ART : When the Japanese Imported Western Ways

They say that traditional Japanese actors are trained to express emotion by imitating its physical look rather than by attempting to actually feel the feeling. The Kabuki actor is not laughing because he is happy, he is happy because he’s laughing; not breathing hard because he’s angry but angry because he’s breathing hard. That’s the opposite of the Western method of subjective empathy according to Stanislavsky or Strasberg, but it obviously works because nobody is better at projecting an emotion to the back of the house than a Noh drama performer.

The tactic suggests a culture that makes art from the outside in. It begins to account for characteristics usually associated with Japanese art and culture, including its once-scorned habit of aping everything from Chinese Buddhas to American microchips. Justa buncha copycats. If they are, how did they then formulate a distinctive national style unmistakable in a panoply of forms from armor to raku pottery to modern films of unsurpassed quality? How did they toss off a style of print-making--supposedly a form of light mass entertainment--that came to fuel a revolution in European art?

These days, the question is not just of interest to a priestly class of aesthetes with limp lilies in their buttonholes. These days, Americans strolling Rodeo Drive watch agog as Japanese tourists gleefully pay cash for Gucci gewgaws, Cartier baubles, Van Gogh paintings and controlling interest in large corporations. We see the same image of the Rich Japanese that Europeans once had of the Rich American.

Our educators make masochistic comparisons between our schools. Our politicians scold Japan for sending us so many desirable products. (It’s hard to be mad at them if you just bought one of those Japanese cars that is supposed to be as good as a Mercedes or BMW for half the price and a third of the upkeep, and as far as you can tell it is.)

How do they do it?

An exhibition on view at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery (through April 3) may cast some light. “Paris in Japan” chronicles a virtually unknown movement unfolded between the 1890s and 1930s, when Japanese artists and writers became every bit as fascinated by modern European art as we were by the Japanese print. Some stayed home and picked up what they could through reproductions and visiting teachers; others managed the arduous journey to Paris, where they studied with such conservative teachers as Jean-Paul Laurens, Fernand Cormon and Carolus-Duran. Adding massive culture shock to the usual rigors and temptations of Left Bank life, many had a rough time.

Of the 27 artists represented here by 75 works, only one, Fujita Tsuguharu, made any lasting dent in the West. His haunted images of wan and stylish ladies with shimmering, glaucous flesh joined in the limning of poetic sexual longing and decadence of Modigliani and Jules Pascin. Almost everybody else plays to those who have characterized the show--co-organized by the Japan Foundation and St. Louis’ Washington University--as a fascinating oddity.

It certainly is that. There are zinging little sociological insights in paintings like Yasui Sotaro’s bright “Portrait of Mrs. F.,” where our notion of a delicate Japanese beauty is suddenly blown up to the proportions of a Rubens and dressed in 1939’s idea of chic Parisian garb. Suddenly an Amazon Japanese is tricked out with an absurd little red boater and filmy scarf that leaves us with a conviction that European clothes are funny-looking.

Speaking of women, a catalogue essay points out that there is no tradition of admiring aestheticized portrayals of the nude in Japanese art (although plenty show up in the erotic prints of the so-called Japanese marriage books). Confronted with the nude, the Japanese artists seemed to zero in on qualities missed or suppressed in Western art, such as the sponginess of lax flesh, the notion of Caucasian women as exotics or a simple and embarrassed distancing.

The show is punctuated with bargain-basement Utrillos by Saeki Yuzo, fire-sale Cezannes by Morita Tsunetomo and right-wing Braques by Koide Narashige. Impatient perfectionism could dismiss the whole caboodle as a conservative cultural souffle that just didn’t rise, but the truth is that the Japanese displayed many of the the same provincial characteristics as Americans who were gingerly trying to absorb modernism at the same time. Yamashita Shintaro’s adaptation of Renoir and Cassatt is actually more successful that that of an American like William McGregor Paxton.

When the Japanese made mistakes, they tended to make them the same way the Germans did, mistaking, say, the freedoms of Fauvism for an emotional rather than a formal revolution. It is surprising how much of the more adventuresome Japanese art comes out looking more like German Expressionist angst than School of Paris suavity. Yorozu Tetsugoro’s “Woman With a Boa” looks like a Matisse that arrived in Tokyo via Munich. His 1912 “Self Portrait With Red Eyes” is every bit as sharded and as troubled as German Die Brucke painting. Kishida Ryusei painted microscopically detailed portraits in the 1920s that paralleled the German New Realists. His absurdly neckless little “Country Girl” combines a Japanese love of caricature with a nearly surreal intensity of vision.

More profoundly, we find these artists pursuing the old cultural tactic of approaching art from the outside in, trying to get the outward look of the thing down first and worrying about the internal meanings later. (Significantly, the catalogue reports that virtually none of these artists had the kind of deep knowledge of Occidental art history that fuels the progress of Western art.)

Fujishima Takeji painted a corny Frans Hals one minute, a Cezanne-esque “Reverie” the next, then veered radically to a Nolde-like sunrise and a Munch-ish “Cypresses” that is not half bad. Except that piece of sky keeps popping off the background like the specter in a ghost movie, and you can tell he didn’t mean it.

Happens all the time in this show. Either the artists get the form down so solidily it looks like mud sculpture or things float around. Nostrils go meandering up noses, nudes hover inches off the ground or a galloping horse dissolves into a spirit.

All these game artists were not just out to learn to paint in any ordinary sense. They were trying to learn a new way of seeing, a foreign visual grammar.

The secret of the original look of Japanese art comes from its ability to absorb outside ideas and translate them into its own distinctive native grammar. It has been called decorative, stylized and story-telling. What it really is, is a shorthand of purified, codified gestures that communicate with extraordinary delicacy and power, whether through the crooked little finger of a geisha in a print or the Kabuki lion tossing his mane with majestic rage.

Japanese art had already spent centuries achieving such an eloquent balance of the realistic and the stylized, it’s a wonder they wanted to learn the clunky barbarisms of the West to begin with, but obviously they did. Tellingly, their greatest success came in absorbing Western art that had itself already absorbed aspects of Oriental art. The Matisse-like odalisques of Koide Narashige, Mitsutani Kunishiro and Umehara Ryuzaburo are not perfect, but they understand the byplay between decorative surface and deep space that was Modernism’s backbone.

What European Modernism had going for it was sheer dynamism, the belief in change and innovation. Had that impulse been deeply present elsewhere, the first Matisse would certainly have been Japanese, just as the first Picasso would have been African.