The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  Japan had been closed to the world until the 1860s, when the country modernized and began trading with the west. When Japan opened her harbours, European ships flooded in and prints like these ones in the MFA found their way across to the west. At the time, they were virtually worthless in Japan, but to western eyes, they were mind-blowing.

  Sarah pulled swathes of images out of their drawers for me to see. You’d need months to study everything, but I got a good feel for the collection, which represents the best work of about 120 artists from the school of g art called ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the floating world’. Ukiyo was originally a Buddhist concept which suggested the sadness (uki) of life (yo). But during the peace and prosperity of the seventeenth century uki came to mean ‘to float’ and instead of connoting sadness, ukiyo became associated with the momentary, worldy pleasures of Japan’s rising middle class and metropolitan Edo (Tokyo). The most popular prints were ones of life in the pleasurable places of Edo – scenes showing Kabuki theatre, courtesans and geisha. Later, the artists moved on to create landscapes, birds, flowers, pilgrimages and legendary heroes. No matter what the subject, the artist always used graceful lines and bright colours to depict reality in the fashionable ‘floating world’ style.

  I immediately recognized the most famous Japanese woodblock print in the western world – Under the Wave, off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave , by Hokusai, (1760–1849). The print shows ferocious, towering waves with foaming white heads about to engulf two stricken fishing boats. The now iconic image is everywhere, and many museums and collectors own impressions of it. However because the Spaulding print has not been displayed, the cold blue of the water, the grey and white sky and the pale yellow boats are just as they were in Japan in 1830 – it’s as though the print were created this morning.

  Ukiyo-e artists were the Andy Warhols of Japanese art. They mass-marketed high art: suddenly, from about 1680 on, almost anyone in Japan who wanted to own a piece of art could afford it. Whereas paintings on silk were very expensive, the ukiyo-e images were printed on paper and could be created cheaply. To make a print, an artist would design an image, then give it to a hikkū, or workshop assistant, who would make a tracing. A craftsman glued that on to a block of wood and cut the image into it. The block was inked and printed so as to make hundreds or thousands of copies.

  Every print in the collection was made like this, by hand, by men sitting on the floor at low tables in the back rooms of Edo. You may well have done the same thing yourself: taken a stamp, pressed it on to an inkpad and pressed out the image on the stamp on paper.

  One of the top artists who created prints in this way was Hiroshige. The first print the Spauldings bought for their nascent collection was one of his. Born the son of a fire-warden in Edo in 1797, Hiroshige became a prolific artist and designed thousands of compositions for ukiyo-e woodcuts. The most popular were reprinted many thousands of times.

  Sarah showed me some scenes from the work that sealed his reputation as a master, his 1833–34 Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, depicting stations along the 500 kilometres highway along the Pacific coast that linked Edo with the imperial city of Kyoto. One scene from Kanbara station called Night Snow shows three men walking outside at night, in the snow, wearing snow clogs or barefoot. They are bent over, to shield themselves from the bitter wind. I felt freezing just looking at them.

  Another print I liked was The Koto Player by Suzuki Harunobu (1725–70), the first Japanese artist to design commercial prints using the Chinese method of printing with five colours. It shows a Japanese lady leaning to one side and playing a stringed instrument called a koto. Above her are built-in cabinets painted with purple iris. Behind her is a small stove with a kettle for tea on top of it. This beautiful woman is very accomplished. She reads and writes, she arranges flowers, can perform the Japanese tea ceremony, she lights incense and knows how to play the koto.

  We also looked at a set of three prints that make up one design called A Pilgrimage to Enoshima , designed in about 1789 by Torii Kiyonaga. It shows a group of women resting on the shore opposite the island which contains the sacred shrine of Enoshima. Throngs of people still visit the island today to see the shrine and the pretty island.

  One Western artist who would have been in heaven leafing through the Spaulding collection was Vincent van Gogh. He first bought some Japanese prints from the docks in Antwerp and delighted in them from then on until his death, copying them and writing to his brother, Theo, about them in 1888, ‘I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work. They draw a figure with a few well-chosen lines as if it were as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat.’

