Drawing Beats Painting
The New York Times had a wonderful review by Michael Kimmelman, “An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth” (July 19). I enjoyed it because of my interests in old travel narratives and memoirs, some done back when the diarists did their own illustrations. And I enjoyed it because I have a
special fondness for the great age of amateurism, the Victorian period with its explosion of Henry Higginsises collecting syllables or shells or whatnot. And it brought back such lodged memories of my own efforts to learn how to draw.
My upright Episcopal aunt enrolled me in a summer art enrichment class as a boy. By extraordinary good luck it was taught by Elmore Morgan Jr in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was young in his own career and it was decades before he was acknowledged as one of America’s finest artists. He exposed us children to his ideas of color and line and marking with the same mix of kindness and discipline I found again, eight or ten years later, when I enjoyed his instruction in drawing class at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
Now I reflect on the great good luck evidenced by those events in my life. As Kimmelman says, used to be that “drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness,” Michael Kimmelman goes on in The Times review, “From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations.. . . Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.” Matthew Perry, who had close ties to the Slidell’s for whom the New Orleans’s suburb is named, is most famous for “opening” Japan. But he was a great one for education. He helped develop America’s Naval academy, recommending a curriculum including such practical subjects as “drawing, mapping, and gunnery tactics…” according to his biographer John Schroeder.
For decades, like Jack Kerouac, I lugged about cheap notebooks, writing notes and making little illustrations in whatever pen or pencil was handy. In fact, the very first day the Louisiana government offices were opened again in Baton Rouge after Katrina, I was chewing on a bureaucrat’s ear, suggesting we get a few cases of note books to hand out to the displaced and at the various shelters. Let people write and draw about their experiences. “It’s self-directed,” I pointed out, “and it’s quiet” a special benefit of journalizing. That ear was tin. I ran into folks with the tourism section, and suggested that narratives from journals filled as they were with heart and bravery would be an antidote to the news coverage of “toxic soup.” There was no traction there for handing out note books for journalizing and recuperative drawing, either. Now, of course, there are wonderful Post-Katrina books and photo projects and the State has come fully aboard collecting personal narratives and archiving them for the future. I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t able to get some journalizing and drawing sessions going way back there in the breach.
I don’t ape Kerouac’s nickel notebooks and bic pens anymore. Most of what I do, now, most of the time, are small, palm-sized water colors or India ink pen renderings in an ongoing series of bound, illustrated journals with thick acid-free paper (black ones I order from San Francisco and red bound ones I buy from a shop near Shakespeare and Co. in Paris). I do a few domestic scale drawings using complex media—graphite, colored pencils, washes, ink, all that.
I transitioned from traditional photography to digital and archived my negatives and transparencies in cool (of course) storage. Mostly I shoot for photo-illustration now, not having had a photo show in some time. But for a year or two just before moving to Japan I worked on a set of very large paintings on canvas. These are huge things. The last exhibit, at Dante’s Inferno in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, involved tapping a row of holes in a concrete and brick wall well more than 20 feet from the floor. Then, I caulked in plastic inserts. Once set, I screwed in stainless steel eyes, and then clipped a row of karabiners to the eyes to hold the big canvas. Setting and striking that show was the hardest in my career, of my own or helping other artists. It’s easier to roll in a crate slotted with eighteen museum-mounted, 16 X 20 inch photographic prints, believe me.
However, a wall of canvas and rope and fittings, once up, is pretty impressive.
Many naive viewers immediately associate those surfaces with expressionism and, especially after the release of his bio-pic, with Jackson Pollock. He was justly famous for his contribution to “action painting” but hardly the only artist to resist the tyranny of composition and painterly tradition. However, like all good contemporary artists I figure I just stole every decent idea I have from the French Impressionists. In the case of these big 16 X 20 foot paintings, when using large numbers of familiar, repeated forms I also heavily referenced England’s Bridget Riley who in 1964 noted that "...the uncertainties of a drawn structure increase when it is composed of similar, repeated elements.” She was speaking about her own work, which was very popular at the time.
