I’ll begin with observation that will seem so trite, so self-evident, that you will think: is that all he has to tell us? We knew that already. And then I’ll spend some time trying to convince you that the observation is not only true, but important.
It’s this: a culture will find it easier to accept and absorb images and pictorial ideas from a foreign culture if these can be seen as echoing some elements from its own past, however far in the past they may be, and however neglected they may have been in the intervening centuries.
S,S. You may wonder why I begin with these two: what can they have in common? Both are LS; both are regarded now as highly original works, as masterpieces of their artists (Gong Xian, Hokusai).
More importantly for my argument, both made a deep impact and were deeply admired by western viewers, at early stages in our study of E. Asian art, when traditions they belong to were little understood. (In case of Gong Xian , not nec. this very picture, but something like it by the artist.)
Finally, and most to the point, western viewers who were so struck by them didn’t realize, at that early stage, that part of reason they seemed relatively accessible to western eyes is that both artists had incorporated strong elements of western, or European, style into their pictures. In both cases, I believe, the response of western viewers was directed chiefly at the strangeness of the images; but it also, mostly unconsciously, was tinged with a recognition of strangely familiar aspects of them that made them more visually acceptable, saved them from seeming entirely alien. (Same elements, of course, made them seem strikingly original, visually arresting, to viewers w/in the artists’ own cultures.)
Hokusai’s great Red Fuji (or Fuji at Sunrise, or “South Wind, Clear Weather”): What were familiar to western eyes, but original & striking to Japanese, were the blue sky w. white clouds, and the effect of morning sunlight & shadow on the upper & lower parts of the mountain. Familiar to Japanese but strikingly new to western eyes were the flat, shaded areas of color, without dark shadows, and the boldly simplified, strongly patterned composition--for which, if it were to our purpose, I could show precedents in Jap. representations of particular places--shinkeizu--and espec. Mt. Fuji. Edmond de Goncourt wrote about this print in 1896: “Fujiyama colored brick red with a few snow lizards at its peak, against an intensely blue sky lined with layers of white clouds like a beach with the tide out. A print of considerable originality in which the artist has tried to render the effect he has seen [that is, in nature] in all its barely credible reality.”
-- S. Goncourt was aware of Hokusai’s series of strongly westernized LS prints, done some twenty years earlier, around 1810; he writes that these landscapes “have a Dutch feeling about them.” (A bit of an understatement.) But to account for the striking coloring in the Red Fuji, coloring that was quite outside the Japanese LS tradition, he makes the European assumption that Hokusai had simply imitated the coloring of nature, as any observant artist might do. About the whole Views of Fuji series he wrote, “The series . . . with somewhat garish colors that were chosen to match as closely as possible the colors seen under every light in nature, is currently the source of inspiration for the landscapes of the Impressionists.” Europe was getting back what it gave, somewhat altered.
-- S. (Another of the westernized series, for the shading.) I oversimplify the responses, of course, to make my point--which is that aspects of the image that fit w/in one’s own tradition render the picture acceptable and readable, even comfortable, while those that are adopted from another tradition supply a special visual stimulation, a sense of newness, and so save it from banality, from being just another picture of Mt. Fuji. By brilliantly bringing these together, Hokusai could (without meaning to, of course) dazzle both Japanese and foreign viewers.
S -- Gong Xian’s masterwork “Myriad Peaks and Ravines” in the Rietberg Museum, Zurich. Arthur Waley ended his 1923 book Introduction to Chinese Painting with this extraordinary paragraph, perhaps the first perceptive thing that a western viewer had written about a post-Song Chinese painting: “He [Gong Xian] saw Nature as a vast battlefield strewn with sinister wreckage. His rivers have a glazed and vacant stare; his trees are gaunt and stricken; his skies lower with a sodden pall of grey. Many of his pictures contain no sign of man or human habitation . . . Such houses as he does put into his pictures have a blank, tomb-like appearance; his villages look like grave-yards. With this tragic master I conclude.” Words that fit this picture, whether or not Waley knew it (as he could have, from reproduction.)
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