three man's opinion

Colour-printing in Japan has lost its individuality. It is no longer the peculiar art of the lower orders, and tends more and more to sink to the level of a mere process of reproduction.

To this use it has been put in some notable modern instances the painter, Watanabe Seitei, for example, has had a number of sketches beautifully reproduced by its means but they have nothing in common with the old nishikiye [woodblock prints] and might as well have been drawn for chromo-lithography, or the three-colour process.

Perhaps this is the most fitting place for the author to venture on a brief appeal to Japanese artists to avoid imitations of European work. Of late years some among them have seen fit, naturally enough, perhaps, to try their hands at the Western methods of painting; and Japanese Impressionists, Japanese of the Barbizon school, Japanese of the Art Nouveau, and of the wilder sects of Southern Germany, have come again to their own land with pride and misunderstanding, bearing with them sheaves of pictures curiously wrought in the fashions of the masters of their choice.

Others have tried to blend the Eastern and Western arts, so radically and immovably opposite. Always the result is failure. It could not be otherwise. Their art has a noble history and a place supreme in the love and literature of their country. In the name of all that is beautiful let them keep it there, and not adulterate and defile it with the scraps and off-scourings of the alien.
Edward F. Strange 1906

We see in Watanabe Seitei that art has been vulgarised. The coloured print has become chiefly a child's toy. Artists can no longer afford to superintend the technical processes of its production, and cheap flaring, violent pigments imported from abroad have taken the place of the delicate, rich, and costly colours of old Japan.

Frank Brinkley 1902

The modern Japan found a satisfactory expression of art in Seitei Watanabe. The imagi- nation of Japan has been growing wider and wider under the influence of Western art. You will find here and there in Watanabe the sure trace of a certain classic school; a graceful solitariness, like that of Tosa; a far away imaginativeness, like that of Kano; the memory, as it were, of an old lover, which will not be put aside.

Again, in Wata- nabe, the old conven- tion- alism turns delight- fully into a hint of dignity, and unin- telli- gible symbolism into deep poetry. This artist would keep the essence of each school for his own use. Basho Matsuo, the great Japanese poet, once compared the poets and artists to a beggar's bag, because they gather whatever beauty and truth they may, from anything. Seitei Watanabe used to laugh at the artists of particular schools. He declared that he did not belong to any one.

Yone Noguchi 1903

the abstract

i sat on the swing out back this afternoon, trying to cajole ruby into sitting with me. yellow leaves were falling from the chinese evergreen elm.

i found myself wondering whether a leaf is considered an animate object. and if so, when is it animate no longer. when is it dead? what if it falls when it's crimson, then turns brown and dries out on the ground.

a few days back i drove by a chain-link fence with a vine crawling along it, or rather hanging from it, now. i suddenly realized how often the dead leaf is part of japanese art and how rarely in the west.

can you tell which of these images are by eastern or western artists? ironically, much was written in the west about the incredible influence of japanese design on design in the west. the western images here illustrate that.

but the japanese images here were seen as strongly western in style! "Seiho Takeuchi was trained in traditional Japanese Shijo painting. Soon he developed his own style. And after he had been in Europe for two years, his style had become even more messy seen from the eyes of a strict Shijo painter. Takeuchi became famous as a distinctively Western style painter. " 1

the artists of the 20th century often developed styles that were so closely linked that easterners saw their own artists, now, as western, and vise versa. seitei watanabe also studied in paris, and was considered a western painter. to us they look asian. they do to me.

methods of teaching, though, were very different. seiho could be a rigid disciplinarian, in a way filled with heart. "[An artist] was appren- ticed to the late great Seiho Takeuchi who made him study the lives and habits of wild fowl for 16 years before he might set brush to silk panel.

For several hours a day he was made to squat in the marshes, by the duck ponds, silently meditating. When Seiho Takeuchi decided that [the artist] knew enough of the plumage, the habits, the anatomy, the temperament of ducks he was allowed to begin painting on silk panels with a camel's hair brush, not with oil paints, but with Chinese ink or Sumi." 2

CONTRARY THESES (II)

One chemical afternoon
in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy
on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked
and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust,
the green locust.

He wanted and looked for
a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations
of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun,
the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling
like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes
were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

The premise from which
all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought
the chrysanthemums’ odor.

Wallace Stevens


“Contrary Theses (II)” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

in chronological order (sort of)

japan: hokusai '36 views of mt fuji' ca. 1829

britian: analysis of waves from an 1880 book on japanese ornament and design

japan: seitei wata- nabe ca. 1900
japan: ohara koson ca. 1915

russia: ivan bilibin ca 1905

japan: isono 1905

colours*

FOR ANNE GREGORY

'Never shall a young man,

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear,


Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.'


'But I can get a hair-dye

And set such colour there,

Brown, or black, or carrot,


That young men in despair

May love me for myself alone

And not my yellow hair.'


'I heard an old religious man

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove



That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.'


WB Yeats





















*what artists like seitei watanabe gave us was the way to color that sings

fear not the night, dears

with no pattern but beauty!

for no reason
but
joy!












welcome the light!

(kogyo tsukioka; ethel kirkpatrick; ito sozan; biho hirose; seitei (shotei) watanabe; unknown; bairei kono; chikuseki; edna boies hopkins)

the strange mr. strange

edward fairbrother strange made his living writing articles and books about design: lettering, bookbinding, lace, etc. his tone was often one of arch dissatisfaction and resentment that no longer were the excellent standards of the past being upheld.

we've met him already, listening to him rail against the degenerate work of seitei watanabe, and i promised you you'd hear more. after railing generally against american book design, he says:

to turn to the consideration of some particular cases, one is compelled to reiterate a somewhat well-worn story, that of the wide-spread and curious influence of aubrey beardsley. the cover designs by bertram g goodhue are often full of it--beardsley's earlier manner of the morte d'arthur;

but of all beardsley's disciples the one who has more closely approached to him in method is will h bradley. the binding of the romance of zion castle is a typical example of this somewhat common tendency. here we have another version of the 'avenue poster' type of decoration;

with, however, not a tithe of the marvellous success of the latter in indication form and drapery by judiciously balance flat masses. in mr bradley's design the gold is over-done, and the hard boundary lines to which it gives rise spoil the effect of the decidedly clever distribution of the upper part of the cover.

the same artist's lyrics of earth wants balance; the serpentine line is rather too heavy, and not very gracefully distributed, although the tree is well rendered and just in its proper place.

a very pleasant treatment of a conventional landscape is that adopted by mr louis rhead, in meadow grass. the use of a picture pure and simple for a cover, instead of some arrangement of ornament, is a new and dangerous device; and it requires powers of no uncommon order to secure for it the success obtained by mr rhead in this instance.

a book-cover has been made by margaret armstrong for love-letters of a musician. it is good in color, the rare subordination of the two lines of floral diaper giving a pleasing effect, but the head of st cecelia, done on an inlay of vellum in slight relief, and the border gold which surrounds it, seem rather forced and over-wrought.

the same artist has produced an effective composition of poppies and pipe-stems, in crimson, light green and gold, on coarse white canvas, for washington irving's rip van winkle.

this is, one would imagine, a good 'saleable' cover, though, from the critical point of view it must not be too closely considered, and the lettering cries aloud for condemnation.

(mr strange was by no means alone in his pouts; snipping, snapping and sniping were the trade of the day in the large and gor- geously produced periodicals covering the art world. so what else is new?)