Catalogue Of The Collection Of Antique Japanese Art Objects And Curios Formed By The Well Known Connoisseur The Late Dr S M Burnett Of Washington D C

Author : American Art Association
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781333539504
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (395 download)

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Download or read book Catalogue of the Collection of Antique Japanese Art Objects and Curios Formed by the Well-Known Connoisseur, the Late Dr. S. M. Burnett of Washington, D. C written by American Art Association and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Catalogue of the Collection of Antique Japanese Art Objects and Curios Formed by the Well-Known Connoisseur, the Late Dr. S. M. Burnett of Washington, D. C: The Entire Collection to Be Sold at Unrestricted Public Sale by the Order of the Executors, Beginning January 7th, 1907; The Sale Will Be Conducted by Mr. Thomas E. Kirby of the American Art Association, New York, 1907 Japanese art, as a brief View of the specimens of the exhibit will convince, differs from our own also in that it is almost entirely decorative in purpose. Nothing that the Japanese uses is without some decorative touch. Even the carpenter's chalk line (see No. 369) is wound on a reel made to represent a wave, and to indicate, no doubt, that the owner was a shipbuilder. No pot, pan or kettle is too lowly to have some touch of art upon it. A picture is not a representation of natural Obj ects. It is a decoration, and treated as such, wherein lies another great and fundamental difference between the two arts. Decoration to the Japanese means color, pattern and movement, and we need not look far among the Obj ects of the Burnett collection to see how wonderfully the Japanese artist succeeds in combining these things in his work. Occidental painters admit freely their indebtedness to the J ap anese for the idea of notan (arrangement of masses with regard to their color, size and shape), and notan is in reality nothing but an attempt to achieve a certain subtle, almost spiritualized pattern. And the Japanese for ages have realized, with practical effectiveness, the fact that not oa the masses of a picture count, but the spaces likewise, and that spaces must be arranged with regard to their form; and this is a conception that has come recently to us from them with a good deal of force. Decoration also means to a certain degree conventionalization. In our art we have something that we call conventionalization, but viewed in the light we get on this subject from the Japanese, it seems something in the nature of murder. We take the life completely out of the ower or leaf or animal that it has pleased us to treat. The well known Chrysanthemum, that most people will immediately think of in connection with Japanese art, is the least characteristic of their conventionalizations. The kiri crest of the Emperor (three three-lobed leaves and berries arranged in a triangle) is much better. But putting these aside, and considering the freer and more artistic conventionalizations, it becomes soon evident that the Japanese have keener eyes than ours, and more sensitive minds, and an ability to look deeper into the soul of things, especially the things of nature - the nature that they love with a passion beside which our admiration or enthusiasm seems pale indeed. It would seem almost as if for generation following generation they had sat down beside their beloved owers and grasses and waited, with un inching patience, for that moment when the thing should be most itself, and reveal its soul to some lucky artist who, having glimpsed it in its true re lation at that moment, recorded his vision, for all time, with inspired tech nique. The group of ying geese, by Korin, on the cover of this catalog illus trates a thousand excellencies of the Japanese decorative animus, but none so well as this special faculty for getting at the living, spiritual fact of an obj ect - animate or inanimate - f or extracting the decorative essential. De spite the fact that they are conventionalized to such a degree that they are practically types, these are real geese. And could their swift onward move ment be more incisively expressed than by the outstretched necks and the slim pointedness of every mass? TO take one more example, and this from Korin, too: his conventionalization of the pine tree into that little bean shaped mass - usually of lead in his lacquers - that he uses so frequently to represent a mass of foliage on a pine branch. It is eminent..."