Ukiyo-e - Kunsthandel Klefisch
Ukiyo-e - Kunsthandel Klefisch Ukiyo-e - Kunsthandel Klefisch
in character the popular artists had no predecessors and were in no danger of rivalry by the older academics.... Even amongst the plebeian painters the social position, or rather the absence of social position, of the actor sometimes brought upon the theatrical section of the ukiyo-e a pseudopatrician contempt, and a few draughtsmen who devoted their pencils to perpetuating the graces of teahouse girls and courtesans, chose to consider they would dishonour their art by employing in the portrayal of the impersonation of the Garricks of the drama. Here we already find, preceding Goncourt, all the ideological ingredients which formed the subsequent Western interpretation of ukiyo-e. Edmond de Goncourt should not be looked upon as the founder of the French category of critics, but rather as the discoverer of Japanese xylography in terms of a “territory” of modern art, in a close combination of ukiyo-e and impressionism. If Goncourt had not viewed ukiyoe with impressionist eyes, his monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai - in spite of his collection of information straight from the “sources” through Tadamasa Hayashi - would have occupied a far less important place in the history of criticism than they actually do. So Goncourt’s main merit consisted in the type of reading, on an aesthetic basis, that he gave of the phenomenon of ukiyo-e: European criticism, essentially, has not gone beyond this type of interpretation as yet. In another context I have pointed out how the typical concept of Goncourtian “decadentism”, with its themes of courtesans and of life in the “green houses”, reappeared in the later critics (not only French), including Paul Andre Lemoisne and Louis Aubert; in these minor critics it is perhaps even more easy to perceive, from 1910 to 1930, the “literary” tendency that Keyes ascribes to the “French tradition”. One might also insist on the “European commonplaces” of interpretation in Goncourt, such as that of the strength of the sign in Hokusai as in Michelangelo, or that of Utamaro read as a Watteau “de la-bas” - but an equally clear example of an ideological interpretation, like the French one, can be found in the reading of Sharaku given by Julius Kurth, considered the founder of the German school. Kurth was one of the discoverers of the genius of Toshusai Sharaku, and his study started the revaluation of this artist; but in this case, too, how much of the development of criticism was determined by the scholars “aesthetic ideology”? So, curiously enough, to an interpretation of Utamaro by a French impressionist there corresponded that of Sharaku by a German expressionist. In fact, German expressionism, though a decade after the impressionists and Van Gogh, had a definite function in the European discovery of ukiyo-e. This is particularly true of the poet and writer Carl Einstein, author of the booklet Der Frühere Japanische Holzschnitt (sixteenth volume of the small, but famous, series Orbis Pictus, by the Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth), which appeared at the beginning of the nineteen-twenties and was one of the crucial contributions to the aesthetic revaluation of the ukiyo-e “Primitives”.
It was not by chance that Einstein focused on the Primitives rather than on Kiyonaga and Utamaro, like the impressionists, or on Hiroshige, like Van Gogh, because the more rigid graphics of the Primitives were more comparable to the dry and angular style of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, both great xylographers. And Einstein, on this line of rediscovery of “primitiveness” as the central element of “modernity”, had already fully revaluated African tribal sculpture, in another booklet of his, Negerplastic (Munich, 1915), which also was a cornerstone of the Expressionist view. We must therefore conclude that the alleged tendency towards the ideologisation of the interpretation of ukiyo-e in an European aesthetic key is a phenomenon common to all scholars, beyond the hypothetic distinction between the French tradition and the German one. This tendency can be found in almost all scholars from the end of the nineteenth century on; it is also possible to point out rarer opposite episodes of intrusion of the specific ukiyo-e character in the history of European art, for example the repeated comparisons of Botticelli with Utamaro in the Berensonian monograph by Yukio Yashiro. We must point out that the French literary culture was the first one to overthrow “classicist” prejudices against erotism in art, and the path opened by Baudelaire and Goncourt was followed in the twentieth century by the Surrealists, while Georges Bataille reached its extreme conclusions in the summary formed by his books L’erotisme, 1957, and in 1961, shortly before his death, Les larmes d’Eros. I did not have a chance, around 1970, to ask Richard Lane, with whom I was having a close exchange of letters, whether he too, like me, had been attracted