The Encounter Between
Japanese Avant-Garde Calligraphy and
Abstract
Expressionism
Ryan Holmberg
Independent Work for Distinction
Art History Department, Boston University
Spring 1998
Table of Contents
Contact Ryan Holmberg ryan.holmberg@yale.edu if you are interested in the the body of this work.
In the spring of 1997, the Boston University Art Gallery held an exhibition of contemporary Japanese calligraphy. Apart from the scant knowledge I had gained from perusing Alexandra Munroe's book, Scream Against the Sky, I knew nothing about modern Japanese calligraphy and attended the Boston University show blind. Nonetheless, the works of calligraphy which I saw there had a profound impact on me, ultimately resulting in Dragon knows Dragon, my thesis on the postwar calligraphy avant-garde and its encounter with Abstract Expressionism.
I would like to express my gratitude to various people who aided and/or tolerated me throughout the research and writing of Dragon knows Dragon. First of all, I must thank my parents, Ronald and Lucionne Holmberg. I am indebted to them not only for their support and encouragement, but also for exposing me first-hand to Japanese culture. This thesis is as much a reflection of their tastes as it is of my own.
Certain individuals and institutions deserve acknowledgment for their help throughout the research phase of this project. I would like to thank Alexandra Munroe for directing me to the proper scholars and museums in Japan. Nakajima Tokuhiro of Hygo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Amano Kazuo of O Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard were extremely helpful in sharing their expertise and allowing me access to various resources. My debt to Kashiwagi Junko must also be noted, for without her patience and help in translating Japanese, the major sections of this thesis would have never been completed. I would also like to thank Professors Stephen Addiss, Sylvan Barnet, and William Burto for showing me their private collections of calligraphy associated with the Zen tradition and the postwar avant-garde. My meeting with Cecil Uyehara, calligrapher and scholar, was particularly helpful.
I would also like to thank the readers of Dragon knows Dragon. Professor Qianshen Bai's expertise on the aesthetics and history of calligraphy was invaluable throughout the course of this project. Professor Caroline Jones provided me with much insight into postwar American art and my "negotiation" of Franz Kline's identity owes much to her guidance. Professor Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, my third reader and thesis advisor, deserves her own paragraph.
I wish to extend my sincerest gratitude to Professor ten Grotenhuis; her influence is felt on every page of this thesis. Her deep understanding of Asian art and religion partially inspired this project, and her close scrutiny of my writing and organization was responsible for its successful completion. I wish her the best in the future and hope that she will remain my friend and mentor in the years to come.
Finally, I must thank Faye Marie Trapani for sharing me with my passion for Japanese and modern art. Her presence maintained my sanity during the final phases of this thesis.
Calligraphy, in the strictest sense, is the art of writing beautifully. Throughout history, master calligraphers have been admired for their technical prowess in transforming everyday written language into aesthetically pleasing forms. Yet beyond this formalist aspect, calligraphy has been heralded for its transcendental qualities -- especially in China and Japan. Elegant curves, broad verticals, and quickened horizontals are not merely the visual attributes of a work of calligraphy, but are believed to reflect the personal character of the calligrapher.
This transcendent mode of calligraphy is known in Japanese as sho, differentiating it from shji, the study of decorative scripts. The characters for shji translate as "learning letters," while the ideogram for sho holds a much more artistic connotation. It can represent "writing," but, it is also used for relating the actions of "painting" and "drawing." In this way, sho, or calligraphy, goes beyond the mere writing of ideograms and becomes artistic expression.
The avant-garde calligraphy movement of the immediate, post-World War II era (c. 1945-55) engaged in the most conscious and vigorous pursuit of this transcendent side of calligraphy in the art form's 3,000 year history. For example, sutra copiers in the Nara period (710-94) may have sought spiritual merit for the attainment of enlightenment -- a seemingly "transcendent" goal -- but their means were non-expressionistic. They had to practice strict adherence to the original text and script style. Often heralded for its early use of expressionistic brushwork, calligraphy from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries associated with Zen monks was, nonetheless, similarly limited. Although it dispensed with the mimetic aspect of sutra copying, "Zen" calligraphy remained enclosed within the Asian calligraphy tradition, using brush, ink, and paper to write Buddhist adages. Avant-garde calligraphers of the postwar period, on the other hand, looked to both East and West for ways to transform calligraphy into a transcendental experience.
Dragon knows Dragon, the title of this paper, refers, first of all, to a work by Morita Shiryu (b. 1912), the leader of the Japanese avant-garde calligraphy movement. Morita repeated this calligraphy numerous times, either in gold ink-on-black lacquer or black ink-on-wood screens. Each version has its own idiosyncratic character: one "dragon" ideogram larger or more fluid than another; one "know" more distorted than another. Yet all share a common feature: the abstracted "dragons" are transformed into actual, serpentine dragons, snapping about the seemingly infinite space of the ground. Avant-garde calligraphy, in this way, broke free of conventional calligraphy scripts, thereby accessing the pictorial root and dynamic essence of the ideogram.
Dragon knows Dragon refers, secondly and more importantly, to the impassioned post-Pacific War dialogue between East and West which resulted in expressionistic calligraphies, like those of Morita. The Eastern dragon, rising from the atomic ashes of the Pacific War, sought to establish itself within the modern, global arena. The Western dragon, empowered by its recent victories, provided the vocabulary necessitated by the East to articulate its modern identity. These two dragons -- East represented by the Japanese calligraphy avant-garde; West by Abstract Expressionism -- became intertwined in the early 1950s, spawning a short period of cross-cultural and cross-genre discourse.
