with the Japanese art, while I walk through the gallery of Western
art of the Taiheiyo Gakwai Club of this year in Uyeno Park. There are
exhibited more than two hundred, or perhaps three hundred pieces—quite
an advance in numbers over any exhibition held before; but I am not
ready to say how they stand on their merit. I admit, at the outset,
that the artists of the Western school have learned well how to make
an arrangement no artist of the pure Japanese school ever dreamed to
attain; and I will say that it is sometimes even subtle. But I have
heard so much of the artistic purpose, which could be best expressed
through the Western art. Are they not, on the other hand, too hasty and
too direct to describe them? Some of their work most nakedly confesses
their artistic inferiority to their own thought. What a poor and even
vulgar handling of oil! I have no hesitation to say that there is
something mistaken in their perception of realism. (Quite a number
of artists in this exhibition make mistakes in this respect.) Indeed
there is no word like realism (perhaps better to say naturalism) which,
in Japan’s present literature, has done such real harm; it was the
Russian or French literature that taught us the meaning of vulgarity,
and again the artists, some artists at least, received a lesson from
these writers. It is never good to see pictures overstrained. Go to the
true Japanese art to learn refinement. While I admit the art of some
artist which has the detail of beauty, I must tell him that reality,
even when true, is not the whole thing; he should learn the art of
escaping from it. That art is, in my opinion, the greatest of all arts;
without it, art will never bring us the eternal and the mysterious.
If you could see some work of Nakagawa or Ishii exhibited here, you
would see my point, because they are somehow wrong for becoming good
work, while they impress with line and colour. I spoke before of effort
and pretence; such an example you will find in Hiroshi Yoshida’s
canvases, big or small, most of them being nature studies. (By the way,
this Yoshida is the artist who exhibited two great canvases, called
“Unknown,” or “World of Cloud,” painted doubtless from Fuji mountain,
overlooking the clouds at one’s feet, and “Keiryu,” or “The Valley,” at
the Government exhibition with some success some years ago.) I am ready
to admit that the artist has well brought out his purpose, but the true
reality is not only the outside expression. His pictures are executed
carefully; but what a forced art! This is the age when all Japanese
artists, those of the Japanese school not excepted, are greatly cursed
by objectivity. Some one has said that the Japanese dress, speaking of
Japanese woman as a picture, does serve to make the distance greater.
I thought in my reflection on art that so it is with the Japanese art.
And again how near is Western art, at least the Japanese work of the
Western school! Such a nearness to our feeling and mind, I think, is
hardly the best quality of any art. I have ceased for some time to
expect anything great or astonishing from Wada or Okada or even Kuroda;
we most eagerly look forward to the sudden appearance of some genius
at once to frighten and hypnotise and charm us and make the Western art
more intimate with our minds.
[Sidenote: THE SPIRITUAL INSULARITY]
I amused myself thinking that it was Oscar Wilde who said that Nature
imitates art; is not the nature of Japan imitating the poor work of
the Western method? Art is, indeed, a most serious thing. It is the
time now when we must jealously guard our spiritual insularity, and
carefully sift the good and the bad, and protect ourselves from the
Western influence which has affected us too much in spite of ourselves.
Speaking of the Western art in Japan, I think I have spoken quite
unconsciously of the general pain, not only in art, but in many other
things, from which we wish we could escape.
After I have said all from my uncompromising thought, my mind, which
is conscious to some extent of a responsibility for Japan’s present
condition in general, has suddenly toned down to thinking of the
short history of Western art in Japan, that is less than fifty years.
What could we do in such a short time? It may even be said that we
did a miracle in art as in any other thing; I can count, in fact,
many valuable lessons (suggestions too) from the Western art that we
transplanted here originally from mere curiosity. Whether good or bad,
it is firmly rooted in Japan’s soil; we have only to wait for the
advent of a master’s hand for the real creation of great beauty. It
seems to me that at least the ground has been prepared.
Charles Wirgman, the special correspondent sent to the Far East from
the _Illustrated London News_, might be called the father of Western
art in Japan; he stayed at Yokohama till he died in 1891 in his
fifty-seventh year. He was the first foreign teacher from whom many
Japanese learned the Western method of art; Yoshiichi Takahashi was one
of his students. Before Takahashi, Togai Kawakami was known for his
foreign art in the early eighties; but it is not clear where he learned
it. Yoshimatsu Goseda was also, besides Takahashi, a well-known student
of Wirgman, and Shinkuro Kunizawa was the first artist who went to
London in 1875 for art study, but he died soon after his return home in
1877 before he became a prominent figure in the art world.
