Building Taliesin by Ron McCrea

Author:Ron McCrea [RON McCREA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780870206061
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Many consider Wright’s essay on the Japanese print to be the most important statement of his artistic philosophy. He praises the Japanese artist’s ability to evoke the “spell-power” of underlying geometric forms in every woodblock print, to get to the essentials. “The first and supreme principle of Japanese aesthetics consists in stringent simplification by elimination of the insignificant and a consequent emphasis on reality,”35 he says.

Wright’s current struggles with prevailing sexual mores bubble up in The Japanese Print. He notes that many prints depict scenes from the Yoshiwara, the pleasure district of old Edo, the name for Tokyo before the modern era. These ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the Floating World,” feature kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, samurai, and courtesans, including that rarefied figure, the geisha. She is depicted “with an innocence incomprehensible to us,” Wright says, “for Japan at that time—although the family was the unit of her civilization—had not made monopoly of the sex relation the shameless essence of this institution.”36

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