Uchiwa Gallery

On the street behind Rouen Cathedral, Rue St. Romain, named after the city’s holy bishop, an interesting shop opens. Uchiwa Gallery, a Japanese shop with Japanese prints, books about them, albums by Utamaro, Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Japanese souvenirs. It is very appropriate that precisely in the birthplace of the Impressionism there is such a shop for Japanese prints, which inspired the vision of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionist so much that it is considered a separate movement called “Japonisme”.

We are browsing between the objects, leafing through the books. The saleswoman offers to help us. We start talking about the selected objects.

“Why did you open a Japanese shop? Does it have anything to do with Japonisme?”

“I don’t think so. The owner, my friend, started this shop as a picture framer, and in the meantime she became interested in Japanese prints, so much so that they now form the profile of the shop.”

“Who is your audience, who buys Japanese prints here?”

“On the one hand, collectors from all over France. There are maybe only four such shops in the whole country, so anyone who is interested in them will come here again and again. On the other hand, a lot of young people. France is the homeland of comics, most comics are published here and in Belgium. And within that, manga, too. After Japan, most manga are published here. Manga is familiar to young people who read comics, and they quickly notice the Japanese prints that are related to them. After all, in Japan, manga and prints form a continuum. It is mainly the thirty- and forty-something generation who, having grown out of manga, can appreciate the original Japanese prints and come in and buy.”

“Do you also have Japanese visitors? What do they say? Do they buy?”

“Yes, Japanese tourists also come in, and they are very surprised, even touched. Japanese people do not know how popular Japanese prints are in the West, especially in France, and they are shocked that there is a special shop for them here. But they don’t buy. In Japan, classical prints don’t have such a large audience anymore. They still make modern paraphrases,” she points out a few, “but even that is rare, because the genre is too laborious, few people undertake it anymore.”

Autumn

さびしさを問てくれぬか桐一葉 sabishisa o toote kurenu ka kiri hitoha Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

Won’t you come and see loneliness? Only one leaf from the kiri tree

Dissolving: For woman poets, on invitation cards

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806): From the series Seven women applying make-up (1792-93)

Arnošt Hofbauer (1869-1944): Invitation to the reading of Hana Kvapilová (1860-1907) in the Youth Club of Prague, 1899

The Art Nouveau in Szabadka

The building of the City Museum of Szabadka/Subotica, hosting the exhibition of the Art Nouveu in Szabadka is itself one of the finest examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Szabadka, the work of the Budapest architects József and László Vágó from 1906, the great decade of the city’s Art Nouveau architecture. Its commissioner, Miksa Dömötör (1868-1944), the chief physician of the city’s Insurace Company, built it as a block of flats for rent, but he equipped the five-room luxury apartment to the left from the main entrance for himself and his family. This is the flat which is now filled – until next April – by the exhibition recalling the Art Nouveau in Szabadka with the objects of a former civic world, the objects which once filled these homes. This is the very context which gives a real significance to the exhibition. We can often encounter one or another of these objects that belonged to the everyday life of the turn of the century, but only so, put in their places in a home can they really revive the world for which they were made, and document the glorious marching in of the new style into a provincial Hungarian town.



“In the first primary class I only collected sacred images. I often looked at them, caressed them, rearranged them. After that I always collected something… Not only sacred images, but also reckoner papers. I got them mainly from Antal and Pista. We were sitting in the attic with Kató, arranging and watching our treasures…”

Sarolta Damjanovné Zimmer: Így éltünk Szabadkán (So we lived in Szabadka), Budapest-Zagreb, 2003, 19.

Quoted by Olga K. Ninkov, Director of the City Museum in her detailed
presentation of the exhibition: Bácsország, 62 (2012/3), 5-10.

Beside the works of arts and crafts and the everyday objects incorporated into art by the new style, the high art, the paintings decorating the salons are mainly represented by the works of Henrik Aczél (1876-1946), born in Nagyvárad/Oradea, whose portraits had been already praised by the great poet Endre Ady in the Nagyváradi Napló in 1902. He settled three years later in Szabadka, where, in addition to portraiture, he was also heavily involved in cultural life, giving lectures and art classes, restoring the paintings of the Town Hall’s gallery, and in 1910 founding the local Female Industrial and Applied Arts High School. He designed the cover of the popular family journal Bácsország – today, published again, the excellent journal of the Homeland Study Society of Vojvodina. His graceful, mysterious and inspired impressionist paintings were very sought for in the period, and won numerous international awards. Due to our predilection for Persian culture, we especially mention among them, as a curiosity, the Lion and Sun Order of the Shah of Persia.

