Japanese art

“ The true history of Japanese art is the history of the art we have called national; all else is but the prostitution of individual genius to commerce. In the former we find simplicity and piety mingled with a humor often quaintly clothed in clay. There is abundant material for research, for study and close examination. The art of Japan has many peculiarities, and will give an observer ideas of artistic beauty and æsthetic taste which an American or European education would never suggest. ”

“ Whoever makes such a criticism must imagine Western art to be everywhere equally intelligible. Some of it—the very best—probably is; and some of Japanese art also is. But I can assure the reader that the ordinary art of Western book illustration or magazine engraving is just as incomprehensible to Japanese as Japanese drawings are to Europeans who have never seen Japan. For a Japanese to understand our common engravings, he must have lived abroad. For an Occidental to perceive the truth, or the beauty, or the humor of Japanese drawings, he must know the life which those drawings reflect. ”

“ But Japanese art comes to the aid of the student of composition with abundant material—sketch books, design books, drawings and color prints. The learner should seek for genuine works of the best periods, avoiding modern bad reproductions, imitations, carelessly re-cut blocks, crude colors, and all the hasty and commonplace stuff prepared by dealers for the foreign market.
The Japanese knew no division into Representative and Decorative; they thought of painting as the art of two dimensions, the art of rhythm and harmony, in which modelling and nature-imitation are subordinate. ”

“ The Japanese artist goes a step further: he paints the feelings evoked by the memory of the scenes, the feelings when one is between waking and dreaming. He is altogether an idealist, and this at both ends of the scale, the beautiful and the grotesque. Were he able to work on a large canvas, a very great ideal art might have been the result. But in art, as in literature, his nation seems lacking in the genius, the breadth of view, necessary for making grand combinations. ”

“ They belonged to the period when Japanese art was perhaps in its crudest state, and yet in this uncertain atmosphere they seemed to possess an extraordinary vitality, as though indeed they were prepared at a moment’s notice to leap from their frames and annihilate this mysterious product of modern days, who in black clothes and silk hat, unarmed and without physical strength, yet wielded the powers of life and death as surely as they in their time had done. ”

“ Japanese art is distinguished by directness, facility, and strength of line, a sort of bold dash due probably to the habit of writing and drawing from the elbow, not from the wrist. This, so to say, calligraphic quality is what gives a charm to the merest rough Japanese sketch. It has been well remarked that if a Japanese artist's work be carried no further even than the outlines, you will still have something worthy of being hung on your wall or inserted in your album. Japanese art disregards the laws of perspective and of light and shadow. ”

“ This estimate of painting as the peer of calligraphy explains not only the decorative character of Japanese art, the strict formalism of its style, the great importance which it attaches to the balance of light and dark masses, the subordination of colour to purely decorative ends, but also the wonderful freedom which Japanese art has always managed to retain in spite of its tendency to formalism. ”

“ It passes half its day tied on to her back, peeping companionably its head over her shoulder. At night it is lovingly sheltered under the green mosquito curtains, and provided with a toy wooden pillow.
The expression "Japanese Art" seems but a created word expressing either the imitations of it, or the artificial transplanting of Japanese things to our houses. The whole glory of art in Japan is, that it is not Art, but Nature simply rendered, by a people with a fancy and love of fun quite Irish in character. ”

“ The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the art of nations. Being in its own methods and attitude the art of accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value. It is of accidental value, and not of integral necessity. The virtual discovery of Japanese art, during the later years of the second French Empire, caused Europe to relearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may look when Symmetry has grown vulgar. ”

“ The mystery of the{39} expression of pure personality in art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than here. To the accustomed eye the line-work of the Japanese artist is vibrant with intimate connection between hand and spirit. This command of the brush, so perfect that the passion of the artist's soul flows out through it, is one of the vital characteristics of Japanese painting. ”

“ Japanese art is not realistic, it does not aim at photographic accuracy; but by the free and bold exercise of imagination, it tries to abstract the essential aspect of objects, and to give expression to the artist’s sentiments by its portrayal. It is for [128] this reason that form is comparatively little regarded, while idea is considered all-important; that it is weak in realistic delineation and strong in decorative design. These three characteristics underlie all Japanese art, and distinguish it from the art of other Oriental nations. ”

“ A Japanese artist, by which I mean a painter, is long in making. From ten to fifteen years of continuous study and application are required before much skill is attained. During that time he gradually absorbs a knowledge of the many principles, precepts, maxims and methods, which together constitute the corpus or body of art doctrine handed down from a remote antiquity and preserved either in books or perpetuated by tradition. ”

“ In modern decoration, the most obvious and superficial qualities of Japanese art have generally been seized upon, and its general effect has been to loosen the restraining and architectonic sense of balance and fitness, and a definite ordered plan of construction, which are essential in the finest types of design. On the whole, the effects of the discovery [pg 65] of Japanese art on the modern artistic mind, may be likened to a sudden and unexpected access of fortune to an impoverished man. ”

“ Art is necessarily objective, whether it depicts nature or man; the gaze is always and necessarily outward, even when it is depicting the human form. In our consideration of the æsthetic elements of Japanese character [CM] we gave reasons for the Japanese love of natural beauty and for their relatively slight attention to the human form. If the reasons there given were correct, the fact that Japanese art is concerned chiefly with nature has nothing whatever to do with the "impersonality" of the people. ”

