History of art . the sudden peace producedits usual harvests. Half-effaced symphonies remain to us from thesefirst ages of intellectual concentration, in which Bud-dhism, shared but very little by the people, shut itselfup in the monasteries in order that their silence shouldenable it to illumine the old silk kakemonos. Andthrough these works Japan saw within herself the riseof her veritable realities. At the moment which issummed up by the work of Kose Kanaoka, for example,we find a hieratic art full of the spiritual radiance ofBuddhist painting; and this is paralleled by the appear-ance, in
History of art . the sudden peace producedits usual harvests. Half-effaced symphonies remain to us from thesefirst ages of intellectual concentration, in which Bud-dhism, shared but very little by the people, shut itselfup in the monasteries in order that their silence shouldenable it to illumine the old silk kakemonos. Andthrough these works Japan saw within herself the riseof her veritable realities. At the moment which issummed up by the work of Kose Kanaoka, for example,we find a hieratic art full of the spiritual radiance ofBuddhist painting; and this is paralleled by the appear-ance, in the somber harmony, of its reds and blacks,of the gold of the backgrounds and the aureoles, to givea warmer patina. But the new problems—those of theidea and those of technic—offer no more than tem-porary obstacles to the nascent spirit of the Japanesein its manifesting of a vision that was already moredirect, more incisive, and clear-cut than that of theartists of the continent. Those three obscure and very. Statue of the Jingo Kuago (x Century). (From The Kokka.) JAPAN 111 slow centuries, when the artists are held in the archaicmold, do not yet, to be sure, permit the Japanese spiritto free itself, since the monastic life in which theintelligence is at work is closed to the life of movement,to what brings enjoyment, to what brings suffering, towhat brings understanding. But sometimes, when the 8fe:»
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Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectart, bookyear1921