A design from the sketchbook of the great local novelist Géza Csáth, 11 September 1907

Szabadka as an international rail hub and as the third largest city in contemporary Hungary, boasted a widespread postcard publishing, whose history was summed up in this year by the local collector József Horváth in his richly illustrated Szabadkai és palicsi képes levelezőlapok története (History of the postcards of Szabadka and Palics). The exhibition presents only a few of them on a postcards wall, but it selects with a good sense those which are the most rare, represent a special event, or are interesting because of the message of the sender.



The “Japanese fever” of the turn of the century, as we have already written, reached its climax around 1905, during the Russo-Japanese war, and it immediately appeared also in Subotica, which kept pace with the fashion. “The Japanese fashion has also invaded our carnival, and General Kuroki’s spirit has also conquered here – but without any destruction” – wrote the Bácsország on 12 March 1905, following the “Japanese night” organized in the National Casino. The journal also presented the photo of the daughter of the city’s chief architect Titus Mačković, dressed in kimono, which is also shown enlarged in the exposition. They started to collect Japanese engravings and carved souvenirs – the exhibition presents a number of okimonos made of ivory from the contemporary Szabadka collections –, and the Lifka Bioscope, the city’s famous movie projecting short films, put Japanese movies on his program.

“Teophil was about eight years old. On the fast-paced, flashing images he saw one of the scenes of the Russo-Japanese War. The chunchuzs attack the train – and the audience, which, together with all Lemberg, backed the Japanese, after the first presentation shouted: Banzai! It lasted only a quarter of an hour, and costed twenty cents; he kept dreaming about it in the night, but it was not repeated for a long time.”

Jan Parandowski: Decaying heavens

And the Lifka Bioscope – to which the museum has recently dedicated a separate presentation – is also enlivened here. A small room of the house has been equipped at the model of the original movie, and on the canvas – as if Henrik Aczél’s Dance of fairies came to life from the next room – continuously runs the short film of 1896 by the Lumière Brothers, also presented in Szabadka in 1905, Loïe Fuller’ Serpentine dance.


As the exhibition’s apropos was the solemn inauguration of the Art Nouveau Town Hall exactly a year ago, on 15 September 1912 – about which we will write more –, thus through the walls of th rooms, as if through windows, we can glance at the masterpieces of the great decade of the Art Nouveau in Szabadka: the town hall, the most beautiful Hungarian synagogue, the City Coffee House which worked on the ground floor of the town hall, at the site of the current “Art Nouveau McDonald’s”, from which some original furnishing has been also preserved and presented now.


As we arrive at the museum, rain starts to fall soon. While we are visiting the exhibition, it’s incessantly pouring out. An hour later we want to go on, but there is no way. The water has flooded the streets, the cars wade in it up to the door, it already covered the baseboard of the synagogue on the other side of the street, is pouring into the courtyards laying one step below the street level, flowing into the staircase of the museum undre the gate. Just like that other unexpected downpour, almost a hundred years ago, washed away the whole Art Nouveau and Szabadka. We have to flee through the courtyard and a back entrance, before it would be also closed off by water. Szabadka would not be Szabadka, were it not waiting for us with such unexpected surprises.

Doce vistas del Monte Fuji

En las oscuras mañanas de Londres, mientras tomo el té, miro atardecer sobre el monte Fuji —a distancia, en una webcam. Es perfecta esta diferencia de nueve horas. ¿Se habrá disipado la niebla tan densa de las últimas semanas? Es como si esperara la llegada de un viejo amigo. Ahora vendrá la primera nevada. La ubicación de la cámara es perfecta, mira hacia el Fuji-san, impasible. Yo le añado estados de ánimo y se altera. Siempre cambia.

Llega la sombra a la montaña,
y yo escucho su voz

Santōka

Se dice que puedes conducir casi hasta la cima del Fuji-san, y por la noche ver una cicatriz de luz cerca de la cumbre. No me apetece subir ahora. Un tiempo para la gente y otro para el silencio.


