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Flowers of the Moon: The Art of Kaii Higashiyama
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11707 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1987 |
2,937 Words |
| Author
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Betty Rogers Rubenstein
Betty Rogers Rubenstein is an art historian and critic
residing in Tallahassee, Florida. |
Japan's most celebrated artist, seventy-nine-year-old Kaii Higashiyama, attracted over one million people of all ages to exhibits of his work between the summer of 1981 and the spring of 1982 alone. His worldwide reputation - stretching form Germany to China, from Rome to Washington - rests on his quiet but compelling landscapes and seascapes painted in the traditional Nihon-ga (Japanese style). Higashiyama's art is on display at the Japanese embassy in Washington, and his paintings have been given as official state gifts to Queen Elizabeth II and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.
From humble beginnings as the sickly child of a poor family, Higashiyama grew up in the internationally oriented port city of Kobe, where he first encountered Western culture. "I was interested in the West, but in my college days in Tokyo I studied Nihon-ga," Higashiyama said in an interview. Today, Higashiyama has reached a pinnacle reserved for few living artists. His many distinguished patrons include the Imperial Household Agency, which commissioned him to create a painting for the new Togu Imperial Palace in 1960 and to paint Evergreen for the New Fukiage Imperial Palace, constructed to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the emperor of Japan in 1961. In 1968, he completed Waves at Dawn as murals for the New Imperial Palace. The Japanese government commissioned the artist in 1972 to do a painting as a gift for Mao Tse-tung to celebrate the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations.
An even greater honor came to Higashiyama in 1971 when he was asked to paint a set of murals for the hall at the Toshodai-ji Temple complex near Nara, where the precious dry-lacquer sculpture of Ganjin (d.763), founder of the Risshu sect of Japanese Buddhism, is kept. This
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