Word: tessai
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...what amounts to a major shift in Japanese national taste, an almost forgotten Confucian scholar named Tomioka Tessai, who died in 1924 at the age of 88, is emerging as Japan's most popular painter since the Ukiyo-e masters of the 17th and 18th centuries. What makes his sudden rise to fame so surprising is that Tessai's work boldly departs from the polish and finish of Japan's professional, court-painting tradition. Instead, he used a rough, impulsive brushwork that often seems closer to the West than to the Orient...
...Japanese public's enthusiasm for Tessai's work soared in 1955 when Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art turned over its entire three floors to an exhibition of his works. Western-oriented Japanese compared his work to Cézanne and Van Gogh in its vigor and independence; the president of Japan's Society for International Cultural Relations called Tessai "the greatest giant produced by Japan in recent times." Early this year a crowd of 20,000 showed up on the opening day of another Tessai exhibit. Now with a traveling exhibit of 53 Tessai...