File:History of art (1921) (14780203391).jpg

Identifier: historyofar02faur (find matches)
Title: History of art
Year: 1921 (1920s)
Authors: Faure, Elie, 1873-1937 Pach, Walter, 1883-1958
Subjects: Art
Publisher: New York and London : Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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he petals will fall like snowflakes, thelandscape where the flowers resist the frost, the land-scape with its limpid skies over serene waters, thenocturnal landscape where women—moving gardensin themselves^—pass against backgrounds uniformlyblack. The sap of Japan, in these millions of flying leaves,fell like ever-heavier raindrops, but also it got fartherand farther from its roots. The country had beenclosed for two hundred years, deaf to the voices fromwithout—and the voices from within beat againstunscalable walls. Too long deprived of the oppor-tunity for interchange, which is life, impotent to renewitself, its soul contracted into itself, grew enervated,and lost itself, little by little, in detail and in anecdote.Let us admit as much. The art of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, despite the abundance in JAPAN 159 which it spouted forth, despite its verve and its Hfe,seems a little frail and troubled, feverish and cari-caturish beside that of the preceding epochs. The
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HoKUSAi (1760-1849). Drawing. (Louvre.) great Hokusai himself, the protean poet, the man witha hundred names who filled more than five hundredvolumes and twenty thousand prints with his thought, 160 MEDIAEVAL ART the old man mad about drawing, the distractedvagabond who gave its climax to the art of the peopleand scattered the spirit of Japan to the four corners ofthe heavens, as a great wind despoils the forests ofautumn^—the great Hokusai himself is an expressionof the decadence. He has for his suffering fellow-creatures the unconcealed passion that was perhapspossessed, among us, by Rembrandt alone; he hadthat powerful minuteness that one finds only in Durer,and that love of aerial landscapes in which ClaudeLorrain and Veronese saw the tremble of their gold andsilver; his verve—cynical or terrible or bantering orsinister or harrowing—is the same as that with whichGoya tore from the world of forms the swift symbolsof the tragedies of his heart. He has the immensityof knowledge

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