It’s generally understood that Riley painted and extended Seurat’s color wheel and copied his Bridge of Courbevoie to learn more about his technique of complementary colors. I admired that research, that is, her work, and with these big paintings I in my turn tried to extend from it -- I don’t think it necessary to replicate forms exactly or play around with optical illusion.
Obviously, color perception always depends on the other colors around. For these monumental, architectural scale works, I carefully orchestrated the colors of the nominally repeated forms. Then, I splashed and spilled and dripped and poured as direct, tension inducing counterpoint. The effect of proximal color was noted by Chevreul and called simultaneous contrast; described in the 1839 book, De la Loi du contraste Simultané des Couleurs, a book that was praised by those rascally Impressionists from whom I learned [stole] so much.
Several years ago Jim Delahoussaye introduced Jolly and me to a small group of commercial fishermen who had been working in the Atchafalaya Basin (formerly living in campboat communities). In the intervening time Jolly and I made some supportive efforts toward museum representation for them and the material culture associated with that orbit. Another result was the series of variegated surfaces of the big paintings, which are festooned with lines and pierced with grometted holes, clad with hardware and I hope reminding viewers of the fishing industry and the light falling through the leafy bowers of the Atchafalaya Basin.
Thus, I believe there is an almost irristable confluence of inputs coming together which I can identify, as if I was a bystander watching events unfold from some remote location. As the participant, however, it’s a lot more fun, and a lot more fulfilling, than mere observation. Moving to Japan was, in some ways, the shoe dropping. I began sundering up the ramp, becoming curious about Eastern religion, in high school, reading Jack Kerouac like a cotillion other goofs.
His discourse about “Highways of the Night” helped establish a 30 year, and ongoing, series of night photography-- prints of which have been exhibited in US and European shows over the decades.
I began Kerouac reading On the Road, then The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums which seemed to me under appreciated but was always my favorite, Doctor Sax which I felt was most representative of his “jazz” style writing, Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses his mandatory but, for me, uninspired poetry, Maggie Cassidy, and Tristessa. By the time I read Lonesome Traveler which, with DB, got me thinking about journey texts and travel narratives, a latent curiosity which emerged in graduate school, then Book of Dreams, recordings of his dreams. Pull My Daisy was a collaboration with a photographer (as a teenager I had no idea of the sexual implications of this film), then Big Sur , which should be seen as emerging travel exploration, Visions of Gerard. Both of these, Desolation Angels and Satori in Paris rounded off my entry into being curious about why people are fascinated about leaving home – adult “Toot and Puddle” books.
Kerouac did a half dozen more releases, plays, poetry collections, and letter sets but you always wonder how much of that is author generated and how much publisher churn. No matter. I put it all in my library next to a dozen or so biographies as the Beat industry grew. My best bud David even got me a “Kerouac” hat at one point.
Kerouac called Alan Ansen, “Rollo Greb” and William Burroughs, “Bull Hubbard” in On the Road; he called Burroughs “Frank Carmody” and Alan Ansen, “Austin Bromberg” in The Subterraneans. That book deals with the for its time edgy world of a white sub-culture character in love with a pithy black woman. Hollywood bought the rights and, on screen, the affair is between a white guy and a French woman. Pretty much the same dynamic, don’t you think? Right now, decades later, Hollywood’s darling is Tibet, and they are conveying the subtleties of that political situation with exactly the same finesse.
Neal Cassady, who turns up, as Tom Wolfe recounts for us, years later driving the bus for the Kesey Acid tests, is “Leroy” in The Subterraneans; “Cody Pomeray” in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. It was the facile discussion of Buddhism in these books applied to my soft teen noggin that got me started thinking about Eastern religion. First nature poet Gary Snyder (the Big Sur’s Jarry Wagner, the Dharma Bums’ Japhy Ryder) is portrayed living “the good life” in Aristotelian terms—if that included porking coeds—in a tiny shed-like cottage. That chimed my personal gong in favor of the simple life well before reading the good Dr. Shi. Then these mountain galumting poets scoot off to Japan, in text pictured to be stuck more or less in Lafcadio Hernish aspic.
