Moon, Cormorants and Herons

This startling diptych, capturing two aspects of the half moon—one reflected in water at dusk on the left and at midnight on the right—encapsulates a yin-yang dichotomy of light and darkness, and of a vast formation of white-feathered herons contrasted with a trio of cormorants, fishing birds of the night. The possibility of seeing either vista is of course impossible except in one’s imagination, but that is part of the allure of the work—an abstraction of idealized views of the moon and birds in flight that captures our attention like the decoration on a textile or lacquerware.

Fujii Tatsukichi, though clearly talented as a painter, is better remembered as a central figure in Japan’s modern kōgei (arts and crafts) movement. As a young man he worked for a Nagoya based cloisonné dealer who participated in the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon in 1905. While visiting the States he took the opportunity to visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was so inspired by Japanese art displays he saw there that he decided to quit his job, move to Tokyo, and devote himself to learning the traditional techniques of cloissoné and lacquer. His interests were broad, and he expanded his repertory to include ceramics, textiles, paper crafts, as well as engraving and painting. We may safely assume that he selected the unorthodox mounting textiles and crystal roller knobs used for the mounting of this diptych. He was among the artists who advocated to have kōgei included in government-organized exhibitions and to be recognized as an essential category of the modern art movement. He frequently served as an exhibition juror and for a long period held a professorship at the Imperial Art School in Tokyo (later known as Musashino Art University).

In his later years, Tatsukichi returned to his native Aichi prefecture (where Nagoya is) and devoted himself to paper crafts and painting in a literati mode—his abstract ink landscapes have always quite a following. While his work in any medium is little known in the West, his various types of kōgei and paintings are found every major public collection of modern art in Japan. In 1996, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art collaborated to hold a major retrospective exhibition “Fujii Tatsukichi: Modern Crafts Pioneer,” and the Fujii Tatsukichi Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Hekinan in Aichi Prefecture in 2008.