2-2 "Portrait of a Geisha" by Watanabe Kazan II

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Do curso por The University of Tokyo

Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

172 classificações

The University of Tokyo

Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

172 classificações

In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant. Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.

Na lição

Painted Beauties

Visual images of women produced in Japan before the introduction of photography can be divided into two types: portraits of women who actually existed in society, and painted or printed images of idealized “beauties,” whose resemblance to physical reality was subsumed often to an intense interest in mode and situational aspect. Like samurai portraits, images of women, both real and imagined, would often be inscribed with texts which instruct viewers how to understand and appreciate them. In this module, we will overview several painted and printed images, and learn how contemporary viewers used these images and their texts as a tool to understand the world.

2-1 "Portrait of a Geisha" by Watanabe Kazan I6:28

2-2 "Portrait of a Geisha" by Watanabe Kazan II11:07

2-3 "Portrait of a Geisha" by Watanabe Kazan III9:01

2-4 "A Courtesan" by Takahashi Yuichi I6:49

2-5 "A Courtesan" by Takahashi Yuichi II7:20

2-6 "The Courtesan Usugumo of the Miura House at the Age of 89"8:30

2-7 Beauties in Ukiyo-e I6:51

2-8 Beauties in Ukiyo-e II5:23

Conheça os instrutores

Robert Campbell
Emeritus Professor, The University of Tokyo
Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature

But again, I want to dive into the composition, the words that are inscribed

onto this painting in order to be able to appreciate and

understand what was in Kazan's mind and

the strategies that he employed in order to represent this

woman whom we know from the inscription that he knew very, very well personally.

I've translated an excerpt from the text itself.

Before the words that we see here,

Kazan has described his relationship to this woman.

We don't know her name, she's a geisha in Edo perhaps in Yanagibashi or

one of the other areas that had a lot of geisha houses.

We can't really pin down her sort of social identity, but

we know that she worked as a geisha.

And that Watanabe Kazan in the years that he spent in Edo engaged with her.

He was committed to their relationship.

She was a geisha, so he visited her house as a guest.

And he paid the owners of the house, and so forth, and she had remittances for men.

In other words, she was paid in order to spend time with him.

But, they developed a very particular, strong relationship with each other.

He really appreciates her, cherishes her.

Not just the way that she looks or comports herself,

but for her vivacity, her spirit.

And the way that she's very,

very constantly sort of honestly sort of engaging with him.

So he describes his strong feelings for

this woman within the text that he's written onto her portrait.

He goes on as follows:

"Each of the following men painted what he loved and

each in turn was stimulated by the images to give them as presents to his friends."

Here Kazan is quoting older ancient

Chinese literati painters from different dynasties which

each of whom really, really, enjoyed painting a certain kind of thing.

So he collects all of these.

He's collected several painters here who have really,

really strong feelings towards particular sorts of subject matters.

Wen Yuke, for example, "groves of bamboo,

Zheng Sixiao his orchids Hua Guang plum blossoms.

None of us, though, really like or dislike in exactly the same way.

Wang Yan hated springs, Ouyang Xiu detested cicadas,

Mei Shan loathed the chessboard.

Even if they wanted to, how could they all cherish the same things?

I myself prefer lotuses.

No fun drinking wine without the gentle waft of a lotus,

and should I set myself off to dreams,

I could not even fall asleep 'til the sweet scent envelops me."

Kazan is being very, very sort of poetical here.

He's thinking about the different writers and

the literati painters who were also poets, and the things that they cherished, some

of them really describe what they really don't like in their writing and so forth.

And he's trying to sort of set up the artist as being

essentially individualistic.

And no artist really liking everything that everybody else does.

So there's a great deal of choice,

a great deal of preference, or rejection of different things that

artists or cultivated, cultured men share with each other.

And he confesses to us here in this phrase, in this passage here,

that he really likes lotuses a lot.

Lotuses of course blossom in the early summer, and they blossom especially

in Edo in ponds that are all over the city, especially in the morning

when it's hot and the temperature begins to go up right after dawn.

You'll see, you'll have descriptions of lotuses,

lotus pods sort of all popping and blossoming up all at once.

