The Spirit of Japanese Art/The Memorial Exhibition of the Late Hara
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 2? 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.