East-West comparative analyses are intellectually fashionable these days, investigating many topics such as religion, philosophy, and pop-culture. Unlike many of these analyses, Dragon knows Dragon proposes to engage in more than a juxtaposition of historical and cultural facts. The issue at hand here -- namely, the role of tzai (East-West) discourse in the development of the Japanese calligraphy avant-garde -- deals, not with ideologies or figures set side by side, but with ideologies and figures contemporaneously interacting. Neither is our case one of wholesale adoption or forced imposition, as is often the case in modern Japanese art history. The issue here involves one group's vigorous drive for reform inspired by similar impulses in another group. The mutual efforts of East and West constructed the tzai-bashi (the ideological and artistic bridge connecting East and West) between Abstract Expressionism and Japanese avant-garde calligraphy.
The avant-garde calligraphy movement in early 1950s Japan has been barely mentioned in Western scholarship. Most references to the movement appear as brief articles in journals or exhibition catalogs and fail to grapple seriously with the topic's complex, interwoven issues. The fact that much of the secondary material and most of the primary sources remain untranslated helps explain this problem. Post-Meiji restoration (1868) art, in addition, has been discounted as derivative of Western art, marginalizing modern Japanese art history. A partisanship has formed against Japanese art even remotely touched by Westernization. Karatani Kjin, a scholar and literary critic, succinctly described the paradox facing Japanese art in the modern era:
. . . that which is praised as new and anti-traditionalist in Japan appears to be mere mimicry in the West, where, conversely, a return to Japanese traditionalism is viewed as cutting-edge.
Alexandra Munroe, in her seminal work, Scream Against the Sky, has done much to remedy this situation. Her comprehensive coverage of post-World War II Japanese art and her analysis of its primary sources has been indispensable for the field (and my own research). The thesis of Scream Against the Sky posits postwar, Japanese avant-garde art as severed from its pre-twentieth century past:
The Japanese avant-garde that emerged after 1945 from the devastation of war was both a resurrection of Taisho and prewar Showa modernism, and a purge of history, a beginning from absolute nothingness [emphasis added].
In the case of avant-garde calligraphy, as in postwar Japanese history in general, this view is incomplete. Indeed, artists working after the 1945 fall of militarism experienced an unprecedented access to artistic expression, resulting in innovative works of art. The postwar calligraphers, however, drew not only from what Munroe calls the "spirit of opposition" of prewar modernism, but also from the ideological and artistic traditions of pre-modern Asia. The paradox of opposition to the past and reconciliation with tradition was the driving force behind the avant-garde calligraphy movement.
Dragon knows Dragon will refute both Munroe's "purge" thesis and accusations that modern Japanese art is simply derivative of the West, submitting, instead, a view wedged in between these two antithetical camps. The viewpoint of Dragon Knows Dragon is that the inspirational model of Abstract Expressionism -- represented mainly by the 1950s, black and white abstractions of Franz Kline (1910-62) -- influenced, but did not initiate, the Japanese avant-garde calligraphers' reform. A flame from within and fuel from without ignited avant-garde calligraphy in Japan.
In order to prove this thesis, I will investigate several points. First, I will show that proto- and early-avant-garde calligraphers conducted a reform from within the tradition. Many of the doctrines they expounded as modernist and reformative were simply reiterations of ancient Chinese and Japanese calligraphy theories. Secondly, Morita, as ideological spokesman of the avant-garde movement, based his calligraphy theories primarily on Zen philosophy. Influenced deeply by Buddhism and the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitar (1870-1945), whose thought was a conflation of Eastern spirituality and Western dialectics, Morita sought personal expression in calligraphy through a process similar to Zen self-awakening and transcendence of duality. Morita, also desired an art capable of traversing cultural boundaries. This was also the wish of others associated with the calligraphy avant-garde -- especially, the art critic and painter Hasegawa Sabur (1906-1957) and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1989). Both Hasegawa and Noguchi fostered the development of an ecumenical art form imbued with the modernist spirit, but still retaining an inherent "Japanese-ness." To achieve this end, Noguchi and Hasegawa introduced Kline's work to the calligraphy avant-garde through Morita's journal Bokubi (Ink Beauty). The inaugural issue of Bokubi featured Kline's Hoboken on its cover, thus serving as the blueprint for artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical dialogues between East and West, and between calligraphy and painting. Kline's abstractions, therefore, served only as fuel thrown onto the steadily burning flames of calligraphy vanguardism.
Kline's monumental, black and white canvases of the 1950s were, themselves, products of a certain synthesis of Eastern and Western art. This contributed to a dynamic and complex impact-response relationship between Kline and avant-garde calligraphy, for the calligraphers, as William Seitz states, "borrow[ed] back their own writing methods in the abstract." The Asian influence on Kline, however, has been for the most part rejected by Western scholars. The American-centrism that has plagued analysis of Kline's painting will be reexamined here. After establishing the Asian influence on Kline's work, in Dragon knows Dragon, I will demonstrate how this "Orientalism" was immediately spotted by both New York critics and the calligraphy avant-garde. In our assessment of the critical interpretations of Kline's work in the early 1950s, it will become clear that, while New York critics disparaged the calligraphic aspect of the painter's oeuvre, the calligraphers heralded the American artist as a symbol of cross-cultural and cross-genre art. The Japanese calligraphy avant-garde's embrace of Abstract Expressionism impacted the entire Kansai art community -- the hotbed of vanguardism in postwar Japan -- resulting in a period of artistic discourse and confluence.
In Dragon knows Dragon, I will conclude with the demise of "avant-garde" calligraphy. Because the movement was initiated from within the calligraphy tradition and only subsequently influenced from without, the avant-gardists could make recourse to the traditional, defining feature of calligraphy -- the ideogram, or moji. Issues of identity and tradition thus maintained the East-West schism and ended the decade-long, experimentalist activities of calligraphy in the immediate postwar era. As Renato Poggioli states in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, "each specific avant-garde is destined to last only a morning."