Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Some collectors have card-catalogues in which they keep all information relating to each print. Others use the bottom of the mount under the mat for that purpose. For a large collection the former is preferable; for a small one, the latter.

The mounted prints are best kept in portfolios or Solander-boxes, laid flat on shelves and protected from dust as much as possible. Within the portfolio or box, the arrangement that is most useful is the chronological one.

There have been in the past several collections, such as the Hayashi and Wakai, whose owners felt it to be appropriate that they stamp their private seals upon the face of each print held by them. It is useless to comment upon the wisdom or unwisdom of their course; for the thing is done, and many a fine print is now indelibly branded with these insignia. But it may be pointed out that the present practice of reputable collectors does not sanction such acts. Should any collector who happens to read these lines contemplate thus immortalizing himself, I suggest that he seriously consider whether even one small seal is not a disturbing factor when injected into a design so subtly calculated as the finest prints.

Further, if one collector may so stamp his prints, all others surely have a similar privilege; and if the habit became universal, what would be the appearance of a print which, in the next two hundred years, should pass—as a print might easily pass—through the hands of twenty collectors? And lastly, is there not a certain betrayal of petty conceit when the mere temporary owner of a great work of art judges the fact of his brief ownership to be of such importance that future generations must be told of it; and so places his own emblem beside that of the creator of the print—beside the name of the immortal Kiyonaga or Sharaku?

Conclusion.

The day is coming—perhaps it is already here—when the Japanese Print will become the spiritual possession of a wider circle than that limited group of collectors who have been devoted to it in the past. Alien though this art is, it has power to penetrate to regions of the mind which Western art too often leaves unvisited.

Much is said unwisely about the elevating and educative power of art. The man in the street has come to believe that the elevating force resides in the theme which a work of art presents—that a picture of Galahad riding for the Grail is a lofty thing, and that a picture of the wings of the theatre during a ballet is a base one. Hence has arisen that unspeakably childish modern school of middle-class painters whose "pictures with a story"—generally a sentimental or edifying story—are the terror of the art-lover. After them, no wonder that even the Cubists came as a relief.

As every artist knows, the elevating power that resides in the mere subject of a picture has at best no more force than a moral maxim; the mind may assent to it, but the heart is unmoved. The same may be said in the case of a poem. The glory of poetry is not that it furnishes elevated sentiments in rhyme for public speakers to quote, but that it embodies music and thought combined in so fitly proportioned and expressive a structure that the reader carries away with him a certain acquaintance with perfection and a lasting desire for ideal beauty in everything.

Thus it is only through its power to cultivate the spectator's sense of form that art may be called elevating. Close familiarity with the productions of great artists gradually develops in the spectator an understanding of proportion, harmony, and conscious design, evoking in him the ability to perceive and even create order and freedom.

Because of the fact that the best Japanese prints are so superb an expression of the sense of form, they may be rated high as cultural agents. In them the eye finds little or no distraction occasioned by mere subject. Here speak the pure elements of artistic creation, liberated from combination with elements of accidental and personal charm. They contain the quintessence of all those harmonious and significant qualities which men desire of life. He who really takes them into his consciousness will be repelled by disorder, dullness, and indeterminateness all his days. And probably the world will be saved by its hatred of these things. Therefore the Japanese print cannot be regarded as primarily a pattern for future designers of wood-engraving; it appears to have a far wider and deeper office to perform.