Sur un Fond Blanc: Ecrits Japonais sur la Peinture du IX au XIX1 Siecle

Abstract

VERA LINHARTOVA'S Sur un fond blanc ('On a White Background') is a critical anthology of ten centuries of Japanese writings about painting, many of which have never before been translated into a Western language. The book brings together a rich fund of primary sources on aesthetics, particularly valuable to those who do not read Japanese. It will also be of great interest to specialists, not only because of the author's choice of texts but also because of her critical approach and her inspiring overview of artistic movements and aesthetic trends. While the anthology proper starts in the ninth century with Kuikai's fundamental teachings on the use of images in religion, Linhartova' nevertheless analyzes the first Japanese written sources, Kojiki, 712, and Nihon Shoki, 720. There, as so often, a continental influence is evident (references to yin and yang, for example), but typically enough the Chinese abstract Taoist cosmology is transformed into uniquely Japanese images and anthropomorphic descriptions of the landscape. In Nihon Shoki, references to craftsmen are to be found, the craftsmen-artists who would later form the schools typically organized on a strong hierarchical basis, perpetuate the master-pupil tradition, and maintain the harmony of the arts and crafts in contrast to the West. Even though covering the eight centuries from the Nara period to the Momoyama, the first part of the anthology is shorter than the second, which surveys less than three centuries, the Edo period. Up to the seventeenth century, Linhartova' explains, documents on the theory of painting were scarce, and her extracts are taken mainly from literary and historical sources. Chinese writings were known from early times, but they do not appear to have attracted many commentaries until the Edo period, when a renewal of interest in China took place and Chinese artistic theories were studied systematically by literati painters. In fact, throughout the centuries, Chinese influence penetrated Japanese culture and art to a greater or lesser degree. The title for the anthology is not, significantly enough, a Japanese original image, but rather the Japanese adaptation of Confucius's cryptic words in Analects: 'All painting is done on a white (or plain) background,' (huishi housu, J. kaishi koso), an expression similar to the Western idiom, 'Starting with a blank canvas.' The way in which the Chinese expression was adapted to Japanese may be seen as a symbolic example of the way in which continental influences were assimilated and transformed into Japanese aesthetics: the four ideograms of the original expression were abridged to koso, or 'blank background', and these two characters surprisingly became synonymous with painting by the time Kano Ikkei wrote his Kososhu ('On Painting'), 1663. This two-part anthology is organized under evocative headings. The title 'Une image du monde et les premieres chroniques du Japon' is echoed and reversed in the following chapter, Le monde des images dans l'ceuvre de Kukai. Here the great Esoteric Buddhist master expounds beautifully how art helps express what is beyond words, 'the Ultimate Reality' that is 'totally formless and colorless', but which 'can be grasped through forms and colors.... What the sutras and commentaries say in a veiled or cursory fashion, images reveal with total clarity' (p. 44). Kuikai's metaphysical view of art is in total contrast with Tachibana Narisue's comments of the Heian period