Edmond De Goncourt

Outamaro Edmond De Goncourt

Edmond de Goncourt masterfully exposes the history of Japanese art from the Buddhist School to the School of Life, including the Tosa School and the Kano School. I could add details that have been better known since then; but I will only point out the extreme continuity of Japanese art. Nothing can give a better idea of this than the representation of faces, especially the woman's face. Since the earliest antiquity, we have found this mask motionless, elongated, reduced to elementary lines, always the same, following a gun from China... The painters will succeed the painters for a thousand years, and this conventional mask will remain the face of the woman... I am convinced that this is not a special modality in Japanese art. Let us only recall the slow evolution of Egyptian art, the persistence of cannons, the hieratic poses, fixed once and for all, and the diversity of the gods alone creating the diversity of types...