Word: fenollosa
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...like Thomas Jefferson's, that could afford it. Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853, which forced Meiji Japan to open itself to Western influence, led to a concurrent craze in Europe and the U.S. for all things Japanese. By the turn of the century Ernest Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow, learned Bostonians infatuated with Japan, were assembling the great collections of furniture, scrollwork, carvings and prints that now fill whole galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts...
...writing "fat and thin" characters, some bold and emphatic and others trailing to the faintest visual whisper, was peculiarly his own (at least among Japanese calligraphers) and difficult to emulate. His ability to work with space through writing struck his admirers as a marvel. Ernest Fenollosa, the great Boston connoisseur of Japanese art who did the most to introduce Koetsu to a Western audience at the end of the 19th century, went into raptures about it: "Such a unique feeling for spacing, placing and spotting has never elsewhere been exhibited in the world's art. Koetsu...
...writing "fat and thin" characters, some bold and emphatic and others trailing to the faintest visual whisper, was peculiarly his own (at least among Japanese calligraphers) and difficult to emulate. His ability to work with space through writing struck his admirers as a marvel. Ernest Fenollosa, the great Boston connoisseur of Japanese art who did the most to introduce Koetsu to a Western audience at the end of the 19th century, went into raptures about it: "Such a unique feeling for spacing, placing and spotting has never elsewhere been exhibited in the world's art. Koetsu...
...enlisted in the British army in World War I and was taken prisoner on the Marne. The horrors of the trenches made him want to flee Europe altogether. In prison camp, he found books on Eastern civilization by Ernest Fenollosa and Lafcadio Hearn; at war's end, he enrolled at the Slade School in London and took classes in Japanese and Mandarin. In 1929, penniless, he managed to reach Shanghai. For the next few years he was able to study Chinese art and writing at first hand, painting landscapes and street scenes (none of which survive), getting...
...course, this would have been exactly the feeling of a cultivated Japanese in 1885, watching his cultural patrimony being politely stripped by American collectors, led by Ernest Fenollosa and the "Boston bonzes." The emerging lesson of the late '80s, which is unlikely to change in the '90s, is that America no longer controls the art market to any significant degree. Mostly, it sells. Its buying power is fading fast...