We had a house guest last week. A wonderful little boy, all of 7, who played too many hours of Little Big Planet with Ted and me.
When you are still free from the tyranny of telling time there isn't any. It's all one long moment. You go to bed, get up, eat, go to school, do homework, go to bed, do it all over again. People are constantly telling you what you need to do. I told him that one day, when he's 18, he could sleep as late as he wants to. He softly gasped with joy.
Went to SAAM planning to walk through Gardens and Cosmos again but a detour took me to the library. The Volunteer Park location is cozy, deco, eclectic. The lady's restrooms still have a 50's mood. The library hasn't changed much since the 30's. Big wooden chairs, book cases, and very, very dry air for such a damp place like Seattle.
I picked up a book and disappeared into the late Edo period of Japanese art discover-
ing Hirai Baisen (1889-
1969). The book: From Literati Modern Bunjinga from Late Edo to 20th C Japan, the Terry Welch Collection-Honolulu Academy of Art published for an exhibition of Welch's collection at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Terry
Welch took a year off after college and went to Japan, taught English and started collecting Japanese art. He never made it to law school. He became a landscape designer and he still collects. This collection was acquired by the Academy in 2005. In 08 the Academy exhibited the collection for the first time. It consists of 84 works by 60 artists; hanging scrolls, handscrolls, large screens, and albums.
Back to Hirai Baisen. He was born in Kyoto and attended the Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kogei Gakko, Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. After graduating at 18 his work brought him success and fame. In 1925 he was the sixth most successful painter in the Osaka/Kyoto area. His patrons founded the Plum Promotion Society-Baisuikai. The society's several hundred members supported Baisen by organizing annual exhibits promoting his work.
Baisen wanted to take nihonga in new directions. He visited China in 1913 and in 1914 submitted Summer at Liaohe River and Palace Garden to the 1914 Bunten. Both pieces were recognized for their imaginative compositions, strong color contrasts and fresh decorative flair. Baisen submitted Summer to the 1915 Bunten. He used dramatically different moods to contrast urban and rural life in the three panel painting. The paintings were considered daring and innovative, "free from the established rules of traditional nihonga." 1916 he created Thirty Scenes of the Capital, a set of three albums depicting 30 separate Kyoto scenes. Using brilliant color, different viewpoints and styles for each scene referencing the Tosa school, yoga and nanga.
Baisen's Plum in Snow/Rising Snow pictured below is in Literati Modern Bunjinga. The colors were riviting and soothing. The perfect orb melts into the background, it's warm vibrant colors alongside the plum branches covered in snow present a dramatic contrast. The orb, what color is it? I could find a Patone match but that would be too easy. It glows from its center, not a hard orange or soft. The background color is a perfect color field from the orb's color. Baisen's brush work is soft yet exact. There's no bravodo in his execution. There is a delecacy and weight to his plum branches and snow.
I didn't find his work childish or commercial but a review from 1927 thought Baisen's Teiten "would make a suitable poster for an Osaka shipping
company". Calling an established nihonga artist's work commercial was indeed insulting.
Critical reviews of Baisen's work increased. He began losing status even while producing
high-quality work. Eventually his paintings seemed to lose inspiration
and impact.
Very little about Baisen and his work is online. One reference I did find was from The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions Nihonga
from the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection, Paul Berry and
Michiyo Morioka, Seattle Art Museum, 2000:
270-71, on Arte Orientalis and which I've excerpted below.
A three panel painting Summer (Natsu), shown at the 1915
Bunten, represented yet another new approach. Baisen used very wet brush work to
depict three views of country and city scenes from a traditional bird's-eye
perspective. The brushwork and compositions of these paintings resemble those in
Maeda Seison's (1885-1977) triptych on the theme of hot springs (Tojiba)
shown at the 1914 Inten (Japan Art Institute Exhibition,
Nihon bijutsuin tenrankai).
A number of artists
were simultaneously working in this wet, evocative style, and there is not a
clear-cut case of one painter influencing another. Yet these paintings may have
instigated the popular public perception that linked the two artists. In
1926 an art magazine requested comments from seven artists and critics abıut the careers of Baisen and Seison, having chosen them as being representative of the
new trends in nihonga in western and eastern Japan.
Although
Baisen stopped submitting works to the national shows after 1931, he continued
to create smaller scroll paintings. The pedestrian
character of his colorful postwar works seems the expression of a different
artist from the one who had been so continually inventive in his youth. The
phenomenon of Baisen's apparent devolution as an artist is not unique and
raises questions about the increasingly academic nature of nihonga
painting groups, which may have been so rigid that creativity was stiffed.
