Word: ikebana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Picasso of Flowers. Such works have made Sofu Teshigahara, 54, "the Picasso of flowers" in his native Japan. Sofu has broken all the rules of the centuries-old flower-arranging art known as ikebana. His innovations leave Japanese critics torn between a fear that ikebana is getting its death blow and admiration for a technique which, commented a leading Japanese art critic, "boggles the eyes and stuns the senses...
...famous flower arranger known professionally as Wafu (Gentle Breeze), young Teshigahara was arranging flowers at four, at 14 often replaced his father in classes, as a teen-ager plowed through the Chinese classics. But at 26, Teshigahara, who had chosen as his ikebana name Sofu (Cool Green Breeze), decided to strike out on his own. What Sofu did was as shocking to the classicists as pounding out madrigals to a boogie-woogie beat. The central canon of ikebana for centuries has been Ten-Chi-Jin (Heaven-Earth-Man), where heaven is symbolized by the tall central flower...
...earlier this year sold 35,000 admission tickets in advance. With some half-million followers in Japan making up Japan's second largest flower arranging school,* Sofu now thinks he can afford to ignore the criticism of traditionalists who grumble that "Sofu has taken the soul out of ikebana." In reply Sofu simply quotes his own Grass Moon motto: "Always look forward to a fresh and vivid world and do not become buried in retrospection...