When the Government engaged Antonio Fentanesi, an Italian artist of
the Idealistic school, in 1876, as an instructor, the Western school
of art had begun to establish itself even officially. This Italian
artist is still to-day respected as a master. He was much regretted
when he left Japan in 1878. Ferretti and San Giovanni, who were
engaged after Fentanesi, did not make as great an impression as their
predecessor. However, the time was unfortunate for art in general, as
the country was thrown into disturbance by the civil war called the
Saigo Rebellion. The popularity which the Western art seemed to have
attained had a great set-back when the pictures were excluded from the
National Exhibition in 1890. But in the reaction the artists of the
Western school gained more vigour and determination; Shotaro Koyama,
Chu Asai, Kiyowo Kawamura, and others were well-known names in those
days. Kiyoteru Kuroda and Keiichiro Kume, the beloved students of
Raphael Collin, returned home when the China-Japan war was over; they
brought back quite a different art from that with which we had been
acquainted hitherto. And they led vigorously the artistic battle; the
present popularity at least in appearance is owing to their persistence
and industry. The Government again began to show a great interest
in Western art; it sent Chu Asai and Yeisaku Wada to Paris to study
foreign art. Not only these, many others sailed abroad privately or
officially to no small advantage; you will find many Japanese students
of art nowadays wherever you go in Europe or America.
[Sidenote: THE GOVERNMENT’S INTEREST]
We were colour-blind artistically before the importation of Western
art, except these who had an interest in the so-called colour-print;
but the colour-print was less valued among the intellectual class, as
even to-day. Our artistic eye, which was only able to see everything
flat, at once opened through the foreign art to the mysteries of
perspective, and though they may not be the real essence of art,
they were at least a new thing for us. There are many other lessons
we received from it; it seems to me that the best and greatest value
is its own existence as a protest against the Japanese art. If the
Japanese art of the old school has made any advance, as it has done,
it should be thankful to the Western school; and at the same time the
artists of foreign method must pay due respect to the former for its
creation of the “Western Art Japonised.” It may be far away yet, but
such an art, if a combination of the East and West, is bound to come.
APPENDIX I
THE MEMORIAL EXHIBITION OF THE LATE HARA
The memorial exhibition of Busho Hara, a Japanese artist of the Western
school, held recently in Tokyo to raise a fund for his surviving family
as one of its objects (Hara passed away in October, 1913, in his
forty-seventh year), had many significances, one of which, certainly
the strongest, was in contradiction of the general understanding that
Western paintings will never sell in Japan; even a trifling sketch
in which the artist only jotted down his momentary memory fetched
the most unusual price. Hara is a remarkable example of one who
created his own world (by that I mean at least the buyers, though not
real appreciators) among his friends through his personality, which
strengthened his work; paradoxically we shall say he was an artist well
known and utterly unknown; and when I say he was an utterly unknown
artist, I have my thought that he never even once exhibited his work to
the public, and his often defiant spirit and high aim made him scorn
and laugh over people’s ignorance on art. How he hated the Japanese art
world where real merit is no passport at all. But Hara’s friends are
pleased to know from this exhibition the fact that even the public he
ever so despised are not so unresponsive to his art, whose secret he
learned in London.
Hara was, sad to say, also an artist whose Western art-work, like
that of some other Japanese artists to whom quite an excellent credit
was given in their European days, much declined or, better to say,
missed somehow the artistic thrill since he left England in 1906. Why
was that? What made him so? Was it from the fact that there is no
gallery of Western art old or new in Japan where your work will only be
belittled after you have received a good lesson there? or is it that
our Japanese general public never have a high standard in the matter
of art, especially of Western art? I think there are many reasons to
say that the passive, even oppressive air of Japan, generally speaking,
may have a perfectly disintegrating effect on an artist trained in the
West; it would not be wholly wrong to declare that the real Western
art founded on emotion and life cannot be executed in Japan. Hara made
quite many portraits by commission since that 1906, some of which
were brought out in this exhibition. As they are work more or less
forced, we must go to his other works for his best, which he executed
with mighty enthusiasm and faith under England’s artistic blessing.
He writes down in his diary, the reading of which was my special
privilege, on January 2nd of 1905, the following words: “At last
Port Arthur has fallen. When the war shall be done that will be the
time for our battle of art against Europe to begin. Oh, what a great
responsibility for Japanese artists!”
