拍品專文
One of the best-known Japanese painters working in oil in the Western style and a member of the avant-garde Hakubakai (White Horse Society), Fujishima Takeji had already influenced a generation of artists at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts when he made a seminal trip to France and Italy in 1905 under the aegis of the Japanese Ministry of Education. In Paris he studied with Fernand Cormon at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière and was profoundly affected by the 1907 Cézanne retrospective. Seeking southern light and clarity of expression, Fujishima pursued his studies at the French Academy in Rome under the instruction of Charles E.A. Carolus-Duran. The broad, confident brushstrokes and dramatic use of light and dark evident in Fujishima's paintings of this period are also characteristic of another Carolus-Duran student, the American John Singer Sargent.
Fujishima returned to Japan in 1910, and the immediacy of his European-period paintings gave way to more extensively detailed and refined pictures. He sought an integration of East and West in pictorial as well as philosophical terms, and found in the work of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci, an approximation of his ideal of quiet simplicity.
The present painting is one of a series of profile portraits that Fujishima painted in the mid-1920's. Aspiring to the stillness he found at the core of the Italian masterworks, Fujishima attempted to convey the essence of the Japanese spirit. He went to great lengths to select a model who epitomized Japanese beauty and collected over fifty Chinese dresses, more simple in form than Japanese garments, from which to choose the perfect costume for his model. With this remarkable combination of Western technique, Chinese costume, and idealized concept of Japanese feminine beauty, Fujishima managed a superb transformation: the simplicity of the broad impressionistic technique he developed in Europe here becomes the simplicity of an exacting linear profile, the essence of a spirit.
Throughout his career Cézanne's influence remained important to Fujishima, who wrote:
Cézanne resembles the stillness of the East. Yet to make such an extreme statement suggests in fact that there is some reason to seek a differentiation between East and West. While it seems that there may exist some difference in artistic spirit between the two, what is needed to penetrate into the roots of any art is a profound sense of responsibility about the purpose of art itself. Within this responsibility, this conscience, lies a spirit of tradition. Thus, even when Cézanne as a young man made copies of classic works of art, what he felt in them was their spirit. Art is said to concern itself with nature and tradition, but in the end, it concerns itself with the spirit of man. (S. Takashima, J. Rimer, and G. Bolas, op. cit., p. 99)
Fujishima returned to Japan in 1910, and the immediacy of his European-period paintings gave way to more extensively detailed and refined pictures. He sought an integration of East and West in pictorial as well as philosophical terms, and found in the work of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci, an approximation of his ideal of quiet simplicity.
The present painting is one of a series of profile portraits that Fujishima painted in the mid-1920's. Aspiring to the stillness he found at the core of the Italian masterworks, Fujishima attempted to convey the essence of the Japanese spirit. He went to great lengths to select a model who epitomized Japanese beauty and collected over fifty Chinese dresses, more simple in form than Japanese garments, from which to choose the perfect costume for his model. With this remarkable combination of Western technique, Chinese costume, and idealized concept of Japanese feminine beauty, Fujishima managed a superb transformation: the simplicity of the broad impressionistic technique he developed in Europe here becomes the simplicity of an exacting linear profile, the essence of a spirit.
Throughout his career Cézanne's influence remained important to Fujishima, who wrote:
Cézanne resembles the stillness of the East. Yet to make such an extreme statement suggests in fact that there is some reason to seek a differentiation between East and West. While it seems that there may exist some difference in artistic spirit between the two, what is needed to penetrate into the roots of any art is a profound sense of responsibility about the purpose of art itself. Within this responsibility, this conscience, lies a spirit of tradition. Thus, even when Cézanne as a young man made copies of classic works of art, what he felt in them was their spirit. Art is said to concern itself with nature and tradition, but in the end, it concerns itself with the spirit of man. (S. Takashima, J. Rimer, and G. Bolas, op. cit., p. 99)