Sube el sol cruzando el cielo hasta que, cerca del solsticio, inicia el regreso. Debo calcular algo sobre las puestas de sol, pero decido tomar más té y luego seguir. Cinco kilómetros de altura, las estelas de los aviones llegan hasta el sol en el horizonte. Se ha servido la comida, se han visto las películas a bordo. Yo también contemplo y me admiro.

Ha de ser bueno vivir a la sombra de esta montaña sagrada. El lago es el Yamanaka-ko, el mayor de los cinco lagos Fuji.

Estas nubes las reconocerían Hokusai y Santōka.


Cuando hay montañas, miro las montañas;
Y si el día es lluvioso, escucho el agua.


山あれば山を観る

雨の日は雨を聴く


Santōka

Fuentes.
Las imágenes son de la Cámara en directo del Monte Fuji ligeramente adaptadas.
Mountain Tasting, Zen Haiku de Santōka Taneda, traducción nuestra.

Twelve Views of Mount Fuji

In the dark London mornings I take my tea and watch the sunset over Mount Fuji — remotely by webcam. The nine hour time difference suits me well. Will the impenetrable cloud of the past weeks have lifted? It's like expecting an old friend. Now I am waiting for the first snow. The location of the camera is perfect, and it watches Fuji-san impassively. But I bring to it moods and cares. Always changing.

The mountain becomes dark,
I listen to its voice

Santōka

It is said you can drive almost to the top of Fuji-san, and at night a scar of light can be seen near the summit. To climb it now would not be to my taste. There's a time for people and a time for silence.


The sun steps across the sky until, around the solstice, it starts the walk back. I should calculate something from the sunsets, but decide to take more tea and be still. Five-miles up, aircraft vapour trails catch the sun below the horizon. Meals are being served, in-flight movies watched. I too watch and wonder.

What a pleasure it must be to live in the shadow of this sacred mountain. The lake is Yamanaka-ko, the biggest of the five Fuji lakes.

The clouds would be recognised by Hokusai and Santōka.


If there are mountains, I look at the mountains;
On rainy days I listen to the rain.


山あれば山を観る

雨の日は雨を聴く


Santōka

Sources.
Images are from the Mt. Fuji Live Camera and have been slightly cropped.
Mountain Tasting, Zen Haiku by Santōka Taneda, translated by John Stevens, Weatherhill, 1980.

Souvenir of Hiroshima

“In this post I want to talk about one of my several hobbies”, writes lebedeff in his recently launched blog entitled “I am no photographer, this is just my hobby” and in which he presents his beautiful and sensitive portraits made in vintage style, but free from any archaizing mannerism. “I have been collecting old cameras for many years, and occasionally it happens that I receive the camera ordered via internet together with the last film left in it. Sometimes they only forget to take it out, but sometimes they do not have time for it, because of the owner’s death, a theft or other unexpected troubles. I develop these films.”


“This package was sent from Hiroshima. The seller, whom I asked, had no idea what this film is and whom it represents. It belonged probably to a previous owner of the house they bought, they found it among the belongings left there. The details point to the first half of the 1940’s, the time of the war. The number 3 written on the paper is maybe 1943. If you know Japanese, I would be grateful for a translation.” Me, who only read kanji on the basis of Chinese, and even that probably differently from how Japanese people read it, can only read the name: perhaps Kato Masaharu. If you know more, please write about it.


“The central figure of these photos is this young man who apparently came home to visit his relatives and to relax a bit. Here he is, in a kamikaze pilot suit and with a sword in the hand.”


“Here he is again in the middle, at the table, among local relatives and acquaintances.”


“Sake (the bottle is already laying on the earth), miso and the rest of festive delicacies. Apparently it was him to stand up and to shoot the next picture with timing.”


“In kimono with a young relative or his own son in the yard.”




“This can be perhaps the mother or grandmother of our hero.”




“Some automobile repair shop with friends and colleagues, in the 1940’s as it can be seen from the vehicles.”







“In all this there is something very sad and mysterious. These pictures have been waiting for more than fifty years for a person to have a look at them. The people represented on them are already all dead, and none of them has ever seen any of these photos.”