The Spirit of Japanese Art
9781465643810
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In the Ashikaga age (1335-1573) the best Japanese artists, like Sesshu and his disciples, for instance, true revolutionists in art, not mere rebels, whose Japanese simplicity was strengthened and clarified by Chinese suggestion, were in the truest meaning of the word Buddhist priests, who sat before the inextinguishable lamp of faith, and sought their salvation by the road of silence; their studios were in the Buddhist temple, east of the forests and west of the hills, dark without, and luminous within with the symbols of all beauty of nature and heaven. And their artistic work was a sort of prayer-making, to satisfy their own imagination, not a thing to show to a critic whose attempt at arguing and denying is only a nuisance in the world of higher art; they drew pictures to create absolute beauty and grandeur, that made their own human world look almost trifling, and directly joined themselves with eternity. Art for them was not a question of mere reality in expression, but the question of Faith. Therefore they never troubled their minds with the matter of subjects or the size of the canvas; indeed, the mere reality of the external world had ceased to be a standard for them, who lived in the temple studios. Laurance Binyon said of them: “Hints of the divine were to be found everywhere—in leaves of grass, in the life of animals, birds, and insects. No occupation was too humble or menial to be invested with beauty and significance.” Through them the Ashikaga period becomes very important in our Japanese art annals. Binyon says: “The Ashikaga period stands in art for an ideal of reticent simplicity. A revulsion from the ornate conventions, which had begun to paralyse the pristine vigour of the Yamato school, and fresh acquaintance with the masterpieces of the Sung era, brought about by renewed contact with China, after a hermit period of exclusion, created a passion for swift, impassioned or suggestive painting in ink, on silvery-toned paper.” People, like myself, who are more delighted at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square with, for instance, “A Summer Afternoon after a Shower,” or a “View at Epsom,” by Constable, and with “Walton Reach,” or “Windsor from Lower Hope,” by Turner, than with their other bigger things, will be certainly pleased to see “Temple and Hill above a Lake,” by Sesshu, or “Travellers at a Temple Gate,” by Sesson, representing this interesting Ashikaga period, exhibited in the new wing of the British Museum. You have to go there and spend an hour or so with the Arthur Morrison collection of Japanese art, if you wish to feel the real old Japanese humanity and love that our ancient masters inspired into their work. 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! What a pity Sesson’s “Travellers at a Temple Gate,” this remarkable little thing, has been mended in two or three spots. If you wish to see the real power and distinction of great Sesshu, you might compare his “Daruma” in the exhibition with the other “Daruma” pictures by Soami and Takuchu also in the exhibition: the point I should like to bring out is that Sesshu’s “Daruma” is an artistic attempt to proclaim the spiritual intensity which shines within from the true strength of consciousness and real economy of force, while the others are rather a superficial demonstration. There is no other Japanese school so interesting, even from the one point of style in expressive decoration, as the Koyetsu-korin school, the much-admired branch of Japanese art in the West.
