The Spirit of Japanese Art/Western Art in Japan
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. It would be a blessing if we could free ourselves in some measure, through the virtue of Western art, from the world of stagnation in feeling and thought. I have often declared that it was the saviour of Oriental art, as the force of difference in element is important for rejuvenation. But what use is it to get another pedantry from the West in the place of the old one? I have thought more than once that our importation of foreign art is a flat failure. It may be that we must wait some one hundred years at least before we can make it perfectly Japanised, just as we spent many years before thoroughly digesting Chinese art; but we have not a few pessimists who can prove that it is not altogether the same case. Although I have said that the foreign pedantry greatly troubles the Japanese work of Western art, I do not mean that it will create the same effect as upon Western artists. Iam told the following story:
A year or two ago a certain Italian, who had doubtless a habit of buying pictures (with little of real taste in art, as is usually the case with a picture-buyer), went to see the art exhibition of the Taiheiyo Gakwai Club held at Uyeno Park, and bought many pictures on the spot, as he thought they were clever work of the Japanese school. Alas, the artists meant them to be oil paintings of the Western type! The Italian's stupidity is inexcusable; but did they indeed appear to him so different from his work at home? The saddest part is that they are so alien to our Japanese feeling in general; consequently they have little sympathy with the masses. It is far away yet for their work to become an art of general possession; it can be said it is not good art when it cannot at once enter into the heart. It is not right at all to condemn only the Western art in Japan, as any other thing of foreign origin is equally in the stage of mere trial. I often wonder about the real meaning of the modern civilisation of Japan. Imitation is imitation, not the real thing at all.
There are many drawbacks, as I look upon the material side, to the Western art becoming popular; for instance, our Japanese house—frail, wooden, with the light which rushes in from all sides—never gives it an appropriate place to look its best. And the heaviness of its general atmosphere does not harmonise with the simplicity that pervades the Japanese household; it always appears out of place, like a chair before the tokonoma, a holy dais. Besides, the artists cannot afford to sell their pictures cheap, not because they are good work, but because there are only a few orders for them. I believe we must undertake the responsibility of making good artists; there is no wonder that there is only poor work since our understanding of Western art is little, and we hardly try to cultivate the Western taste. If we have no great art of the Western school, as is a fact, one half the whole blame is on our shoulders.
Here my mind dwells in more or less voluntary manner upon the contrast 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.
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.
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.