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Letter #8

5

I proudly turned Hogai over, as leader.  He died in 1888, but not before he had permanently influenced the method of the art school, and some of its most promising first pupils.  His most important painting at this time, just about finished at his death, was a more elaborate and a more highly colored replica of his most original design, The Creation of Man, the picture sent to Paris in 1883 and which I am now forwarding to you.  Gaho became the successor of Hogai at the school, and, though unofficially, he still lives as the head of the movement that sprang from that school.  If Japanese art lives to the future as a distinct movement, it will be chiefly through the influence of these tow men.  If not, they will remain its final word.

I send you four of their works, and will give a few words to each.

Hogai's Creation of Man, No such design has been found in old Chinese and Japanese Buddhist painting.  It was original with Hogai's own mind, though quite consistent with the deepest Buddhist philosophy of Asamgha and Vasubandhu.  The Bodhisattwa Kwannon, highest of all spirits below Buddhas, a bi-sexual being combining both male and female traits, essentially the Kwannon of the Tang painters from Godoshi rather than of the Sung, pours in mid air form her crystal water-vase a spray form which is born a little naked babe typefying man, who, falling through the clouds toward the savage peaks of earth, turns to his spirit-creator as if asking reproachfully if this was the awful world for which had been planned the tragedy of his birth and fate.  The thought is grandly realized, though mostly in terms of line, as if it were a gigantic etching.  In such splendor of line Hogai stands alone in Japanese art for three hundred years.  He is almost a rebirth of Ririomin, yet in no sense a copyist.  The color, though slight, is very silvery and delicate.  This is Hogai's first thought of the subject, the one sent to Paris, and the greatest specimen now remaining of Hogai's figure work before he fell under my influence.  The more minute and highly colored variation of the same subject, done in the last year of his life, is now kept as the greatest treasure of the Tokio Art School, and shows the ripeness of his style after falling