Delighted with arrival in Japan, it’s taken us a few months to find our footing, and learn how to get about. Now, I get to scoot up to China to discuss ideas about the Japan-French Impressionist connection. There has been a historic appropriation of aesthetic and design elements from Asia into Western art, particularly with the French Impressionists.
Because of this borrowing, this can be seen as a mediating device for visitors to Asia. Being a little familiar with some of the design elements of Asia, even through the round-about way of routed through Impressionism, ameliorates anxiety associated with presentation of the exotic, it seems to me. Usually, travelers as faced with the unusual (and, indeed, that’s why we, many of us, bother to travel).
Very briefly, beginning in the early 1600s, the Tokugawa family or clan ruled Japan, following a period of marginally welcome Portuguese and Dutch missionary activity and trade. The Tokugawa period was marked by closure to foreigners during the approximately 265 years of this Shogunate rule. With the death of Tokugawa Leyasu in about 1616 and the elevation of Tokugawa Hidetada, the presence of foreign missionaries was forcefully expunged.
In short, a period of European presence in Japan was followed by an extended period of closure to the West. A period of relative unrest and divisiveness was followed by relative and relatively extended unity and peace. Japan remained isolated. During this period—until the early 19th century—Japan was ruled by the Shogunate. The Emperor was an absolute monarch who delegated authority to the Shogun.
In Edo, Kabuki emerged as one of the most important modes of entertainment during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Its plays and actors then went on to influence the content of the printmakers. Many Kabuki plays embraced themes of heroism, tragedy and loyalty, as might be predicted. They were performed upon spacious stages involving clever uses of theatrical illusion, special lighting, movable scenery, and the incorporation of music and dance in support of drama.
Life in the burgeoning cities was used by Ukiyo-e printmakers, who also drew from the Japanese landscape, bringing urban and rural environments together – not necessarily in the same piece, but within the genre. Scenes of sensual delight began to compose a certain portion of the Japanese block print out put, often drawing from the “Yoshiwara” or pleasure sections of towns. These regions not only represented a kind of domestic exotica, the women involved were likely to be very beautiful and therefore useful as ideal models.
Ukiyo-e wood block prints, or “floating world,” became increasingly commonplace from 1660 to the mid-19c. Nominally, the floating world involves a sense of the worldly, carnal, or temporal reality, as opposed to the orbit of Buddhist bliss. It’s more particular meaning often refers to what Americans would call “tenderloin” or the French “petit monde,” that social environment including opportunity to or suggestion of commercial sexuality and its immediate infrastructure.
The Japanese wood block approach to representation under discussion (which incorporates a good deal of design method based on Chinese illustration) is vastly different from what might be called the “Western” or Renaissance arts approach to creating a draftsmanship like space. While Western art historians discuss as “breakthroughs” such techniques as atmospheric and linear perspective, both designed to foster the illusion of a three dimensional literal setting, the Japanese print contains many design elements earnestly resisting this very illusion.
The space in a properly constructed print of this style is flat, meant to be unframed, viewed close up (in conditions similar to and perhaps related to the viewing of fine handwriting) with no visual illusion of depth. Formally, the bottom of the block print represents the point nearest the viewer, the top more distal. Lines grow wider as they recede into the “distance.” Smooth, opaque, flat fields of colour are applied (shadow is generally not used). Finally, a system of complicated iconography (birds, fish) conveys emotions.
Then after Matthew Perry’s dubiously titled “Diplomatic Missions” to Japan in the mid-1800s, Asian art from the archipelago nation flowed much more quickly to Europe. Artists, especially avant guard members of the tribe in France such as Edgar Degas and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (both of whom, it should be said, might predictably be touched by these examples of ukiyo-e prints, given their interest in color and line.)
While we may often speak of Japan becoming “Westernized,” in many respects Europe and the United States were also becoming “Japanized.” John La Farge wrote the first compelling and important essay on Japanese art in the US right after the American Civil war – well before the ground swell of the French Impressionists “picking up” those well publicized prints but after the prints became popular.
