Welcome to the Treeherd's blog about Bonsai, art and culture

I intend to present a different slant on aspects of bonsai and allied subjects. The sort of stuff that you might not get elsewhere, including unusual trees, problems that most bonsaists need to confront, experiments, and some disasters, that might turn into learning experiences. No pontifications here. No gloating, some myth busting. And, no lying or tall tales

Monday, April 23, 2012

Hiroshige's Trees Transformed Van Gogh's Art


Hiroshige's Trees Transformed Van Gogh's Art
(But not the modern Art of Bonsai)

Vincent stared intensely at the Hackberry tree. He had concluded that he should copy one or two of the prints in Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo to get the feel of the style that he found so alluring. Although he knew that he would paint trees in the manner of this woodcut masterpiece in the future, he was put off by the fox spirits that surrounded the tree, a theme which was not capable of being directly observed. This woodcut, “New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, ōji”, is generally included among the "best three” of the collection. Hiroshige Andō normally depicted the realities of the observed world in his work, and that appealed to Vincent and the other Impressionists.
Hiroshige Andō 

“New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, ōji”  
A bonsaist would be proud to have styled such a gorgeous Informal Upright. 

So, he decided to copy two other prints from the same collection;. One of the prints, Vincent decided, would, of course, be a tree, and the other an urban scene. This was in 1887, and Van Gogh painted “Flowering Plum Tree” (based on The Plum Orchard at Kameido” in that same Edo collection, a favorite of Van Gogh's). The result is decidedly mixed, but it was, after all, his first attempt. He painted frames around the orchard in which he drew invented pseudo-Japanese characters. His use of colors was unlike the original and he had not yet grasped the subtlety of the Japanese use of complimentary colors; his use of green next to yellow next to red is garish. But, he had the correct goal.

Hiroshige Andō
Plum Estate, Kameido
Vincent van Gogh
Flowering Plum Tree
1887


He wrote, from Arles:
I want to use colors that compliment each other, that cause each other to shine brilliantly... But whatever they say, the most ordinary Japanese prints, colored in flat tones, seem admirable to me for the same reason as Rubens and Veronese... I envy the Japanese artists for the incredible neat clarity which all their works have. It is never boring and you never get the impression that they work in a hurry. It is as simple as breathing; they draw a figure with a couple of strokes with such an unfailing easiness as if it were as easy as buttoning one's waist-coat." (Vincent to Theo, 24 September 1888)

Van Gogh had moved to Arles that year of 1888 expressly because he thought the light and subject matter was similar to that of Japan. The house he bought there, “The Yellow House”, was also called the “Japanese House”. He was especially intrigued with the olive trees, so common in the region. In the last few years of his life, he would create at least 18 paintings of olive trees, and many blossoming orchard trees as well. He shaved his head to "look like a Japanese monk".


He wrote to his sister from Arles:
"Theo wrote that he offered you Japanese woodblock prints. That is certainly the best way to understand which direction the light and colorful painting has taken. Here I need no Japanese woodblock prints, because I am here in Japan. This is why I only have to open my eyes and paint the impressions that I receive.

With the opening of Japan in 1854, after two hundred years of isolation, Japanese art and culture were introduced to the West, initiating a fascination that began in France (where it was called Japonisme ) and Holland – the Dutch had the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay, that was primarily a trading venture - before spreading throughout Europe and America.

Ukiyo-e (the “Floating World”, a euphemism for the “pleasure” districts such as the Yoshiwara) prints were particularly popular with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters and were studied and used as inspiration by artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as Van Gogh. It didn't hurt that the ukiyo-e prints were very inexpensive, often serving as packing material for use in shipping crates of ceramics. Monet avidly collected the prints and displayed them in his home. Vincent Van Gogh, who with his brother Theo owned over four hundred wood block prints, organized exhibitions of them. The other Impressionists were taken by other ukiyo-e print subjects: Whistler by bridges and other structures(mostly on the Thames), Lautrec by brothels and Montmartre cafe life with its dance-halls and cabarets (much like the Yoshiwara), Monet by flowers, gardens and, briefly by geisha (he famously grafted his wife Camille's head on the robes of a geisha), Degas by women performing their daily rituals, Mary Cassatt by women and their children, Gaugin the apparent simplicity of life. But Van Gogh concentrated on trees and landscapes, as did Hiroshige.
 
