Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets

Epilogue: From Technique to Art

In the late 1800s, the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) wrote to a young painter who had asked his advice, “Paint the essential quality, try to convey it by any means whatsoever, without bothering about technique.”1 Although an excerpt from a letter, this statement reveals an attitude toward technique that was not unusual in the modern era.For many artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technical skill was deemphasized, at times even considered suspect. “As to [Claude] Monet’s former comrades,they witnessed with a certain sadness how his career as an impressionist was ending in technical prowess. . . . They now remembered Degas’ contention that Monet’s art ‘was that of a skillful but not profound decorator.’”2 As suggested in the foreword and introduction of this book, over the course of the twentieth century,the focus in art education in theWest tended to shift away from technique and toward “creativity.”This is not universally true,of course,but generally speaking there were both qualitative and quantitative differences in the way students learned an artistic practice;a ten-year uchi deshi type of apprenticeship, by its very nature, imparts a fundamentally different kind of learning experience than a two-to-five-year course of study in an art school or university. In institutions like the Tokyo School of Fine Arts,students were placed into a formalized,university-style environment and 178 B R E N D A G . J O R D A N Epilogue From Technique to Art exposed to new and different ways of thinking about art.There developed a dichotomy of “artist” and “artisan,” a point to which I will return below. In contrast, the training painters received in Kano ateliers and Kanolineage studios was a form of education in which students learned experientially , by active participation in a community of practitioners.3 A painting student learned much more than how to handle a brush and ink; he/she became identified with a group,sharing the knowledge,technical expertise, and values of that group.This type of learning tested the character and persistence of pupils as much as it did their ability to master techniques. Pupils often lived and learned in the same place, became subject to the rules and regulations of that place, and were integrated into an artistic group with all the implications of duty and loyalty that being a part of that group entailed. They were also required to spend endless hours, days, even months practicing one skill before being allowed to move on to the next skill. Persistent practice of basic forms, called “kata” by practitioners of the “arts,” was not only a means of acquiring the fundamental skills of painting; kata were also “warm-up exercises to be used for a life-time in the continuing refinement of artistic practice.”4 Whether it be copying of funpon,the production of “ten thousand” sake cups, or a year spent learning to draw a bow, the patience, persistence,and time required for this type of training are something clearly of another world from that of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century art schools and universities.5 And yet many of those premodern apprenticeshipstyle learning practices survive in contemporary Japan in one variation or another, not only in the traditional arts, but also in formal educational settings and business practice.This undoubtedly has something to do with the role these educational practices play in developing the identity of the individual within the group. The case studies in this book have situated the symbiotic relationship of talent and training in a range of Kano-lineage ateliers, which employed apprenticeship-style learning strategies to one extent or another. They demonstrated a variety of learning environments and student experiences but also served to outline pedagogical strategies common to a range of different practices and disciplines,including those in the West.In the following,I offer a broader context for thinking about painters’ training in Japan, one meant to highlight commonalties. A comparison of nineteenth-century Kano atelier training and the private French ateliers that served as preparation for entrance into the École des Beaux-Arts,the official art school,yields some striking parallels in terms of student experiences and teacher strategies.Pupils in both French and Kano ateliers were being prepared for lives as academic painters.6 What follows, however, is not meant to be a definitive comparison of the Academy in France and the Kano...