Somewhat ironically as the great age of block print making was winding down in Japan, the prints themselves contributed very directly to the enormous invention taking place in the fine arts in Europe. Apparently, one of the earliest enthusiasts of all things Japanese in the mid-19th century was French printmaker Félix Bracquemond. It’s recorded that he worked with the first important representatives of Japanese prints (Hokusai’s Manga album) in 1856. Bracquemond immediately saw an affinity for the curvilinear work of the Japanese draftsmanship. His enthusiasm helped introduce others to the block prints. Eventually a so-called secret society, the Société du Jing-lar was put together in France for the purpose of the study of Japanese art. The Impressionists were gelling their future vision, and the bright, vivid colors, applied in a looser style; the use of truncated composition, of silhouette, of a black line (related to that of stained glass, but not exactly an extension), and the use of flat space common to Japanese block prints all later turned up in the eventual result. Think, for example, of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
By the end of the 1800s Asia had become a borough of the advertising world. It was wonderfully “exotic” in the sense that a particularly lovely flower was more exotic than the foliage, and it was more marketable in exactly the same way that the bouquet was more marketable than the leaves were. “Japonisme” was alleged to be in love with all things from Japan, but didn’t scruple too much if it captured in its aesthetic embrace other things Asian in the meantime.
In 1889 Oscar Wilde could say that “the whole of Japan [is a] pure invention, simply a mode of style and an exquisite fancy of art.” Of course, Wilde was an “Aesthete,” who believed that having the right kind of wallpaper in the home could prevent a youth from growing up to be a juvenile delinquent (he didn’t understand it was really the right song on the CD player). What he meant was, however, that Asia was no longer a geographic place. It was instead by that time an intellectual conceptualization of the West.
It’s instructive to compare and contrast the approach to the arts and crafts taken, East and West. Japan embraces the need for skilled work and sets aside a category of “National Treasure” for those experts in particular fields. Undertakings such as flower arranging have extraordinary preparatory conditions. In the United States, how do we prepare for a career in the Fine Arts? Well, not by Classical Instruction, it seems.
According to Michael Kimmelman in The Times, “a century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature.” But that would imply working to achieve a quality of draftsmanship.
Back in 2005 Pete Panse, a tenured, talented, motivated art teacher in Middletown NY mentioned to his students—merely mentioned—that the best of them might benefit from taking life drawing classes.
He was suspended from his job pending the eventual hearing with a threat of being fired if it turned out badly. The charge? Well, to be clear, he is not being charged with actually doing anything. No claim of any unsavory action of any kind. Actually being guilty of something in order to be Salemed today would be so outré.
But he felt that his very best students might flourish with exposure to life drawing classes. They planned to go on to art school, to seek scholarships, and for that to be submitting portfolios. The mention of the idea was enough to spur the school board into action. According to ARC (a conservative website devoted to traditional art) Mr. Panse was charged with making “comments that students could construe as being of a sexual or personal nature...or using [his] position as a teacher to put students into any situation reasonably likely to make them feel uncomfortable because of the injection of sexuality into...the substance of [his] comments”. Yes. I know. They actually tried to regulate comments teenagers might be able to “construe as being of a sexual or personal nature.” Christ! You can’t say the word “Duty” in a classroom without half the students snickering.
The squib raises a number of interesting issues. It underscores the lack of fit between the insulated administrators and the students (and especially the realistic academic needs of their charges); it highlights the everyday cowardice of typical school boards; it chits up yet another good teacher punished for showing the least glimmer of initiative. Where the administrators should be providing leadership, or at least blocking when teachers go for a goal, they instead function as obstructionists. And, because I’ve devoted so much of my professional life to research into Controversial Leisure (almost introducing the area as a field within Leisure Studies) I was drawn to the conflict between the arts and the vulgar, unlettered school board members.