  Van Gogh painted his own versions of two of the prints from Hiroshige’s 1856–58 series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo – one of delicate blossom in a plum orchard, the other a bridge showered with splinters of spring rain, called Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge . I saw both of his paintings in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They are called Flowering Plum Orchard: After Hiroshige and Bridge in the Rain: After Hiroshige. Van Gogh was was also inspired by Japanese prints to create Almond Blossom, in 1890, a symbol of new life, of spring, as a present for his brother Theo’s newborn son, also called Vincent. Impressionist artists, including Manet, Degas and Monet – who covered the walls of his house in Giverny with more than 200 Japanese woodcuts – found the prints unusual and shocking. They were ethereal and beautiful, unlike anything in western art. It was as though they came from another planet.

  The Spaulding brothers came late to the game of collecting Japanese prints: they bought collections from other people, including Frank Lloyd Wright, designer of the iconic Solomon Guggenheim building in New York, but resold any they were not in love with. They had a great eye and collected only the best, which is why their collection is so wonderful. You can see images from the collection on the museum’s website, as the images were photographed in 2005, but the originals will never go on display.

  Graphic arts specialists, lovers of Japan and devotees of beauty can make an appointment to visit the collection to study the prints first hand and glimpse the colours of Edo that inspired van Gogh and Impressionist artists, and which have developed into modern video games, cartoons – and the Japanese creations I like best, the delightful animated world of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation and film studio in Tokyo. Their film Spirited Away won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2001, the only film that isn’t in English to have done so. I’d give an Oscar to their 2008 film Ponyo, a brilliant interpretation of The Little Mermaid, with the sweetest Japanese theme song you’ll ever hear.

  [The Great Wave by Hokusai]

  The now iconic image is everywhere, however the Spaulding print of the image has never been displayed in the light. It is perfectly preserved – as though the print were created this morning.

  [Night Snow by Hiroshige]

  Three men are walking outside at night in the snow, wearing snow clogs or barefoot. They are bent over, to shield themselves from the bitter wind. I felt freezing just looking at them.

  [The Koto Player by Harunobu (1725–70)]

  I liked this perfectly preserved print of a Japanese lady playing the koto. The images in the print show she is very skilled; she reads and writes, she arranges flowers, can perform the Japanese tea ceremony, she lights incense and plays the koto.

  [Spirited Away]

  A scene from Studio Ghibli’s Oscar-winning film.

  ‘MY SKETCHBOOK SHOWS THAT I try to catch things “in the act”,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo, in 1882. That is a little how I felt, 130 years later, looking through four of the artist’s sketchbooks, in storage at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam – as if I was catching him ‘in the act’ of creation.

  There are seven of his sketchbooks in total in the museum, but only four with their original covers. These four are stored in the prints and drawings archive. Van Gogh carried each one in his pocket, at different times in his life.

/>   Van Gogh had been all set for a deeply religious life but, aged 26, he transferred his religious zeal to art. He decided to become an artist instead, as he felt he wanted to leave ‘a certain souvenir’ to humankind ‘in the form of drawings or paintings, not made to comply with this or that school but to express genuine human feeling’.

  He moved to a rural town called Nuenen to live with his parents and begin learning his craft. I was able to leaf through pages and pages of personal sketches and observe van Gogh in the act of becoming an artist.

  The first sketchbook has a royal blue, marbled inside cover and an empty pocket at the back. The first image he sketched in it was a church in Nuenen. He later painted this church in View of the Sea at Scheveningen and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen. The painting once hung above the storage room, upstairs in the gallery, but in 2002 it was stolen. Now the museum has no idea where it is. They have only this pencil sketch – the only trace of a masterpiece that has now disappeared.