to shunga by the stimuli received through French literature. For Lane, who was an attentive reader of Ihara Saikaku’s novels, the stimulation probably came directly from the role of the erotic literature of ukiyo-e: in 1956 he had been the editor of an English edition of Saikaku’s novel Five Women who Loved Love, translated by W. Theodor de Bary and published by Rutland. Roger Keyes had already pointed out, with his customary depth of analysis, that alongside French tradition there had developed that criticism of ukiyo-e that he called German tradition (R. Keyes, Klaus J. Brandt’s Hosoda Eishi, in “Andon, Bulletin of the Society of Japanese Artisan Crafts”). On the contrary, when, in 1977, I wrote the introductory essay for the edition of the third volume of Koi no hutusao by Utamaro (bilingual English-Italian edition), I was still strongly influenced by Goncourt’s book. Jack Hillier, with whom I was in touch since the first half of the nineteen-sixties, spotted this “dependence” of mine on the French writers in a review of my text, which he appreciated also for its “modern psychological approach”, unusual at that time in the criticism of ukiyo-e. Hillier was the first real great innovator in the study of the art of ukiyo-e; his attitude to shunga was of great appreciation. In his letters to me he repeatedly expressed this opinion, encouraging me to study this hitherto neglected genre of Japanese xylography; and he showed his interest even more in the long conversations we had during our en-
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in character the popular artists had no predecessors and were in no danger of rivalry<br />
by the older academics.... Even amongst the plebeian painters the social position,<br />
or rather the absence of social position, of the actor sometimes brought upon<br />
the theatrical section of the ukiyo-e a pseudopatrician contempt, and a few draughtsmen<br />
who devoted their pencils to perpetuating the graces of teahouse girls<br />
and courtesans, chose to consider they would dishonour their art by employing in<br />
the portrayal of the impersonation of the Garricks of the drama.<br />
Here we already find, preceding Goncourt, all the ideological ingredients which formed<br />
the subsequent Western interpretation of ukiyo-e. Edmond de Goncourt should<br />
not be looked upon as the founder of the French category of critics, but rather as<br />
the discoverer of Japanese xylography in terms of a “territory” of modern art, in a<br />
close combination of ukiyo-e and impressionism. If Goncourt had not viewed ukiyoe<br />
with impressionist eyes, his monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai - in spite of his<br />
collection of information straight from the “sources” through Tadamasa Hayashi -<br />
would have occupied a far less important place in the history of criticism than they<br />
actually do. So Goncourt’s main merit consisted in the type of reading, on an aesthetic<br />
basis, that he gave of the phenomenon of ukiyo-e: European criticism, essentially,<br />
has not gone beyond this type of interpretation as yet.<br />
In another context I have pointed out how the typical concept of Goncourtian “decadentism”,<br />
with its themes of courtesans and of life in the “green houses”, reappeared<br />
in the later critics (not only French), including Paul Andre Lemoisne and Louis<br />
Aubert; in these minor critics it is perhaps even more easy to perceive, from 1910 to<br />
1930, the “literary” tendency that Keyes ascribes to the “French tradition”. One might<br />
also insist on the “European commonplaces” of interpretation in Goncourt, such as<br />
that of the strength of the sign in Hokusai as in Michelangelo, or that of Utamaro read<br />
as a Watteau “de la-bas” - but an equally clear example of an ideological interpretation,<br />
like the French one, can be found in the reading of Sharaku given by Julius<br />
Kurth, considered the founder of the German school. Kurth was one of the discoverers<br />
of the genius of Toshusai Sharaku, and his study started the revaluation of this<br />
artist; but in this case, too, how much of the development of criticism was determined<br />
by the scholars “aesthetic ideology”? So, curiously enough, to an interpretation<br />
of Utamaro by a French impressionist there corresponded that of Sharaku by a German<br />
expressionist. In fact, German expressionism, though a decade after the impressionists<br />
and Van Gogh, had a definite function in the European discovery of<br />
ukiyo-e.<br />
This is particularly true of the poet and writer Carl Einstein, author of the booklet Der<br />
Frühere Japanische Holzschnitt (sixteenth volume of the small, but famous, series<br />
Orbis Pictus, by the Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth), which appeared at the beginning<br />
of the nineteen-twenties and was one of the crucial contributions to the aesthetic<br />
revaluation of the ukiyo-e “Primitives”.
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