Although deeply conservative, ARC, a non-profit organization devoted to support of traditional art education and antagonistic to Modern art, was supportive of Panse because drawing is at the center of a formal art curriculum. Moreover, no parents complained, nor was any traditional notion of probity blemished. Panse seemed to be legitimately interested in the welfare of his students while the administration was, it seemed, motivated by job preservation.
xxx xxx xxx
special fondness for the great age of amateurism, the Victorian period with its explosion of Henry Higginsises collecting syllables or shells or whatnot. And it brought back such lodged memories of my own efforts to learn how to draw.
My upright Episcopal aunt enrolled me in a summer art enrichment class as a boy. By extraordinary good luck it was taught by Elmore Morgan Jr in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was young in his own career and it was decades before he was acknowledged as one of America’s finest artists. He exposed us children to his ideas of color and line and marking with the same mix of kindness and discipline I found again, eight or ten years later, when I enjoyed his instruction in drawing class at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
Now I reflect on the great good luck evidenced by those events in my life. As Kimmelman says, used to be that “drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness,” Michael Kimmelman goes on in The Times review, “From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations.. . . Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.” Matthew Perry, who had close ties to the Slidell’s for whom the New Orleans’s suburb is named, is most famous for “opening” Japan. But he was a great one for education. He helped develop America’s Naval academy, recommending a curriculum including such practical subjects as “drawing, mapping, and gunnery tactics…” according to his biographer John Schroeder.
For decades, like Jack Kerouac, I lugged about cheap notebooks, writing notes and making little illustrations in whatever pen or pencil was handy. In fact, the very first day the Louisiana government offices were opened again in Baton Rouge after Katrina, I was chewing on a bureaucrat’s ear, suggesting we get a few cases of note books to hand out to the displaced and at the various shelters. Let people write and draw about their experiences. “It’s self-directed,” I pointed out, “and it’s quiet” a special benefit of journalizing. That ear was tin. I ran into folks with the tourism section, and suggested that narratives from journals filled as they were with heart and bravery would be an antidote to the news coverage of “toxic soup.” There was no traction there for handing out note books for journalizing and recuperative drawing, either. Now, of course, there are wonderful Post-Katrina books and photo projects and the State has come fully aboard collecting personal narratives and archiving them for the future. I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t able to get some journalizing and drawing sessions going way back there in the breach.
I don’t ape Kerouac’s nickel notebooks and bic pens anymore. Most of what I do, now, most of the time, are small, palm-sized water colors or India ink pen renderings in an ongoing series of bound, illustrated journals with thick acid-free paper (black ones I order from San Francisco and red bound ones I buy from a shop near Shakespeare and Co. in Paris). I do a few domestic scale drawings using complex media—graphite, colored pencils, washes, ink, all that.
I transitioned from traditional photography to digital and archived my negatives and transparencies in cool (of course) storage. Mostly I shoot for photo-illustration now, not having had a photo show in some time. But for a year or two just before moving to Japan I worked on a set of very large paintings on canvas. These are huge things. The last exhibit, at Dante’s Inferno in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, involved tapping a row of holes in a concrete and brick wall well more than 20 feet from the floor. Then, I caulked in plastic inserts. Once set, I screwed in stainless steel eyes, and then clipped a row of karabiners to the eyes to hold the big canvas. Setting and striking that show was the hardest in my career, of my own or helping other artists. It’s easier to roll in a crate slotted with eighteen museum-mounted, 16 X 20 inch photographic prints, believe me.
However, a wall of canvas and rope and fittings, once up, is pretty impressive.
Many naive viewers immediately associate those surfaces with expressionism and, especially after the release of his bio-pic, with Jackson Pollock. He was justly famous for his contribution to “action painting” but hardly the only artist to resist the tyranny of composition and painterly tradition. However, like all good contemporary artists I figure I just stole every decent idea I have from the French Impressionists. In the case of these big 16 X 20 foot paintings, when using large numbers of familiar, repeated forms I also heavily referenced England’s Bridget Riley who in 1964 noted that "...the uncertainties of a drawn structure increase when it is composed of similar, repeated elements.” She was speaking about her own work, which was very popular at the time.
It’s generally understood that Riley painted and extended Seurat’s color wheel and copied his Bridge of Courbevoie to learn more about his technique of complementary colors. I admired that research, that is, her work, and with these big paintings I in my turn tried to extend from it -- I don’t think it necessary to replicate forms exactly or play around with optical illusion.