Hiroshige and his “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” occupy a special place in the Western reception of ukiyo-e. To many artists, prints from this series became important models for their works. Individual images were either copied, as with Van Gogh's oil based on “Plum Estate, Kameido”. Often they were more general sources of inspiration, evident in the adaptation of a particular landscape element or effect. After viewing another group of Hiroshige's prints at an exhibition in Paris in 1853, Pissarro wrote in a letter "the Japanese artist Hiroshige is a marvelous Impressionist." 
 
And Bonsai?
By now you are probably wondering just what these prints and now-famous artists have to do with bonsai. It seems to me that Bonsaists only consult other Bonsaists, or their work, in order to determine what is “good” or “bad” about a tree. The Impressionists, evidently, had more open minds. I thought it might be interesting to look at Japanese graphic art in order to understand something about what sort of tree Japanese artists thought was artistically interesting. It seems self-evident, doesn't it? The art I chose to examine was ukiyo-e woodblock prints, because they are of such high artistic merit, and because that merit was validated by so many of the best artists in Europe, and especially because there are so many examples extant. I make a few assumptions about your mindset. First, I am assuming that you consider bonsai an art. Second, although of Chinese origin, that the Japanese are, or have been, the most admired of bonsai artists. Third, that you agree that Japanese graphic artists are good judges of what other form, in Japanese culture, is good art. Fourth, that you agree that widely admired Western artists (such as The Impressionists) are good judges of what is good in Japanese art, and validate the choices of the Japanese.

For simplicity, let's stay with the prints of Hiroshige Andō and his Edo collection, and add a few of Van Gogh's paintings of trees – all in the mode of Japonisme. Although this collection is of “famous views” because of his specialization in landscapes and trees, he is the Japanese artist of the most interest to Bonsaists. I'll also add a few other prints (segments of prints, really) that you may find surprising.

For starters, let's look at both versions of “The Plum Orchard at Kameido”, Hiroshige's and Van Gogh's copy, above. Note that the primary center of attraction is the vertical suckers that the plums produce. And, they have so few flowers. Would you create a bonsai with such suckers? Then look at the broken major branches on the trees. Are they attractive? The plum tree has the habit of ground layering (a branch bends down to the ground, sends out roots and, from those roots, other trees grow.) Would you create a bonsai grouping like this, calling it a “raft”, if you will? Do you have the testicular fortitude to do these things and display the bonsai in public? I freely admit that I do not. Yet, we have proof that earlier Japanese bonsai masters did. The wood block print below is of just such a bonsai (not an orchard, however) created by Ippitsusai Bunchō, in 1770. It has everything that is in the Hiroshige print, and that I would be fearful of allowing in a bonsai. The sprouting suckers, the broken major branch (don't confuse that with an artfully placed jin), the new child tree sprouting from the ground, random rotted holes in the trunk, new branch suckers at odd angles. Would you do those things? But, those things are all characteristic of real plum trees not manipulated by Man, as Hiroshige has shown us. Below is a segment of a woodblock print by Ippitsusai Bunchō showing just such a bonsai. He was not alone in depicting such trees. Hiroshige himself included such a plum bonsai in a woodcut of 1820. I just won't include more of them in order to save space. But, note, too, how so many of the "rules" are broken: No single apex, no First, Second or Back Branch, no "triangle". Neither artists' depictions follow the "rules", and they are very similar.
Ippitsusai Bunchō 1770
Hiroshige 1820
Just one more example with which to question ourselves. The following print is called Moon Pine, Ueno, also from Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. From the Brooklyn Museum (my insertion in brackets): “In Edo, there was a particular taste for naming trees that were distinguished by their age or their form. Pine trees, which tend to live long and grow in strange shapes, were the most common of these. The example seen here was called the Moon Pine, not only because of its full, round shape but also because [it was believed] one could discern various phases of the moon by looking at the tree from different angles. One twentieth-century commentary also referred to it as the Rope Pine, presumably because of its resemblance to a loop of rope.”