Hara made a student’s obeisance toward Watts among the modern masters,
whose influence will be most distinctly seen in one of his pictures
in this exhibition called “The Young Sorrow” (the owner of this
picture is Mr. Takashi Matsuda, one of a few great art collectors in
Japan), in which a young sitting nude woman shows only her beautiful
back, her face being covered by her hands. What a sad, visionary,
pale clarification in colour and tone! Hara writes down when his
mind was saturated with Watts at Tate’s or somewhere else: “What an
indescribable sense of beauty! Art is indeed my only world and life.
Again look at the pictures. How tender, how soft, and how warm in tone
and atmosphere! And how deep is the shadow of the pictures! And that
deep shadow is never dirty.” Again he writes down on his visit to
Tate’s on a certain day: “It was wrong that I attempted to bring out
all the colours from the beginning at once, and even tried to finish
the work up by mending. There is no wonder my colours were dead things.
We must have the living beauty and tone of colours; by that I do never
mean showy. I must learn how to get the deep colour by light paint.”
While he was saturated with Watts, he on the other hand was copying
Rembrandt at the National Gallery. Hara’s copy of “The Jewish Merchant”
is now owned by the Imperial Household in Tokyo. This copy and a few
other copies of Rembrandt were in the exhibition. And Hara was a great
admirer of Turner. Markino confesses in his book or books that it was
Hara who first opened his spiritual eyes to Turner. At this memorial
exhibition Turner is represented by Hara’s copy of Venice. There was in
the exhibition “The Old Seamstress,” which I was pleased to say was
one of Hara’s best pictures. Whenever I see Hara’s pictures of any old
woman, not only this “Old Seamstress,” I think at once that what you
might call his soul sympathy immediately responded to the old woman,
since Hara’s heart and soul were world-wearied and most tender.
Markino has somewhere in the book the following passages: “First few
weeks I used to take him round the streets, and whenever we passed some
picture shops he stopped to look through the shop window, and would
not move on. I told him those nameless artists’ work was not half so
good as his own. But he always said: ‘Oh, please don’t say so. Perhaps
my drawings are surer than those, and my compositions are better too.
But the European artists know how to handle oils so skilfully. I learn
great lessons from them.’”
Indeed when he returned home he had fully mastered the technique of
handling oils from England, where he stayed some four years. It is
really a pity that Hara passed away without having fully expressed his
own art in his masterly technique, which he learned with such sacrifice
and patience. His death occurred suddenly at the time when he was about
to break away from his former self and to create his own new art ten
times stronger, fresher, and more beautiful.
I wish to call the readers’ attention to Yoshio Markino’s _My
Recollections and Reflections_, which contains the most sympathetic
article on Busho Hara.
APPENDIX II
THE NERVOUS DEBILITY OF PRESENT JAPANESE ART
When I say that I received almost no impression from the annual
Government Exhibition of Japanese Art in the last five or six years,
I have a sort of same feeling with the tired month of May when the
season, in fact, having no strength left from the last glory of bloom
(what a glorious old Japanese art!), still vainly attempts to look
ambitious. Although it may sound unsympathetic, I must declare that the
present Japanese art, speaking of it as a whole, with no reference to
separate works or individual artists, suffers from nervous debility.
Now, is it not the exact condition of the Japanese life at present?
Here it is the art following after the life of modern Japan, vain,
shallow, imitative, and thoughtless, which makes us pessimistic; the
best possible course such an art can follow in the time of its nervous
debility might be that of imitation.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
I do not know exactly what simplicity means, when the word is used
in connection with our old art; however, it is true we see a peculiar
unity in it, which was cherished under the influence of India and
China, and always helped to a classification and analysis of the
means through which the artists worked. And the poverty of subjects
was a strength for them; they valued workmanship, or the right use of
material rather than the material itself; instead of style and design,
the intellect and atmosphere. They thought the means to be the only
path to Heaven. But it was before the Western art had invaded Japan;
that art told them of the end of art, and laughed at the indecision of
æsthetic judgment and uncertainty of realism of Japanese art. It said:
“It is true that you have some scent, but it is already faded; you
have refinement, but it is not quite true to nature and too far away.”
Indeed, it is almost sad one sees the artists troubled by the Western
influence which they accepted, in spite of themselves; I can see in
the exhibitions that many of them have long ago lost their faith by
spiritual calamity, and it is seldom to see them able to readjust their
own minds under such a mingled tempest of Oriental and Occidental. Is
it not, after all, merely a waste of energy? And how true it is with
all the other phenomena of the present life, their Oriental retreat and
Occidental rush.
* * * * *
The present Japanese art has sadly strayed from subjectivity, the only
one citadel where the old Japanese art rose and fell; I wonder if it is
not paying a too tremendous price only to gain a little objectivity of
the West.
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury,
England._
End of Project Gutenberg's The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi