Yanagi Sōetsu
What is Pattern?
Handicrafts and Sesshu
Okinawa's Bashofu
A Painted Karatsu as Food for Thought
Recently there is a tendency to pursue distortion in art, but in the case of this jar, natural deformation has raised distortion to the level of spontaneous beauty.
Woodblock Prints
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuIt seems to me that many printmakers are suffering under a delusion. Looking at current trends, it appears that recent prints are simply copying fine art and painting. Some printmakers are working in the nanga style of painting. Others are attempting to reproduce the effects of oil. Some cleverly contrived prints are often difficult to distinguish from paintings done with a brush. The question arises: Why are these printmakers working in the medium of woodblock printing at all?
For prints to follow in the footsteps of painting has very little meaning. The art of the brush and palette should be left to the brush and palette.
Seeing and Knowing
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.
The Japanese Perspective
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuGenerally speaking, the Western perception of art has its roots in Greece. For a long time its goal was perfection, which is particularly noticeable in Greek sculpture. This was in keeping with Western scientific thinking; there are no painters like Andrea Mantegna in the East. I am tempted to call such art ‘the art of even numbers’.
In contrast to this, what the Japanese eye sought was the beauty of imperfection, which I would call ‘the art of odd numbers’. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan.
The Beauty of Kasuri
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe Characteristics of Kogin
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe Beauty of Miscellaneous Things
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuWashi
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuHandmade washi (traditional Japanese paper) is replete with appeal. Looking at it, touching it, fills me with an indescribable sense of satisfaction. The more beautiful it is, however, the more difficult it is to put to use. Only a master of calligraphy could possibly add to its beauty; it is exquisite just as it is. This is wonderfully strange, for it is merely a simple material. Yet plain and undecorated as it is, it is alive with nuanced beauty. Good washi makes possible our most ambitious creative dreams.
What is Folk Craft?
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi Sōetsu
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
A curious fact
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women — old and young — detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place — yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.
Roaming and capricious
Now I sometimes wonder whether the current of utility has not become too strong and whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.
Use
I am pleading for the abolition of the word “use”, and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom.
Freedom
Thus freedom brings not stagnation, but rather the danger of overwork.
The Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute is, from the standpoint of organization, the simplest and least formal thing imaginable. It consists of three schools – a School of Mathematics, a School of Humanistic Studies, a School of Economics and Politics. Each school is made up of a permanent group of professors and an annually changing group of members. Each school manages its own affairs as it pleases; within each group and each individual disposes of his time and energy as he pleases. The members who already have come from twenty-two foreign countries and thirty-nine institutions of higher learning in the United States are admitted, if deemed worthy, by the several groups. They enjoy precisely the same freedom as the professors. They may work with this or that professor, as they severally arrange; they may work alone, consulting from time to time anyone likely to be helpful. No routine is followed; no lines are drawn between professors, members, or visitors. Princeton students and professors and Institute members and professors mingle so suggested that he might find it worth freely as to be indistinguishable. Learning as such is cultivated. The results to the individual and to society are left to take care of themselves.
A tiny rivulet in a distant forest
Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.
Institutions of learning
Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.