Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...winter's main show at Manhattan's Japan House Gallery, "Paris in Japan," is not popular stuff. Its subject looks almost quaintly peripheral. It sets out to describe the impact of French art on Japanese artists who went to Paris between 1890 and 1930, the highest years of French influence on world culture. It does not contain a single masterpiece; almost everything in it is derivative, and not always very intelligently so. One would not normally cross the street to see earnest Japanese pastiches of Renoir, looking like inflamed rubber dolls. The only artist in it whom anyone in America...
...return the compliment; anyhow it was inevitable, once the traditional isolation of Japan was broken by the Emperor Meiji's decree, in 1868, that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world." As J. Thomas Rimer points out in a fascinating catalog essay to this show, the teaching of Western art in Meiji Tokyo began in 1876 mainly as a "scientific" discipline. But before long the bizarre techniques of the mysterious Occident developed their own momentum for Japanese artists, and particularly the Western way of depicting forms by smearing a kind of sticky, slow-drying mud on cloth, rather than using...
...course, some people are naturally conservative; they avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don't believe in going out on a limb when they don't know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality must be partially junked and replaced by the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around the point...
Ackroyd sometimes overstates his satire of scholarship and art -- Chatterton's death by poison comes not out of despair but in the hope of finding a cure for the clap. Yet the poet himself is a poignant re-creation, and the supporting cast of irrepressible eccentrics might have tumbled from a chapter of Pickwick Papers. On a train, Wychwood literally devours a novel, rolling the pages into balls and popping them into his mouth...
...ART DIRECTOR: Rudolph Hoglund...