Hiroshige Andō
Moon Pine, Ueno
So, this is a naturally occurring form of branch in old Japanese Pines. But would you or I create such a branch? When I see something like this on a tree, I immediately think that it is a product of one of the mass producers of imported bonsai who synthetically create “movement” in trees by wrapping them, when young, around sticks, to hasten the time when they can be sold to some unwary soul. But, yet again, old Japanese bonsai masters created such bonsai. Here is one in a print by Utamaro Kitagawa, c.1804. It is not a vertical loop, but it is a horizontal one, which, in my mind, is worse.

Utamaro Kitagawa, c.1804


So what?
In what follows, I explicitly exclude those Bonsaists who create sculptures of their own devising from trees – almost exclusively conifers. The designs of these trees owe very little to the categories one sees in treatises like John Naka's volumes. The artists seem to be primarily from Southern Europe and they very often collect their material from the wild, and then bend it to their wills. One wonders, however, how long these trees are intended to appear as they do soon after creation, or how long the trees will actually live. Only time will tell.

What does that say about us the rest of us as Bonsaists? We, including me, are timid and follow the path of least resistance. We are not very experimental and we tend to make trees that are “pretty” and that look like large old trees we see in the middle of open spaces, such as parks. The majority of my trees can be classified as “Informal Uprights”, Mōyogi. That style probably accounts for the majority of bonsai throughout the USA. There is a saying in our club that “Windswepts never win contests”. So, I have only one of those. (However, I have seen one or two pictures of Windswepts that appear to be caught in the very instant of being blasted by a gust. They seem wonderful to me, but I do not think I have the talent or skill or patience to create one. I wish I did.) Broom style is unbearably boring to me and I have made none. Few people do. Although there are two or three Cascades in our club, I have none. One Cascade looks just like any other Cascade to me. I certainly do not have broken branches on any of my deciduous trees, although hollow trunks are attractive and I, and some of my fellow club members have trees with that feature. One bougainvillea is a nearly completely empty shell, yet flowers and is quite healthy – a very attractive tree denoting great age. But, major branches just broken off, as on those plums? No. Definitely not.

Maybe, just maybe, I am merely taken with the forms of trees I see every day around me, and maybe that is true of most other bonsaists. We like what we know, what we are familiar with. We create what we like. We have another saying in our club. “Every bonsai must tell a story.” Perhaps the stories that Informal Uprights tell are known to me. I, for one, truly adore Hiroshige's Hackberry Informal Upright we see above, feel that I know its story, and feel very comfortable with the slight breakage of “rules” in the crossing branches in front of the trunk. Score one for a very mild, not wild, departure from normative values. I also admire the olives that Van Gogh created as a companion to his “Starry Night”, Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape. Perhaps because they are all sinuous Informal Uprights. Van Gogh obviously was taken with that style, too. Why do you create the styles of bonsai that you do? Have you thought about it?

Vincent Van Gogh
Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape
June 1889

"The olive trees with the white cloud and the mountains behind, as well as the rise of the moon and the night effect, are exaggerations from the point of view of the general arrangement; the outlines are accentuated as in some old woodcuts." Vincent to Theo, June 1889.

Of course, he meant old Japanese woodcuts.

Acknowledgment: All the images of bonsai from partial woodblocks are from http://www.phoenixbonsai.com

















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