Japanese Traditions and American Art

Abstract

We Americans have often given ourselves over to so-called fads in the arts. At one time it was Spanish colonial, at another eighteenth century French. Perhaps this phenomenon of imported taste was more evident in the earlier decades when European influence was predominant and when there was more time and money to indulge in interior decoration. At that time there was also a European influence (mostly French) on modern American painting and sculpture. It took a longer time for this influence to reach the West Coast, although today in any of the Pacific states one can have a wet Picasso in twenty-four hours. I have often thought that if the West Coast had been open to aesthetic influence from Asia, as the East Coast was to Europe, what a rich nation we would be! When I was in Japan in 1933 there was a hiatus between the art of the East and of the West. Japan seemed to be experiencing a migration of artistic forms from Occident to Orient. What little oriental influence there was in America had hardly penetra...