“ LEGEND IN JAPANESE ART The Significance of Japanese Art
Sir Alfred East, in lecturing on the subject of Japanese art, described it as "great in small things, but small in great things," and this, generally speaking, is very true. The Japanese artist excels in depicting flowers and insects and birds. He is triumphant in portraying the curl of a wave, a branch of cherry-blossom against a full moon, a flight of heron, a group of pine-trees, and carp swimming in a stream ”

“ But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, the spots getting bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese art. ”

“ To the cultivated Japanese, who regard art as the highest outcome and flowering of civilization, this tendency is not encouraging. And as to the future of Japanese art, its perpetuation must come from excluding rather than attempting to amalgamate Western ideas. ”

“ To-day the youth of Japan holds to his own writing-brush, and begins, as aforetime, with the one stroke, two stroke, and three stroke sketches that lie at the root of the old masters’ matchless art. Strangely enough, all perception of the beauty and relation of color seems to leave the Japanese when they use foreign materials. ”

“ Japanese painters smile wearily when informed that foreigners consider their work to be flat, and at best merely decorative; that their pictures have no middle distance or perspective, and contain no shadows; in fact, that the art of painting in Japan is still in its infancy. In answer to all this suffice it to say that whatever a Japanese painting fails to contain has been purposely omitted. With Japanese artists it is a question of judgment and taste [pg 8] as to what shall be painted and what best left out. They never aim at photographic accuracy or distracting detail. ”

“ When the present Japanese art tells something, I thank God, it is from its sad failure; indeed, the present Japanese art is a lost art, since it explains nothing, alas, unlike the old art of idealistic exaltation, but the general condition of life. It is cast down from its high pedestal. ”

“ WESTERN ART IN JAPAN The Japanese works of Western art are sometimes beautiful; but I can say positively that I have had no experience of being carried away by them as by good old Japanese art. There is always something of effort and even pretence which are decidedly modern productions. I will say that it is at the best a borrowed art, not a thing inseparable from us. I ask myself why those artists of the Western school must be loyal to a pedantry of foreign origin as if they had the responsibility for its existence. ”

“ Art was not intended solely for the kakemono, or hanging scroll, to be suspended in the alcove of a Japanese home, to be admired for a time, and then to be replaced by another. Art in Japan was universal to an extent not to be found in any other country, where a cheap towel had a pleasing design upon it, and where the playing cards, unlike our own, were works of art. ”

“ In all Japanese art, the element of pure brushwork is of greater importance than in the art of Europe. The people, trained from childhood in the handling of the brush as a pencil for the drawing of the complex forms of written characters, acquire a facility and accuracy unknown in other lands. Fine caligraphy is esteemed an art in itself. And the Japanese painter, whose life is devoted to further exercises with the brush, may achieve a unique degree of skill. His power to sweep, guide, and modulate the width and intensity of his line is developed into a sixth sense. ”

“ The development of the European poster, which would be quite unthinkable without Japanese influence, is only the first step towards a renewal of European painting in all its branches, and especially of monumental painting. The solution after which we are reaching has been forming there for centuries. And, whatever the difference of circumstances, requirements, and race, the fact remains that Japanese art is far closer to us than the art of our own past, with which, however much we may admire its productions, we are completely out of touch. ”

“ Perhaps it is hardly possible nowadays to paint flowers without submitting to some extent to the influence of the Japanese. From them, whatever else you learn, you learn freedom of treatment and a conception based upon essentials. The limitations of Japanese Art it does not happen just now to be the fashion to recognise; though every one who is really educated—every one who understands the Classics of Art, the immense achievements of Europe from Holbein to Turner—must know of these limitations,282 and must feel them. ”

“ To be sure, none of the things exhibited there, small or large, good or poor, are so-called exhibition pictures, which are often a game of artistic charlatans. In real Japanese art you should not look for variety of subjects; but when you find an astonishing richness of execution, certainly it is the time when your eyes begin to open toward another sort of asceticism in art. How glad I am that our Japanese art, at least in the olden time, never degenerated into a mechanical art! ”

“ The artists of Japan embroider with their pencils, and paint with their needles. They follow their own art ideal. Because it appeals to us less, it is not necessarily a smaller ideal than our own.
The very delicacy of touch and mind that makes the Japanese the most exquisite of all workmen, makes them the most sensitive of all peoples, the most petulantly resentful of criticism. I fear that it would be impossible for a European to write an article about Japan that would be inoffensive to the Japanese, unless it were an article of unqualified praise. ”

“ Foremost among the arts of Japan, both relatively and as the key which is necessary to understanding and appreciation of the others, is painting. It is an art differing in many respects from that of the European schools of painting, but not less worthy of serious consideration, and in certain qualities it ranks supreme. To those who have seen the masterpieces preserved among the temple treasures, or hidden in the collections of Japanese noblemen, and have felt their grandeur and charm, this will seem far short of over-statement. ”

“ In the artistic reproduction of this scenery, however, Japanese artists are generally supposed to be inferior to those of the West.
As often remarked, Japanese art has directed its chief endeavor to animals and to nature, thus failing to give to man his share of attention. This curious one-sidedness shows itself particularly in painting and in sculpture. In the former, when human beings are the subject, the aim has apparently been to extol certain characteristics; in warriors, the military or heroic spirit; in wise men, their wisdom ”