Obviously, color perception always depends on the other colors around. For these monumental, architectural scale works, I carefully orchestrated the colors of the nominally repeated forms. Then, I splashed and spilled and dripped and poured as direct, tension inducing counterpoint. The effect of proximal color was noted by Chevreul and called simultaneous contrast; described in the 1839 book, De la Loi du contraste Simultané des Couleurs, a book that was praised by those rascally Impressionists from whom I learned [stole] so much.
Several years ago Jim Delahoussaye introduced Jolly and me to a small group of commercial fishermen who had been working in the Atchafalaya Basin (formerly living in campboat communities). In the intervening time Jolly and I made some supportive efforts toward museum representation for them and the material culture associated with that orbit. Another result was the series of variegated surfaces of the big paintings, which are festooned with lines and pierced with grometted holes, clad with hardware and I hope reminding viewers of the fishing industry and the light falling through the leafy bowers of the Atchafalaya Basin.
Thus, I believe there is an almost irristable confluence of inputs coming together which I can identify, as if I was a bystander watching events unfold from some remote location. As the participant, however, it’s a lot more fun, and a lot more fulfilling, than mere observation. Moving to Japan was, in some ways, the shoe dropping. I began sundering up the ramp, becoming curious about Eastern religion, in high school, reading Jack Kerouac like a cotillion other goofs.
His discourse about “Highways of the Night” helped establish a 30 year, and ongoing, series of night photography-- prints of which have been exhibited in US and European shows over the decades.
I began Kerouac reading On the Road, then The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums which seemed to me under appreciated but was always my favorite, Doctor Sax which I felt was most representative of his “jazz” style writing, Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses his mandatory but, for me, uninspired poetry, Maggie Cassidy, and Tristessa. By the time I read Lonesome Traveler which, with DB, got me thinking about journey texts and travel narratives, a latent curiosity which emerged in graduate school, then Book of Dreams, recordings of his dreams. Pull My Daisy was a collaboration with a photographer (as a teenager I had no idea of the sexual implications of this film), then Big Sur , which should be seen as emerging travel exploration, Visions of Gerard. Both of these, Desolation Angels and Satori in Paris rounded off my entry into being curious about why people are fascinated about leaving home – adult “Toot and Puddle” books.
Kerouac did a half dozen more releases, plays, poetry collections, and letter sets but you always wonder how much of that is author generated and how much publisher churn. No matter. I put it all in my library next to a dozen or so biographies as the Beat industry grew. My best bud David even got me a “Kerouac” hat at one point.
Kerouac called Alan Ansen, “Rollo Greb” and William Burroughs, “Bull Hubbard” in On the Road; he called Burroughs “Frank Carmody” and Alan Ansen, “Austin Bromberg” in The Subterraneans. That book deals with the for its time edgy world of a white sub-culture character in love with a pithy black woman. Hollywood bought the rights and, on screen, the affair is between a white guy and a French woman. Pretty much the same dynamic, don’t you think? Right now, decades later, Hollywood’s darling is Tibet, and they are conveying the subtleties of that political situation with exactly the same finesse.
Neal Cassady, who turns up, as Tom Wolfe recounts for us, years later driving the bus for the Kesey Acid tests, is “Leroy” in The Subterraneans; “Cody Pomeray” in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. It was the facile discussion of Buddhism in these books applied to my soft teen noggin that got me started thinking about Eastern religion. First nature poet Gary Snyder (the Big Sur’s Jarry Wagner, the Dharma Bums’ Japhy Ryder) is portrayed living “the good life” in Aristotelian terms—if that included porking coeds—in a tiny shed-like cottage. That chimed my personal gong in favor of the simple life well before reading the good Dr. Shi. Then these mountain galumting poets scoot off to Japan, in text pictured to be stuck more or less in Lafcadio Hernish aspic.