  Other pages of the Nuenen sketchbook contain images of the people and places of Nuenen – people at work in the fields or weaving in workshops. In the faces of some sketches I glimpsed the faces of the family in his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. It felt very intimate to see the faces of people the artist lived amongst in such a fragile, tangible form; they seemed more real to me in the pencil sketches – more immediate – than in the paintings that hang in the galleries.

  The second sketchbook has a black cover. Inside are more scenes of Nuenen, and then glimpses of Antwerp, where van Gogh next went to live. There he visited a lot of museums and indulged his new passion for Japanese woodblock prints. Van Gogh would have felt he’d died and gone to heaven if he’d been let loose among the Spaulding prints I saw in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

  In Antwerp, van Gogh became ill and run down, perhaps as a result of his diet, as he lived almost entirely on bread, coffee and absinthe. So, in 1886, he moved to Paris, to live with his brother. It was here that he filled the third sketchbook. It is rectangular, far wider than the others, and it has a linen cover. It’s stuffed full of drawings of things he saw in Paris – faces, and sculptures in museums, as well as female nudes who posed for him. In one pencil sketch, I recognized the windmill at Montmartre – a rural village at the time – which appears in lots of his paintings. Also in this book are sketches of flowers, Theo van Gogh’s laundry list and a letter from Vincent to Theo written in chalk. There is one stray sheet, which the artist tore out in order to write a note to his brother announcing his arrival in the city.

  After Paris, van Gogh set off to the south of France, to Arles, hoping to see an echo of the countryside he’d fallen in love with in Japanese woodblock prints; on his way, he said he kept looking ‘to see if it was Japanese yet’. When he arrived, he thought the people in Arles were like ‘creatures from another world’, including the ‘priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros’.

  One of these creatures was named Madame Jeanne Calment. She lived in Arles her whole life, and ended up breaking records: living for 122 years and 164 days, until 1997. She rode her bicycle until she was 100 years old. When asked the secret of her long life, she said she was always very calm, like her name. ‘I dream, I think, I go over my life,’ she said. ‘I never get bored.’

  According to a legend, she met van Gogh when she was 13. He came into her uncle’s shop in 1888. She found him to be ‘dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable’. She could remember selling him coloured pencils. Perhaps he sketched her.

  Van Gogh had been lonely, and hoped to create a collective of artists, living together in Arles. Paul Gauguin came to join him. Van Gogh painted several versions of Sunflowers, the series of paintings of bright, wilting, yellow and brown flowers, while waiting for his friend to arrive.

  The two artists lived together in the Yellow House, and a painting of sunflowers hung in Gauguin’s room there. Gauguin even painted van Gogh painting sunflowers, in The Painter of Sunflowers. In a letter to Theo, van Gogh wrote of Sunflowers, ‘It is a kind of painting that rather changes in character, and takes on a richness the longer you look at it. Besides, you know, Gauguin likes them extraordinarily. He said to me, among other things – “That … it’s … the flower” … You know that the peony is Jeannin’s, the hollyhock belongs to Quost, but the sunflower is somewhat my own.’

  Having never sold a painting in his life, at that moment, van Gogh would never have conceived of a time when his sunflowers would be instantly recognizable across the planet.

  The artistic dream didn’t work out in Arles: the artists argued and, famously, van Gogh cut off his ear. (It has also been argued that Gaugin cut it off when the two were arguing.) The residents of Arles wrote a petition asking that the ‘fou roux’ – the mad redhead – be evicted from the Yellow House. Van Gogh moved into an asylum, continuing to paint there, and then ended up in Auvers-sur-Oise, where, months later, aged 32, he shot himself.

  The final sketchbook has a linen jacket, a tie to keep it closed and a pocket at the back, which contains the business card of E. Walpole Brooke, a painter, who had lived in Japan and with whom van Gogh went out walking. Perhaps they discussed Japanese art and nature – the subjects that fascinated them both.

  There are two sketches of sunflowers in the final book. One shows 16 sunflowers in a vase; the other 12 stems in a vase. The drawings match up with two paintings that belong to the Van Gogh Museum; they have the same number of flowers in the vases. Perhaps he was sketching and remembering happier times.