And cultivated men and women who've been out all night, hanging around, talking,

playing, drinking sake wine, getting together to see at the end of the night,

right at dawn, lotuses blossoming.

And that was one sort of social pastime that cultivated men and women,

one way that they spent time with each other in Edo.

Anyway, Watanabe Kazan really likes lotuses and as he's drinking or

talking with his friends, even when he's falling asleep he likes to have

a lotus in full blossom somewhere near him in his room so

that he can smell it as he's falling off to sleep.

"Hence what we say, that which our emotional instincts

center upon are what prompt us to display our truest thoughts."

In other words, artists, cultivated men and women,

need to be honest,

and need to be understanding what prompts them,

what really feeds their emotional instincts in order to display,

in other words, to express something, to write something, to paint something.

Again here, like his predecessors,

who we saw in module number one, writers, artists, very,

very concerned with getting down, documenting one's truest thoughts.

In other words, not taking on the identity of someone hundreds of years ago or

trying to be more or less than one actually is in society.

What's important, what's essential,

is to be able to display in one's own words or painting one's truest thought.

"No man or woman born into this world without the capacity to feel a desire to

eat, drink, and mingle sexually with men or women can properly be labeled, 'human.'

For this reason, what I have come to love, follows the universal way of the world."

He uses the Japanese term, tenka no kōdō.

"My instincts are at one with the Masters Wen and Zheng.

For this reason, I have drawn my beloved geisha in order to present to Kensai

(who will either share my tastes or not)."

We know here from the last sentence that this portrait with the prose written

on it was meant as a present to someone else, a gift.

It was to be given to a young painter, whom he was training to be a very,

very important painter named Hirai Kensai.

When I first read this passage, I remember seeing this

painting at the museum that owns it.

And reading the sort of kanbun Chinese verse and

wondering how it would feel, why he would want to

present a portrait of, basically his girlfriend, to one of his students?

That seemed to me to be, well extremely something

that living in the modern day, we really can't really empathize with.

It says, something that I really couldn't figure out.

First of all, like the instinct, what his sort of drive was here.

But as you read over and over, and then think about, as I'm going to explain in

a couple of minutes, what's behind these words, the historical context here,

we have a sense of what he wanted to convey to Kensai here.

He makes a very strong statement, declaration, of what it means to be human:

what it means to be human basically is to follow one's human instincts,

the instinct to eat, to drink, to partner,

to be sexually expressive or closely

bonded with someone else.

[LAUGH] All of these are desires, which according to Confucian dogma

perhaps need to be, or sensed or

thought to be, something which needs to be suppressed or controlled.

Here, Kazan proposes that we become closer and

more true and honest to these desires, because these are what make us human,

and what allow us to form and combine and

conjoin as a society, or as a family or as a domain.

So, he's claiming here that what he really loves is what he's going to paint and

that is a lotus.

He loves lotuses but he also really loves this young woman.

So he's decided to paint it and give this as a gift to his disciple, Kensai.

"Recently all sorts of luxury items have been prescribed throughout the land."

He uses the word tenka for land,

which means polity, the nation, perhaps we could also translate it in that way.

"My companion, having removed the jewel combs and golden hairpins from her hair,

appears unmade up, in a thin gauze robe, like a fresh lotus blossom after the rain.

Painted in jest and inscribed by Kazan, Tenth Day, Sixth Month 1838."

The last paragraph here refers to what's going on in Edo.

There are a number of edicts published in the year by the bakufu,

the city magistrate in Edo which forbid conspicuous consumption,

luxury items and so forth, like the gold hairpins and

the jewel combs that he mentions right here.

During this time, his companion,

this geisha has forsaken all of these luxurious items and dresses very,

very simply, doesn't put on any makeup, and he presents her

in this, at the time politically correct, safe sort of mode,

but also as we know from his writing,

tries to convey the sense of her simplicity and

the fact that she's like a fresh blossom right after the rain.

And the most beautiful aspect of her, the most true instinct

that she holds can be portrayed by

showing her not all dressed up in her sort of regalia to go out and work as a geisha,

but right after a bath when she's the most personal, private, and perhaps vulnerable.

That moment in her life,

he's chosen to portray and to give,

including some sort of message, to his disciple Kensai.

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