The 37th International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property
Session 2 Form as Individual
Résumé

9:30-9:40 Session 2 Introduction

　When we are fascinated by an artwork, more so than what that artwork shares with other forms, we are most strongly struck by its own unique quality. If it is a work whose uniqueness transcends its period, that distancing from period style makes it all the more striking. It is not always easy to discuss the connection between such exceptional forms and other forms, or to discuss them in historical terms linking them to their own period context.

　This session will focus on the uniqueness of such individual forms. While this may not be the normal study method in which we discern universally applicable rules, we cannot avoid the rivalry between the exceptional and universal when our studies focus on art that has been dubbed masterpiece or master work. We would like to search for a means of making open discussion possible while making each individual unique form the object of our study.

9:40-10:10 Paper 1

　Through the use of subtly modulated color gradation and intricately detailed design, Japanese Buddhist paintings of the 12th century manifested the “form” of beauty. The National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, Tokyo (Tobunken), conducted a joint study with the Tokyo National Museum (TNM), using high-resolution digital photography of Heian period Buddhist paintings in the TNM collection. This paper considers one of the subjects of that study, the Thousand-Armed Avalokite´svara (National Treasure, TNM), and conducts a detailed investigation of the resultant digital imagery. The aim of this paper is to consider the potential and meaning of an art historical approach that is made possible by the detailed visual study of the “form” of an art work. In this context I have used the term “form” not only in the narrow sense of areas bound by outlines, but also in the broader sense that includes aesthetic expression, as visualized through such specific materials as pigments and kirikane (cut metal leaf).

　Past research on Heian period Buddhist painting includes numerous studies regarding their iconographic, historical and religious background. Conversely, given the extreme intricacy of the technical methods used in Heian Buddhist paintings, the discussion of that expression has only been possible by those scholars who have conducted physical surveys of the actual objects. Albeit, it has not been easy for other scholars to re-examine or further test the findings of those studies. Now, the imaging technology available at the Tobunken can be an effective means of addressing this issue. This paper will present the following major points.

　First, the paper introduces details that are not normally visible in reproductions or standard gallery viewing circumstances, made possible now for the first time by the images created during this joint research project. This examination reveals the intricate and detailed techniques used by the painter. These techniques are related to the expression itself that we receive from the work. Here I indicate the minutely detailed attention paid by the creator of the work, particularly in the kirikane methods.

　Second, the use of kirikane in Buddhist painting represents a massive material change in the aesthetic awareness of Buddhist paintings in the Heian period. This change meant that the maker of the work had issues to overcome and thus had to seek out methods that would resolve those issues. This issue is related to the question of research on historical changes that is one of the art historical methods that cannot be divorced from an understanding of aesthetic awareness.

　Third, the Heian period Buddhist paintings of the 12th century reveal a particularly extensive use of gold and silver, and as such, are at times evaluated as “decorative.” And yet, detailed observation of the Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara raises questions about such “decorative” comments. I would like to consider this issue of the term “decorative” regarding Heian period Buddhist paintings. The Japanese title of this paper, “Birei no jutsu” 美麗の術，here translated as the “Manifesting Splendor,” is a phrase taken from Nakae Chômin’s Ishi bigaku, a Meiji era translation of Eugène Véron’s L’Esthétique (1878).

　Fourth, this paper indicates the issues that arise between looking closely at the “forms of individual works” and the words we use as the method of attempting to elucidate and understand the aesthetic awareness from the diverse works that date from the same period. I would like to also indicate that the awareness of looking deeply at “forms as individuals — particularly through linking such close examination to the careful examination of works that resemble that object — is a potential means of fostering “open discussion.” The process of looking closely at “individual” and awareness through words should normally be a repeated back and forth process.

