664 MODERN PAINTING 



ards of taste which had guided the aesthetic attempts of India, 

 China, Corea, and Japan through these hoary centuries. If, perchance, 

 in the course of this paper, my comments on the state of painting 

 in the West should sound impertinent, I beg you to recall that I am 

 speaking as one from the Orient. 



I wish you further to remember that my criticisms are not dictated 

 by my want of respect for Western art, compelling as it does in all 

 its phases the unconscious homage of wonder, if not always of ad- 

 miration. Our reverential attitude toward all true expressions of art 

 can be explained by our old axiom to approach a picture as one 

 would enter into the presence of a great prince. We have been 

 taught to prostrate ourselves even to a vase of flowers before examin- 

 ing the beauty of its arrangement. 



In the first place, I wish to distinguish between the problems which 

 concern the individual painter and those which concern society. To 

 our Eastern conception of art the questions of technique belong to 

 the painter himself. The public has no right to determine what it 

 shall be in the present or the future. The individuality of the artistic 

 effort forbids that an outsider should meddle with its methods. 

 The painter himself is but half-cognizant of the secret which makes 

 him a master, for each new idea imposes its own modes and laws. 

 The moment when he formulates his secrets is the moment when he 

 enters on his old age and death. For beauty is the joy of the eternal 

 youthfulness of the creative mind. And it is the sharing the gladness 

 of the artist in his discovery of a reawakened life in the universe 

 that constitutes the love of art to us. One of our monk-painters 

 of the Ashikaga period in the fourteenth century claims that art is 

 the Samadhi of the playfulness of the human soul. Indeed, it is the 

 magnificent innocence of the playful genius which is too selfish to 

 be exclusive that makes all great art so unapproachable and so 

 inviting to all. 



Art is nothing if not the expression of the individual mind. A 

 Chinese painter in the sixth century denned painting as the move- 

 ment of his spirit in the rhythm of things. Another Chinese of the 

 Sung Dynasty (the eleventh century), in the epigrammatic style char- 

 acteristic of his ago, has called it the mind on the point of the brush. 

 Art-appreciation is always a communion of minds. The value of a pic- 

 ture is in the man that speaks to you behind his pigments. It is in 

 the f|uality of his intonation that we respond to his personality, not 

 in the pitch of the key nor in the range of his voice. What an 

 intense personality lies in the silk and canvas of the old masters 

 whose names we do not know, whose date even is a matter of ar- 

 chaeological controversy? Who of the recognized great painters cither 

 in the West or the Ka.-t has not directly appealed to us despite the 

 distance of time and race? Their language is necessarily different. 



