Ernest Fenollosa, the man who taught the West about traditional Japanese art, first came to Japan in 1878, when he was invited to teach philosophy and political economy at Tokyo University. In 1886, he resigned and accepted a contract with the Ministry of Education and the Imperial household. That left him with more time to follow his real interest -- saving Japanese art.
It was being neglected and worse, as Japan rushed westward. Not only were paintings, prints and scrolls disregarded, there were also reports of whole pagodas being dismantled for firewood. Fenollosa sought to stop this. He saved many pieces from destruction, and in the process acquired a very fine private collection that can now be seen in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Instrumental in the founding of what is now the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, the first institution to reassess Japanese art, Fenollosa later moved to Boston, where he headed the museum's Oriental Department. He returned to Japan a final time in 1897.
By then, the Japanese were taking care of their own art and so its protector found himself teaching English at the Imperial Normal School in Tokyo. Like many another foreign expert, he discovered himself to be increasingly marginalized. But unlike some, he behaved with dignity, accepted what he was given, and never publicly complained, except perhaps in his rather sudden departure three years later.
After taking up a teaching post at Columbia University, he continued to labor on what was to become his major work, an enormous and often intractable collection of notes on Japanese and Chinese art. These were still not in publishable shape when he died in 1908.
The huge job of ordering these literary remains -- volumes of notes covering 5,000 years of Asian art, all classified in time and in style -- fell to his devoted wife, Mary, who spent the declining years of her own life on the project.
Notes on drama were given to Ezra Pound who issued his own opinionated book on the noh; Okakura Kakuzo, friend and supporter, made use of the notes on the applied arts; Mary herself put together the material that became the book now under review. It was first published in 1912, and was then reissued, revised, a year later. The latter version is now available in this sturdy and attractive facsimile edition.
Originally the publication was in two volumes. It is here reprinted as one, but it has not been repaginated as this would have wrought havoc with the index. In addition, the making of a paperback edition means the page format has been reduced. Since the type was already small, this results in dense, packed pages.
But the interested reader will still peruse them with pleasure -- despite the fact that the scholarship is a century out-of-date and the methodologies are hopelessly old-fashioned -- because the sheer amount of material and the scope of this initial inspection have rarely been equaled.
Fenollosa himself thought that his work's greatest claim was that for the first time he could show that "the art of each epoch has a peculiar beauty of line, spacing, and colour which could have been produced at no other time." Most available works dealt more "with the technique of industries than with the aesthetic motive in schools of design, thus producing a false classification by materials instead of by creative periods."
This can lead to some playing around with pantheons, a diversion frowned upon in our sternly egalitarian postmodern times. Thus we have statements such as "Individually Koyetsu, and perhaps Tanyu, overtop Okio and Kiyonaga in the quality of their general geniuses." And the admonition against admiring Hokusai: "We certainly rank him below Masanobu, Harunobu and Kiyonaga."
In addition, the reader must put up with rigid opinions and a hushed veneration for anything Buddhist.
This can annoy. It certainly irritated Henry Adams, who was spending a hot summer with Fenollosa in Nikko. He wrote back home to wish that his correspondent "were here to help us trample on him. He has joined a Buddhist sect; I was myself a Buddhist when I left America, but he has converted me to Calvinism with leanings toward the Methodists."
Fenollosa also employs the paradigm that sees history in anthropological terms: birth, youth, maturity, decay, death. We must therefore have a long period of decline leading to where Fenollosa was standing when he took his notes. Thus even the Hikone screen is seen as "decadent," and Utamaro is beyond the artistic pale. "The extravagances of Utamaro appealed to a degenerating taste, as they appeal today to many modern French aesthetes."
But it is not for errors of fact, judgment or taste that one continues to read this book. One reads it for its scope, which is enormous, and for the feeling it conveys of the huge panorama of Asian art, which is, in our age of over-specialization, otherwise almost lost.
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