Song of Hiawatha. Генри Уодсуорт Лонгфелло

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      by Teiji Chizawa

       Chief Curator

       Tokyo National Museum

      Hokusai's Views of Mount Fuji deeply influenced Herbert Meyer. "I saw life through art—very differently," he wrote, recalling his discovery of the woodblock print series by one of the leading Japanese artists of the 19th century.

      Something in the Hokusai prints must have attracted this sensitive young American artist. Certainly the treatment of color, brush line, and composition in the Japanese genre (ukiyoe) print, as represented by the work of Hokusai, differs markedly from that in the European tradition of woodblock art. But the Japanese influence is shown differently in Meyer's work than in the paintings of European artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Rather than direct quotation, we find Meyer's own appreciation and understanding of ukiyoe.

      Suggestions of Hokusai can easily be detected in Meyer's techniques; the exaggeration of certain sections, heightening the effect or increasing attention by unusual, dynamic composition; the method of painting creases in mountain ranges with fragmentary, short horizontal and vertical lines; the pointillist (tembyo) touches in the depiction of falling snow. In Meyer's art, as in Hokusai's, one finds surfaces divided with heavy black outlines emphasizing shape and rhythm, or flowers and leaves printed in soft tones with a wide expanse of the same color enhancing the sense of freshness and charm. Meyer also responds to Hokusai in adapting the traditional Chinese perspective, dividing the composition into three horizontal sections to represent near, middle, and far distances; he shows interest in the vertical rectangular compositions known as hashira-e, or narrow, pillar-like designs; he does not use the Western method to indicate clouds, but experiments persistently in depicting them through stylized description.

      These methods and treatments are not limited to Hokusai alone; they are the property of all Japanese woodblock artists and, moreover, of Oriental traditional art. But the classic art of that unknown country called the Orient was revealed to Meyer through Hokusai.

      Meyer's attitude in absorbing the traditions of both the East and the West is honest and unpretentious. I consider particularly praiseworthy his ability to assimilate influences, making them so perfectly his own. His works would immediately strike a Japanese viewer as being very American. Hokusai can be regarded as the most Japanese of artists; I find a deep interest in Meyer's pride in being an American, vividly seen in these works based on the folklore of the native American Indian.