10:10-10:40 Paper 2

　The two painting genres yôga (Western-style painting) and Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) are said to have been codified as the two genres of modern Japanese painting at the beginning of the Meiji era. It was the emergence of the new Western-style painting in the history of art in Japan that set up Nihonga as its opposite. The basic features of paintings included in this Nihonga genre were the use of nikawa (Japanese animal glue) as medium, while conversely Western-style painting included a range of expressive forms that had been developed in Western art, including oil paintings that used drying oil as their medium, watercolors with their gum arabic usage, and pastels that used gum tragacanth. In painting in Japan in the past and the present, there has been an increasing opportunity to see artists and their works that combine various effects in the same work, not being particular about questions of medium such as oil or nikawa, or artists who use different media and effects in different works. These phenomena stand as proof that there are a growing number of painters who are not particular about the Western-style painting/ Nihonga genres that are a product of the modern era, and those who seek to create paintings that surpass such genre distinctions. And yet, the appearance of such artists is not simply a trend of recent years, but can already be seen around the end of the Meiji era when Western- style painting had been widely accepted, including in the government-sponsored exhibitions of the day.

　This paper focuses on Okada Saburosuke and Fujita Tsuguharu as two painters among modern Western-style painters who created works that surpassed Western- style/Nihonga genre distinctions, and considers from a material and technical methods viewpoint how they pursued their own unique painterly expression, namely the “forms” manifested on planar surfaces.

　Okada Saburosuke (1869–1939) moved to France in 1897 (Meiji 30), where he studied under Raphael Collin, the teacher of Kuroda Seiki, who has been dubbed the “father of modern Western-style painting.” After studying Western art, including oil painting, Okada returned to Japan. After his return he taught Western painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko), and during that time he created not only oil paintings but also persevered in his studies of the materials and methods of Nihonga, as he sought a painting form rooted in the Japanese locale. Many of his numerous works in oils painted on washi (Japanese paper) or Japanese traditional mineral pigments painted on canvas remain extant. They reveal his research paths in pursuit of the potential of new “forms” that surpass existing concepts.

　Conversely, Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968), also known as Léonard Foujita, traveled to France in 1913 (Taishô 2) after graduating from the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko, where he distanced himself from both the Western-style painting he had learned from his teacher Kuroda Seiki and the painting trends then occurring in Paris painting circles. He succeeded as a painter in Paris through his images of nude women with “milky-white skin” outlined in black Japanese ink on oil painting canvases. We can sense that he kept Western painting traditions close at hand, while also seeking his identity as a Japanese, and thus created “forms” that had no one had ever experienced before. Through a reconsideration of his “forms” from various angles, we can discern new relationships with other artists who have previously tended to be overlooked and other “forms.”

10:50-11:20 Paper 3

　There are few modern artists after Picasso who have been the subject of as much criticism and research as Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956). As a result, a truly diverse array of interpretations of Pollock’s works has already been produced.

　These critics writing about Pollock have sometimes evoked fierce resistance to their interpretations of his art. The critiques of Pollock’s works written at the time can be largely divided into the formalism represented by Clement Greenberg with his focus on the formal aspects of Pollock’s works, and the concept of Action Painting coined and espoused by Harold Rosenberg with his focus on the painter’s creative act and process. Greenberg panned Rosenberg’s interpretation as “concocted,” severely criticizing the study as having overlooked the question of the “quality” of the resulting works themselves, which should be the most important aspect of Pollock’s art.

　In the 1970s, drawings that Pollock had created while undergoing Jungian analysis were presented for the first time as a group, and thus interest arose in the relationship between Pollock’s art and Jungian theory. Soon after a succession of researchers published Jungian interpretations of Pollock’s arts. However, at the end of the 1970s, William Rubin denied the appropriateness of this type of research, thus signaling the end of the Jungian trend in Pollock studies.

　Yet new battles arose, however, around the turn of the 21st century. When a major Pollock retrospective was held at MoMA in 1998–99, the exhibition co-curator Pepe Karmel created composites of stills and video cuts of Pollock at work, and thus in a sense recreated the production process of several important abstract paintings from Pollock’s mature period. Karmel visually revealed how in the first and intermediate layers of those paintings Pollock included truly rough depictions of human figures. In response, art critic Rosalind Krauss fiercely opposed Karmel’s research, stating that he was denigrating Pollock, likening him to a kind of traditional draftsman. In turn, siding with Krauss, Kent Minturn criticized Karmel’s method of editing the films and still photographs asserting that Karmel improperly manipulated his source materials with the purpose of finding figures in Pollock’s paintings.