Delighted with arrival in Japan, it’s taken us a few months to find our footing, and learn how to get about. Now, I get to scoot up to China to discuss ideas about the Japan-French Impressionist connection. There has been a historic appropriation of aesthetic and design elements from Asia into Western art, particularly with the French Impressionists.
Because of this borrowing, this can be seen as a mediating device for visitors to Asia. Being a little familiar with some of the design elements of Asia, even through the round-about way of routed through Impressionism, ameliorates anxiety associated with presentation of the exotic, it seems to me. Usually, travelers as faced with the unusual (and, indeed, that’s why we, many of us, bother to travel).
Very briefly, beginning in the early 1600s, the Tokugawa family or clan ruled Japan, following a period of marginally welcome Portuguese and Dutch missionary activity and trade. The Tokugawa period was marked by closure to foreigners during the approximately 265 years of this Shogunate rule. With the death of Tokugawa Leyasu in about 1616 and the elevation of Tokugawa Hidetada, the presence of foreign missionaries was forcefully expunged.
In short, a period of European presence in Japan was followed by an extended period of closure to the West. A period of relative unrest and divisiveness was followed by relative and relatively extended unity and peace. Japan remained isolated. During this period—until the early 19th century—Japan was ruled by the Shogunate. The Emperor was an absolute monarch who delegated authority to the Shogun.
In Edo, Kabuki emerged as one of the most important modes of entertainment during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Its plays and actors then went on to influence the content of the printmakers. Many Kabuki plays embraced themes of heroism, tragedy and loyalty, as might be predicted. They were performed upon spacious stages involving clever uses of theatrical illusion, special lighting, movable scenery, and the incorporation of music and dance in support of drama.
Life in the burgeoning cities was used by Ukiyo-e printmakers, who also drew from the Japanese landscape, bringing urban and rural environments together – not necessarily in the same piece, but within the genre. Scenes of sensual delight began to compose a certain portion of the Japanese block print out put, often drawing from the “Yoshiwara” or pleasure sections of towns. These regions not only represented a kind of domestic exotica, the women involved were likely to be very beautiful and therefore useful as ideal models.
Ukiyo-e wood block prints, or “floating world,” became increasingly commonplace from 1660 to the mid-19c. Nominally, the floating world involves a sense of the worldly, carnal, or temporal reality, as opposed to the orbit of Buddhist bliss. It’s more particular meaning often refers to what Americans would call “tenderloin” or the French “petit monde,” that social environment including opportunity to or suggestion of commercial sexuality and its immediate infrastructure.
The Japanese wood block approach to representation under discussion (which incorporates a good deal of design method based on Chinese illustration) is vastly different from what might be called the “Western” or Renaissance arts approach to creating a draftsmanship like space. While Western art historians discuss as “breakthroughs” such techniques as atmospheric and linear perspective, both designed to foster the illusion of a three dimensional literal setting, the Japanese print contains many design elements earnestly resisting this very illusion.
The space in a properly constructed print of this style is flat, meant to be unframed, viewed close up (in conditions similar to and perhaps related to the viewing of fine handwriting) with no visual illusion of depth. Formally, the bottom of the block print represents the point nearest the viewer, the top more distal. Lines grow wider as they recede into the “distance.” Smooth, opaque, flat fields of colour are applied (shadow is generally not used). Finally, a system of complicated iconography (birds, fish) conveys emotions.
Then after Matthew Perry’s dubiously titled “Diplomatic Missions” to Japan in the mid-1800s, Asian art from the archipelago nation flowed much more quickly to Europe. Artists, especially avant guard members of the tribe in France such as Edgar Degas and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (both of whom, it should be said, might predictably be touched by these examples of ukiyo-e prints, given their interest in color and line.)
While we may often speak of Japan becoming “Westernized,” in many respects Europe and the United States were also becoming “Japanized.” John La Farge wrote the first compelling and important essay on Japanese art in the US right after the American Civil war – well before the ground swell of the French Impressionists “picking up” those well publicized prints but after the prints became popular.
