Yoshio Markino – Autumn

“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!”

(Humbert Wolfe)

Yoshio Markino, Autumn, 1904

I have often presented works of Western artists here on the blog, mostly Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, who were inspired, in one way or another, by the Japanese art of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Some of these artists that I have written about were Maurice Prendergast, Vincent van Gogh, Whistler, Henri Riviere, Raphael Kirchner, just to name a few. A lot of European artists have been very enthusiastic about Japanese art ever since Japan opened its borders to the world in the mid nineteenth century but in the case of the Japanese artist Yoshio Markino it is the other way around. Markino was a Japanese artist who from an early age had a fascination with the Western art and he not only took stylistic inspiration from it but actually moved to the Western world; first to USA in 1893 at the age of twenty-four and then to London in 1897. For a short while in 1908 and 1909 he even resided in Italy because of something art-related. Markino loved his life in England and he returned to Japan in 1942 after England had declared war on Japan. Markino lived a very long life and he was a very prolific artist, mostly known for his magnificent depictions of London streetscenes and foggy weather and this is known as Markino’s “fog and mist watercolours”. His art is of a peculiar kind because it is a true mix between the east and the west.

At the moment, and appropriate for these golden and misty October days, my favourite of Markino’s paintings is the one above called “Autumn”, painted in 1904. It shows a woman in the street on a windy autumn day. She cannot seem to open her umbrella and the frustration can be seen in her face expression. Autumnal colours – orange and browns – dominate the painting and the delicate sense of transience is indicated in the fall of the leaves carried away gently by the autumn wind, never to return to their branches, dancing their last dance. There is a dynamic play between foreground and background; at first glance we see the auburn haired woman in the foreground with her umbrella and a tree full of orange leaves above her, and then, painted in a more poetic and dreamy way, is the background with the carriage slowly departing. Our view is clouded from so many leaves flying in the air.

A faint church tower can be seen and also some treetops but these background elements are painted in such a delicate, hushed, and subtle way, almost ghostly or as something seen in the memory. The harsh lines of reality are subdued in Markino’s poetic brushstrokes. Not only the leaves in the air but also the woman’s clothes indicate the presence of the wind and the direction of it. While the background is imbued with a sense of dreamy stillness, the foreground is a place of where dynamic playfulness. A very interesting thing is also the face expression of the woman. It is so particular, even the way her facial features are painted. The cheeks, rosy like a rosebud, the eyebrows, the narrow eyes, all of it brings to mind the faces of the figures in the ukiyo-e art which is known for its expressivness.

Foujita: La Vie – Everything Passes

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

This is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”

(Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human)

Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita, La Vie, 1917

Japanese artist Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita fell in love with Western art at a very young age and in 1913, at the age of twenty-seven, he moved to Paris. The role of an exotic eccentric in Montparnasse surrounded by fellow artists, foreigners and eccentrics fit Foujita like a glove. A person as vibrant and theatrical as he was belonged there. Some of the artists from his artistic gang were Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Juan Gris, Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Foujita’s painting “La Vie” is an example of his early work in France and the style of the painting reminds me so much of Modigliani. The painting shows a woman dressed in blue, set against the background of a solitary sandy beach with a single little boat, stranded and confined in sand instead of floating freely and being carried by the waves. The woman’s oval and slightly elongated face and the shape of her eyes remind me of Modigliani’s melancholy and mysterious mask-like female faces and also of the silent marble Brancusi’s Muse. Simplified and geomentric looking, her head and also the strange position of her hands seem as though they were borrowed from some archaic scuplture, or seen in a dream. The cheeks are bright pink and the fingers slender and long. Her head leans on her right in a very exaggerated way, as if this mysterious woman is bowing her head down, not from shame, but as a gesture of both a realisation of the defeat and calm acceptance. The waves in the water behind her are breaking and hitting the sandy shore then retreating in a rhythm of nature which neither of us can stop or influence. The mood that I feel in Foujita’s painting “La Vie” resonates with me strongly and serves almost as a sacred message to a feeling that is always inside me, sometimes more hushed and sometimes awaken like a volcano, like a wound that never heals, it brings anguish wrapped up in nostalgic rosy cover of sweetness. This feeling is the painful awareness of transience of everything, the powerlesness against the fast and unpredictable currents of life, the best way I can describe the feeling that the painting awakes inside me is by sharing a much loved quote from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: “Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, […], and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” Everything passes, every spring and summer once gone are gone forever, a flower will bloom and wither and nothing can resurrect it, memories are pale and hushed shadows, tears cannot bring back a love once lost, and all change is inevitable, c’est la vie… So what else can we do but bow our heads down like Foujita’s silent and solemn muse and let the river of life flow, for our resistence would only bring anguish and ache.