　Pollock’s works also strongly influenced and inspired later artists. Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis gave birth to the Color Field Painting that used a staining technique developed after Pollock’s pouring technique. Frank Stella had his own unique interpretation of Pollock’s allover compositions, arriving at his own Black Paintings, which then developed into his shaped canvases. Allan Kaprow discerned a relationship with the viewer and actual space in Pollock’s paintings, which led to his creation of new types of art he termed Environments and Happenings. Others were inspired by Pollock’s creative acts and process, leading to the appearance of artists who pursued the concepts of performance and process in their arts.

　This paper looks back at these many critiques, studies and art production surrounding interpretations of Pollock and his works, and then returns to Pollock’s paintings themselves to consider the meaning of thinking about Pollock’s arts.

11:20-11:50 Paper 4

　Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055–1129) was an important waka poet who greatly changed the history of waka poetry during the late Heian period. And this influence was not limited to his role as the selector for the fifth imperial waka anthology, the Kinyôshû. Since the Kokinshû anthology, waka had become all the more standardized, with a growing sense of stereotyping. It was Toshiyori who brought new life to waka expression. This paper aims to consider what made this transformation possible by focusing on the “form” known as personification.

　The mitate, or parody method, was one of the developed waka techniques used at the time the Kokinshû anthology was compiled. The waka’s “form” consisted of expressing scenic feature 1 so that it is mistaken for scenic feature 2. Such mitate is different from metaphor. Conflating scenic feature 1 with scenic feature 2 is more important than the similarity between the two scenic features. In other words, it is an act of manifesting the space the poet seeks to express in the waka as an elegant thing. Personification is one type of such mitate. It is an expressive method in which the scenic feature is expressed as if it is a person. The relationship between the scenic feature and the person corresponds to mitate’s scenic feature 1 and scenic feature 2. It is a way of enacting a scene in which it seems that the scenic feature is the person who appears in the elegant space. Minamoto no Toshiyori frequently used this personification method. And futher, his use of this expression also reveals an extremely individualistic aspect.

　Personification was commonly used from the time of the Kokinshû. In particular, creatures such as birds, deer and insects can generally be seen as a form of personification expression. Further, given that the true nature of a kakekotoba (a Japanese rhetorical tool in which a single word holds dual meanings) lies in its “corresponding construct of heart-object,” kakekotoba frequently appear in tandem with personification. Examples include omina （おみなえし＝ patrinia blossom / をみなwomina = lady) and tsuki sumu ( 住む / 澄むmoon sets/moon is clear). And yet, the extensive use of personification necessarily meant a growing trend towards stereotyping and a resulting lowering of their impact. Thus it became an expressive form that could not help but give a forced or unnatural impression. Hence the waka poets, with their acute awareness of expression, tended to restrain personification.

　Toshiyori’s waka treatise Toshiyori zuinô advised beginners on how to compose waka verses and it includes a section entitled Kadai to yomikata [Verse Themes and Writing Methods]. While ostensibly showing concern for beginners, this section specifically expresses Toshiyori’s own verse writing methodology. A subjective grasp of the mutual relationship of poetic terms–I have named this “related term imagination” [engoteki shiko]–can be seen in this section, but dynamic expression focused on verbs forms its core. Toshiyori believed that the essence of poetry composition was the mastery of attaching mutual relationship to the terms in the poem based on the main constituent action.

　This personification method of Toshiyori was characterized by its use in reminiscences of such themes as financial or personal ruin and the grieving of old age, or the emotions of a love poem. In particular, reminiscence plays an important role in heightening a waka’s emotional narrative, and was a theme that formed the basis for Toshiyori’s poetic composition methods. There are many instances where the reminiscence is expressed by likening the self to the scenic element.

　Because personification is an expressive method in which the scenic element is likened to a person, reminiscence and personification are quite close. Toshiyori used the reminiscence method in seasonal poems. Personification thus restored the lyricism with its power to appeal to the other.