Word: sesshu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Eighteen thousand Japanese, buzzing with admiration, visited Tokyo's National Museum last week to see the work of an artist who died 450 years ago. Known by his painter name, "Sesshu" (Snow Boat), he is today rated as Japan's greatest landscape artist; his works are valued at up to $250,000 each, and four are classed as "national treasures." So enthusiastic were the crowds that turned out to inspect the 30 Sesshu masterpieces on view that the museum broke precedent, was open on Mondays for the first time since its opening...
...Japanese, Sesshu is, as one early critic said, "the open door through which all contemporary and subsequent artists looked into the seventh heaven of Chinese genius." Working mainly in sumi ink and brush, Sesshu changed the Chinese art of landscape into something typically Japanese, portraying traditional Japanese scenes in sure, strong brush strokes that gave a new vigor and vision to the exquisite lines of the Chinese Sung period. From Sesshu onward, Japanese painting had a look of its own and a tradition still practiced by such modern masters as Taikwan Yokohama (TIME, Sept...
Hasegawa has at times been as withdrawn from reality in life as in the strange shapes and forms of his art. He studied at Tokyo University, got interested in Sesshu. the great 15th century Japanese Buddhist painter, and this led him to Zen Buddhist monasteries, where he used to sit for hours under the supervision of monks, trying to learn to exclude all thought from his mind, submerge himself in peaceful oblivion. In the early '30s he went to Europe, where he came under the influence of Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Arp and Alexander Calder. Says...