West Meets Itself
First, read this opening to "
Ruskin in the land of the rising sun" (telegraph.co.uk):
The Arts and Crafts movement has a bit of an image problem. Think of William Morris and what comes to mind? A fat, beardie man with dubious personal hygiene, cuckolded (in the comfort of his own home, no less) by his wife and the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Or think oak furniture, as lumpen and rustic as the man himself. But most of all when you think Morris, you think patterns. Lots of them. Mostly reproduced on wallpaper and easy-clean plastic tablecloths. Safe. Dull. Fussy.
Yanagi Soetsu.
Nothing could be further from the astringent purity of Japanese design - the sophisticated concrete simplicities of Tadao Ando's buildings, the foliage-free geometry of Zen gardens raked in gravel, or Yohji Yamamoto monochrome dresses, which only really look good on the perfect sexless lines of Japanese women.
What the hell? "Perfect sexless lines"? What a perfect colonial line for her to write. Inscrutable Occidental.
Anyway, if you can get past that phrase, the article goes on about V&A's new show, featuring the Arts and Crafts style of Yanagi Soetsu in Japan in the first quarter of the 20th century. I'd never thought about the (now obvious) connection between art nouveau and Japan. And if you take it further, it occurs to me that Frank Lloyd Wright was actually borrowing from William Morris via people like Yanagi. So you have this West to East to West to East thing going on, something like the zero-detail/Muji aesthetic that's been happening recently in industrial design. Ok, so it's not a new comment to make on the way design works. But it's a good footnote to make when people say Wright was inspired by Japanese architecture.
* Ray, 3/10/2005 11:38:36 AM
