of the textile itself, reverse-printed on denim (a very common practice) and embroidered with silk, in a book i already had (the art that is life). as you can see, it's quite amazing. though it's not known the original place- ment of the piece, we do know that candace whee- ler, as part of the assoc- iated artists, an interior decorating firm assembled by louis comfort tiffany, is credited with its design.

to my eyes, however, it looks enough japanese to have been at the very least inspired but more likely directly copied from a japanese design.

i asked mr burrows if he had any idea of the source and he didn't. i then called the rug company; they had the attribution of the associated artists but not wheeler, and they had no idea of any japanese source.

so i started hunting. i thought first katagami -- it easily looks like something that began as a stencil, and in fact it did start as a stencil in candace wheeler's hands. i also thought maybe lacquer, with its intricate inlays. but i came up zero on all accounts.

i could find nothing that was exact, though many many samples of things that were obviously from the same culture.

maybe candace wheeler was just that astonishing.

p.s. mr burrows told me some things that just blew my ears out of the water (or something). in wholly unexpected ways (to me) he has added a surprising new development to the fenollosa/dow story. stay tuned.

the tokyo bibliophile

A largely unknown side of Frank Lloyd Wright emerged when he visited Japan: He developed into one of America's foremost ukiyo-e woodblock print collectors and dealers.

"When I first saw a fine print it was an intox- icating thing. At that time Ernest Fenollosa was doing his best to persuade the Japanese people not to wantonly destroy their works of art," Wright said. 1

japanese prints were to become a lifelong passion, inspiration, and source of income for him, but how did he learn so much about the prints in such a short time? the answer is shugio hiromichi. "Shugio Hiromichi (b. c. 1853) arrived in New York City in 1880. The Oxford-educated aristocrat moved easily in the city's artistic circles." 2

suggestions as to how the two men met vary from in japan, while wright worked on the im- perial hotel, chicago when shugio deli- vered a speech, at the cos cob colony where many japanists often gathered, or the tile club, or in boston, or, possibly, at the grolier club in new york. with both the advice and the connections of shugio, wright became one of the major purchas- ers of the woodblock prints in america.

New Yorkers were introduced to Japanese wood-block prints by Shugio Hiromichi, the director of the First Japan Manufacturing and Trading Company, a Japanese importer of porcelain and parasols. In 1889, Shugio curated the first significant show of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world"), colorful wood-block prints and posters representing urban and natural pleasures, such as geisha in outdoor revelry or theater actors in costume.

These lyrical, contemplative prints inspired a host of turn-of-the-century painters. James Whistler, in particular, borrowed from the ukiyo-e abstract sensibility in his work, saying, “If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.” 3

the exhibitions at the grolier club, in 1889 and in 1896 (for which shugio wrote the catalogue and its introduction) were major influences on art in the u.s. "American impressionists derived their understanding of Japan not only from books and prints but also from Japanese friends." american impressionists met shugio at the cos cob colony, and at the aesthetic movement's tile club.

"The Tile Club was created as an informal fraternal order that met regularly to paint ceramic tiles and enjoy social camaraderie and the stimulation of their fellow artists. Over the years, The Tile Club expanded to include painters, sculptors, illustrators, architects, and even a few authors and journalists. Artists include Winslow Homer, J. Alden Weir, William Merritt Chase, Arthur Quartley, Twachtman, Weir, Robinson, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The art colonists patronized Shugio's emporium as well as those of his rivals (like Vantine's)." 4

no discussion of shugio hiromichi would be complete without mentioning the catalogue he prepared of the collection of convicted criminal t. e. waggaman. in his position of treasurer of washington d.c.'s catholic college, waggaman embezzled a million dollars -- 1905 dollars, then indulged his absolute obsession for asian arts. fortunately shugio was able to value and describe his collection, once waggaman was in jail, and therefor sell enough of his bounty to pay back much of what he owed.