JAPANESE PRINTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 3, 5 January 1937, Page 14

JAPANESE PRINTS

THEIR RISE TO FAVOUR THE PAINTER'S ART In 1861, a book called "Japanese Fragments" was published in London. The event is notable, because this was practically the first occasion on which the art of the Japanese colour print had been written about by an English observer, writes "K.H.W." in the "Sydney Morning Herald." Japan had, until recently, la'in wrapped in hermitlike isolation. Only in 1853 had"Commodore Parry entered Uraga Bay with his warships and demanded, successfully, that the country throw open its doors to outside traders. It is interesting to observe the patronising terms in which Captain Osborne, the writer of "Japanese Fragments," refers to the Japanese prints. The captain was himself, apparently, no great authority on art. But he had had the honour in 1859, of commanding a frigate which carried Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador, on a special mission to the Japanese Emperor. Lord Elgin was a son of the more famous Lord Elgin, whose name is associated with the Greek marbles in the British Museum, and he was thus equipped with the experience and the tradition to give a lead in the appreciation of Eastern culture. Presumably, the Ambassador's taste exerted some influence on the remarks of the Captain. Osborne talks at length about the "humble artists" of Japan, and especially about one, Hiroshige, whom he calls "our embryo Turner." He regards the Japanese colour-printers, it is plain, in the same light, as the average Australian would regard an aborigine scratching some lively designs on a rock. What a change has come over the Western attitude since 1861. In a whole series of books about the Japanese prints, the tone becomes more and more adulatory. Basil Stewart, a wellknown latter-day authority, says:"One may look in vain through an art gallery or an academy exhibition to find a single picture possessing even one of the first principles of true art. Any old Japanese colour-print which originally sold for but a few pence, perhaps, in the streets of Yedo, will poSsess them all; perfect in composij Vlon, line, form, and colour." TARDY VINDICATION. The author of "Japanese Fragments" would certainly be surprised, if he could read this ecstatic reference to his "humble artists!" He might be even more surprised could he see the imposing volume which , Mr. P. Neville Barnett has devoted to Japanese colour-prints. This book equals, and even surpasses, in sumptuousness, Mr. Barnett's earlier publications on the subject of book-plates. Looking through the text and the pictorial matter, which between them carry the narrative from the middle of the eighteenth century down to the present day, one is struck anew by the enormous influence Japanese prints have exerted, during the last 80 years, on the art of the West. Whistler, of course, was among the first to echo the essentials of the Japanese style. The impressionists of the Batignolles school— Manet, Monet, Sisley, and the restwere also avowed enthusiasts of the colour prints. To Japan can be traced the whole motive of the flat, decorative style of - painting which has been in vogue since those nineteenth century days. Not only the impressionists, but the later adherents of the "expressionist" and other movements owe something to Japan—the expressionists in their emphasis on "the character and genius of the element," as opposed to the painstaking enumeration of incidental detail practised by the strict realists. When the Japanese colourprinter represents water, for example, he strives for "the weight and mass of water falling; the sinuous, swift curves of a stream evading obstacles in its way; the burst of foam against a rock; the toppling crest of a slowly-arching billow; and all in a rhythm of pure lines." . Yet, in following the Japanese example, the art of the West is really only* rediscovering some of the "first principles of true art." The elongation its the draperies of the Japanese figures, to give them tragic dignity, can be paralleled in the paintings of El Greco, not to mention the carvings of the Gothic stone-masons. For the absence of linear perspective, so that figures in the middle distance are no smaller than those in the foreground, one has only to turn back to the Italian primitives. The fixing of the angle from which all human faces are represented, to form' an almost invariable convention is, after all, only another manifestation of the ancient Egyptian practice. The Egyptians formalised, not because they were ignorant of realistic methods; but in order to express a special set of ideas. So did the Japanese. Captain Osborne, the representative of the nineteenth-cen-tury outlook, would and could not realise this. But twentieth-century Europe and America see it very clearly. A great proportion of contemporary art is only a re-assimilation and reiexpression of the modes of .thought of earlier periods. These modes appear again and again throughout the history of the human race.