Somewhat ironically as the great age of block print making was winding down in Japan, the prints themselves contributed very directly to the enormous invention taking place in the fine arts in Europe. Apparently, one of the earliest enthusiasts of all things Japanese in the mid-19th century was French printmaker Félix Bracquemond. It’s recorded that he worked with the first important representatives of Japanese prints (Hokusai’s Manga album) in 1856. Bracquemond immediately saw an affinity for the curvilinear work of the Japanese draftsmanship. His enthusiasm helped introduce others to the block prints. Eventually a so-called secret society, the Société du Jing-lar was put together in France for the purpose of the study of Japanese art. The Impressionists were gelling their future vision, and the bright, vivid colors, applied in a looser style; the use of truncated composition, of silhouette, of a black line (related to that of stained glass, but not exactly an extension), and the use of flat space common to Japanese block prints all later turned up in the eventual result. Think, for example, of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
By the end of the 1800s Asia had become a borough of the advertising world. It was wonderfully “exotic” in the sense that a particularly lovely flower was more exotic than the foliage, and it was more marketable in exactly the same way that the bouquet was more marketable than the leaves were. “Japonisme” was alleged to be in love with all things from Japan, but didn’t scruple too much if it captured in its aesthetic embrace other things Asian in the meantime.
In 1889 Oscar Wilde could say that “the whole of Japan [is a] pure invention, simply a mode of style and an exquisite fancy of art.” Of course, Wilde was an “Aesthete,” who believed that having the right kind of wallpaper in the home could prevent a youth from growing up to be a juvenile delinquent (he didn’t understand it was really the right song on the CD player). What he meant was, however, that Asia was no longer a geographic place. It was instead by that time an intellectual conceptualization of the West.
It’s instructive to compare and contrast the approach to the arts and crafts taken, East and West. Japan embraces the need for skilled work and sets aside a category of “National Treasure” for those experts in particular fields. Undertakings such as flower arranging have extraordinary preparatory conditions. In the United States, how do we prepare for a career in the Fine Arts? Well, not by Classical Instruction, it seems.
According to Michael Kimmelman in The Times, “a century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature.” But that would imply working to achieve a quality of draftsmanship.
Back in 2005 Pete Panse, a tenured, talented, motivated art teacher in Middletown NY mentioned to his students—merely mentioned—that the best of them might benefit from taking life drawing classes.
He was suspended from his job pending the eventual hearing with a threat of being fired if it turned out badly. The charge? Well, to be clear, he is not being charged with actually doing anything. No claim of any unsavory action of any kind. Actually being guilty of something in order to be Salemed today would be so outré.
But he felt that his very best students might flourish with exposure to life drawing classes. They planned to go on to art school, to seek scholarships, and for that to be submitting portfolios. The mention of the idea was enough to spur the school board into action. According to ARC (a conservative website devoted to traditional art) Mr. Panse was charged with making “comments that students could construe as being of a sexual or personal nature...or using [his] position as a teacher to put students into any situation reasonably likely to make them feel uncomfortable because of the injection of sexuality into...the substance of [his] comments”. Yes. I know. They actually tried to regulate comments teenagers might be able to “construe as being of a sexual or personal nature.” Christ! You can’t say the word “Duty” in a classroom without half the students snickering.
The squib raises a number of interesting issues. It underscores the lack of fit between the insulated administrators and the students (and especially the realistic academic needs of their charges); it highlights the everyday cowardice of typical school boards; it chits up yet another good teacher punished for showing the least glimmer of initiative. Where the administrators should be providing leadership, or at least blocking when teachers go for a goal, they instead function as obstructionists. And, because I’ve devoted so much of my professional life to research into Controversial Leisure (almost introducing the area as a field within Leisure Studies) I was drawn to the conflict between the arts and the vulgar, unlettered school board members.
Although deeply conservative, ARC, a non-profit organization devoted to support of traditional art education and antagonistic to Modern art, was supportive of Panse because drawing is at the center of a formal art curriculum. Moreover, no parents complained, nor was any traditional notion of probity blemished. Panse seemed to be legitimately interested in the welfare of his students while the administration was, it seemed, motivated by job preservation.
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posted by Donlon at 7:35 AM
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