  Other sketches that you’d recognize as paintings include some sketches from Daubigny’s garden and sketches of irises, olive pickers and two figures in a ravine in Saint-Rémy. He called his Irises ‘the lightning conductor for my illness’; by painting them, he thought he could ground his mind and make himself feel better. Now, the painting belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and is one of the most expensive paintings ever bought – for a secret sum.

  Van Gogh shot himself believing that he was a failure, and a lot of his family thought the same thing. When Theo died half a year after his brother, the family washed its hands of the paintings, and it fell to Theo’s wife and son to take care of the estate.

  In her lifetime, Theo’s wife saw her brother-in-law’s work go from being worthless to being among the most prized paintings in the world. The city of Amsterdam built the museum where his sketchbooks live so as to exhibit and conserve his work. I wonder, if he had known what would become of his paintings, would he have shot himself? And, if he had not, what other paintings might he have produced?

  After I had looked at the priceless sketchbooks, the curators who showed them to me let me peek into other back rooms. We went into a photography studio, where The Harvest, absent from its usual spot on the museum wall, was being photographed. It was at the centre of a wheel lit with nine bright spotlights. What would Vincent have made of the care and precision with which it was being recorded, or indeed of the queues outside to see his work?

  Afterwards, we visited the painting storage rooms. I saw Vincent van Gogh himself. His cool green eyes stared out from a painting: Self-Portrait with Felt Hat. It’s a small image of the red-bearded artist wearing a brown hat, a white shirt and a blue-brown jacket. His eyes are alarming, his face is serious, and seeing him reminded me of what Madame Calment had said about the man she once served in a shop in Arles.

  This painting of van Gogh’s face was in storage because it was about to be reframed and sent to Japan for an exhibition. I liked the idea of van Gogh going to Japan. He loved their art, and would have loved to know that they, in turn, liked his.

  [The first sketchbook]

  It has a royal blue, marbled inside cover and an empty pocket at the back. The first image van Gogh sketched in the book was a church in Nuenen.

  [Jeanne Louise Calment (1875–1997)]

  Madame Calment lived in Arles her whole life – 122 years and 164 days. She met van Gogh when she was 13 and foun
d him ‘dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable’. She sold him coloured pencils.

  [Van Gogh Sunflower sketch]

  The final sketchbook I saw contained two sketches of sunflowers. When he sketched the flowers van Gogh would never have conceived of a time when his sunflowers would be instantly recognizable across the planet.

  [Self-Portrait With Felt Hat]

  This painting was in storage, waiting to be reframed and shipped to Japan. It was strange to see it, unframed, in the stacks, his piercing eyes staring out of the painting.

  VENICE IS THE DREAMIEST CITY on earth. Everything there is floating, suspended. During the day, tourists crowd the city but, by night, it is eerily quiet. On the night I arrived, I walked the streets, seeing barely a soul. I felt as though I were in an enchanted city.

  It’s the same at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal in Venice.

  By day, art lovers cram into Peggy Guggenheim’s former home, drawn as much by the mystique of the lady herself as by her stunning collection of modern art. By night, only the paintings remain, and they settle down, into the quiet of the night time city, wearing their pyjamas.

  Yes, most drawings and paintings in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and some of the sculptures, have their own pair of pyjamas. Each pair is beige and adorned with a sketch of the painting it clothes each night. They protect the works of art from the dazzling light that glitters off the canal each morning when the members of staff first arrive at the museum and pull open the blinds. Then the pyjamas are taken off, the doors unlocked and the crowds arrive.

  Just outside the Pollock Room is a staircase that leads down to the basement. It is cordoned off with a metal gate and a sign that reads ‘Private/Privato’. I met Grazina Subelyte, curatorial assistant at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection there. She opened the gate and we went down the stone stairs and unlocked the door to the room the staff at the museum nickname ‘the bunker’.