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...Koetsu's sources reached back hundreds of years, and yet his way of 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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Subtle Magic of Koetsu | 10/11/2000 | See Source »

...Koetsu, the Japanese artist, is scarcely known in the U.S., but in Japan he is a national treasure several times over - about as famous there as Benvenuto Cellini is in the West. This is because he was one of the supreme masters of calligraphy, an art that matters only to specialists on the American side of the Pacific but is wholly central to Japanese and Chinese aesthetics. It's understandable, therefore, that the present show of Koetsu's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, though respectably attended, has not been packing in the crowds. This is a boon...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Subtle Magic of Koetsu | 10/11/2000 | See Source »

There is an inverse relationship between the size of Koetsu's work and the scale of his cultural resonance. These tiny, fugitive-looking images, in which luminous fragments of nature?pines bowing before a wind, the undulation of a flock of cranes?were painted in colored inks on handmade paper by his collaborator Tawaraya Sotatsu and then written over by Koetsu, have acquired, for Japanese taste, the sort of cardinal importance that a fresco cycle or an altarpiece might have for ours. Koetsu's work, given the accumulated Japanese reactions to it, is perhaps the ultimate example of the power...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Subtle Magic of Koetsu | 10/11/2000 | See Source »

...Koetsu died at 79 in 1637, laden with the esteem of patrons and connoisseurs. He was a devotee of beauty and had given over his life to art with the degree of throwaway fanaticism that entails a horror of self-importance. Koetsu was not a professional artist. He raised amateurism to an extreme level. The rougher and more summary his work, the greater its appeal to the cultivated. He has always been associated with the "Renaissance" of the city of Kyoto, then Japan's capital, after the ferociously destructive civil wars of the 16th century, when Japan was finally stabilized...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Subtle Magic of Koetsu | 10/11/2000 | See Source »

...certain how Koetsu managed to find a place within this society as one of its principal tastemakers - as, in a sense, its artistic director. The role wasn't a complete sinecure: the ruling warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, ordered the seppuku, or ritual suicide, of one of Koetsu's circle, the tea master Furuta Oribe, for some real or imagined disloyalty. But Koetsu ended his days in dignified security, as the quasi-religious head of a community at Takagamine, near Kyoto, part artists' colony and part monkish village...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Subtle Magic of Koetsu | 10/11/2000 | See Source »

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