В пучине бренного мира. Японское искусство и его коллекционер Сергей Китаев

Given his collecting interests that included even chromolithographs and those prints he called “copies” (facsimiles and recuts, or akashi-han), one may ask whether Kitaev was simply omnivorous, as often happens with many well-heeled dilettantes. Yes, by all means he was a dilettante in its original meaning of “delighted one.” Its negative connotation of superficial, half-baked amateur does not become him. Judging from his letters, Kitaev had considerable knowledge of books on Japanese art in European languages, and he hired Japanese linguists to translate texts related to Japanese artists into Russian for him; in the letter that contains the Brief List, Kitaev includes excerpts from thoughts about the essence of art by Kawanabe Kyо̄sai (1831–1889). He frequently communicated directly with artists and antique dealers in Japan, visited old temples to see famous works of art and regularly showed new acquisitions to his “three friends – Chiossone, Bigot, and Gibert” – who visited him on his ship in Yokohama. Edoardo Chiossone (1833–1898) and Georges Bigot (1860–1927) are well-known in the world of Japanese art and do not require any commentary here; the third, Gibert, was a secretary to the French legation. Kitaev was also acquainted with Okakura Kakuzо̄ (1862–1913), who visited him aboard ship to view the collection and later invited Kitaev to his Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

The names of ukiyo-e masters mentioned in Kitaev’s letters to Pavlinov demonstrate that he was well-oriented in who was who. He knew the established hierarchy of artists, but he had his own eye and taste. At the start of his collecting, Kitaev was under the spell of Hokusai. “I was enamored with him more than anybody else… Later I found other artists who were more refined and elegant, and some of them no less powerful.” Revealing in this excerpt is not his fascination with Hokusai, but Kitaev’s ability to admit that there were other artists, perhaps less famous, but more refined and no less powerful: “The works of Hokkei [1780–1850] and Hokuba [1771–1844] I also like very much – there is power and harmony in them.” In the same letter, Kitaev muses on the calligraphic nature of Japanese painting:

And because of this the imagination of the Japanese is incomparably sharper than European; it often allows but a mere hint, whereas ours demands the full elaboration. The consequences of this are manifold. For us, an artist creates volume by shading, whereas, for a Japanese, a sharp outline of familiar objects would be enough. We demand perspective (albeit conventional…), and in the Japanese imagination almost all perspective draws by its own facilities: if it is necessary for a hawk to fly over a forest, an artist will draw a few upper tree branches; if the hawk sits on the ground, the artist gives its exact position on the ground and a hint of this ground at the side; sometimes the artist just indicates somewhere at the top a cliff and it is enough – the imagination of the Japanese viewer will find [the hawk] below on the ground[218].

Kitaev also provides enthusiastic insight into the Japanese aesthetic of displaying paintings:

In the books on Jap[anese] painting I did not find advice on their characteristic habit which is not to turn (as we do) numerous paintings into elements of interior decoration (which become much too familiar and no longer attract attention) by hanging them permanently on the walls. They change their paintings every day and savor the freshness of perception! Isn’t it the case with literature, when it remains more fresh from the distance of time, you always discover in a talented piece new charms that escaped your attention in previous readings. So they applied this method of rereading pictures again and again. You should also add to this the calligraphic nature of their painting, and the aesthetic, visual rereading will appear in all its entirety and total freshness[219].

Kitaev is talking not only about psychological aspects of visual perception but is also drawing together the Japanese way of conceiving imagery through a combination of the visual and verbal. In this subtle perception possibly lies one of the predilections of Kitaev as collector: surimono, with their symbiosis of word and picture.