Tomorrow a friend who is a descendant of the painter Fu Baoshi will be coming by for dinner. I had told her I would see the Fu Baoshi show at the Metropolitan Museum while in New York in the first week of April. I went; it is a great show. His works of the 1940s and 1960s are amazing in power and beauty, with strong lines and well-defined washes. I already knew and liked many of the larger works of the1960s, though I did not know the graceful and intimate fans of those years. I thought I knew the works of the 1940s but was wrong. The few I had seen were not up to the level of those on display, and those on display that I had seen as reproductions were far better in the original than I had imagined. These works have a texture and physical presence that simply does not show in the reproductions. If you can get to New York, see the show.
I also spent a lot of the too much time on the airplane reading a book about the nineteenth century Japanese painter Uragami Gyokudo. I had learned of him when I read he had influenced Fu Baohsi’s daughter, the excellent painter FuYiyao. Japanese painting was influenced by the Song Dynasty monks Mu Qi and Yu Jian, both of whom were largely forgotten in China. (Mi Fu is another influence on Uragami.) The Fu family, in turn, has used Japanese art as a source in and of itself and as a means to recover a major strand of Chinese art. In the back and forth flow of ideas, Uragami in the late 1700s and early 1800s was influenced by the Yangzhou Eccentrics; he could easily pass as one, though the influence of the Yangzhou artists came through second rate paintings that had made their way to Nagasaki, the only entry for Chinese influences on Tokugawa Japan. The book I read, Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters, was informative and well-written, but of course I most enjoyed the pictures. Uragami’s landscapes have textures and compositions akin to works by Ba Da Shan Ren, with an intimacy I associate with Shi Tao. It was nice to ‘meet’ Mr. Uragami in the book, and I look forward to actually seeing his work; I will check before the next trip to Japan.
Another tangent: Did any Japanese paintings make their way to Holland in the early 1600s? There is much written about the Dutch influence on Japan in the 1700s and much about the 1900s Japanese influence on the West. Re the Dutch influence, Dutch works arrived in Japan in the 1600s; rangaku was a name for the study of Dutch works of art and science by Japanese. A Dutch trading facility, permitted to operate in Nagasaki, was Japan’s only, small link to the West (as it was to China) at the time of carefully enforced Tokugawa isolation. I would be happy to learn of any studies on what flowed to the West in the early years, the 1600s. I have often wondered whether Rembrandt’s landscapes had Eastern influences.
