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Gasen (畵筌) is a Japanese instructional manual for those learning to draw or paint. This Gasen, a six volume set, was published in 1721, and was created by Hayashi Moriatsu (林守篤). It is considered to be the first of comprehensive, full-scale art manual in Japan.

Hayashi Moriatsu was trained in the Kanou school, which was quick to draw upon Chinese painting manuals. He introduced them as part of the Kanou school’s body of knowledge. The book is designed for beginners, including painting theory and guides on pigments with clear, and accessible illustrations. (Summarized and translated from: 小林宏光Kobayashi, H. (2018). 近世画譜と中国絵画 : 十八世紀の日中美術交流発展史: Kinsei gafu to Chūgoku kaiga : jūhasseiki no Nitchū bijutsu kōryū hattenshi)

The preface is devoted to Chinese painting theories such as the Six Laws, Three Classes, and Twelve Things to Avoid. Volume 1 includes orally taught secrets by Yuugen Ogata, who was Moriatsu’s master teacher. The next four volumes focus on Kanou School painting methods: vol. 2, instructions on how to draw landscapes and plants; vol. 3, birds and animals; vol. 4, Chinese figures; vol. 5, Japanese figures; and vol. 6, methods of mounting and appreciating painting, and how to roll and unroll scrolls. (Summarized from JAANUS: Japanese Art and Architecture Net Users System)

The images shown here in this post are from Gasen (畵筌) by Hayashi Moriatsu, volume 2 (how to draw landscapes and plants), including how to draw different types of movement in water and flowers in the summer.

#JapaneseArt #Gasen #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #SpecialCollections

Happy August! And it’s National Dog Month!

Here’s Peggy Guggenheim with a dog photographed by Man Ray.

Peggy Guggenheim With Dog Man Ray (American painter and photographer, 1890-1976) (artist) ca.1926 HOLLIS number: olvwork235314

#HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #DigitalImages #NationalDogMonth #Dog

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Betye Saar who passed away on July 26th, only four days before turning 100 years old.

Saar was a celebrated contemporary American artist (1926 - 2026) and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. Through visual storytelling, Saar’s assemblage work often confronts American racism, colonialism, and stereotypes of Black people in this country.

Rest in peace, Betye Saar.

#BetyeSaar #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #RestInPeace

The East Boston Tunnel was the first underwater subway in the United States. It opened for operation on December 30, 1904, after four years of construction that began on May 5, 1900. Starting in 1897, Boston was also the first city in the nation to operate a subway. The East Boston Tunnel connects East Boston, originally comprised of five islands, to “the mainland” city proper via a tunnel underneath Boston Harbor. The construction boosted real estate values for East Boston areas and shortened the commute time significantly from anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half via ferry ride to only 7 minutes on a streetcar. At the time, the cost for a round-trip was 12 cents. The East Boston Tunnel is still being used today by the MBTA’s Blue Line. (Summarized from Massachusetts Historical Society’s website: A Late Christmas Gift for East Boston.)

#EastBostonTunnel #VintagePostcard #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #SpecialCollections #boston massachusetts

“Semilla de Sol” (English translation: Seed of the Sun) by Santiago Robles (b. 1984 in Mexico City) is about so many things—the conjugation of confrontation, juxtaposition of two ancestral figures related to the feminine and the masculine, multiple meanings of the seed and the sun as the origin of life and the ideal of civilization, and pre-Hispanic magical-mythological thought and overwhelming intervention of American culture in Latin American society and imagination. In “Semilla de Sol,” Mexico appears as an ambiguous, contradictory and amorphous community, without a legible face or voice, and corn appears as a transvestite in Virgin Mary, War Granada, Cosmic Uterus, Transgenic Machinery, Seer Hand, Ixcamacuane and Death.

Just as water is associated with the earth, the wind is associated with the sun; here is the permanence of life; copulation, agriculture and miscegenation; the fertilization of a people and the cultivation of a destiny: water man, earth man, wind man, fire man, corn man, sun seed. (Summarized from Texto publicado originalmente en la versión impresa de la revista Tierra Adentro, agosto 2015, página 67).

Weaving many stories between imageries and texts, Robles invites the viewers to take all that in to process and investigate all these multiple meanings.

#ArtistsBook #SantiagoRobles #Mexico #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary

Grrr!

Guillermo Deisler (1940-1995) was a Chilean artist who worked in stage design, woodcut printing, visual poetry, and the early global mail art movement.

Deisler was born in Santiago, but spent most of his life in East Germany. In 1973, he was arrested during the military coup in Chile and was forced into exile. He lived in France and Bulgaria, but eventually settled in East Germany.

He created artist books and unique mail art using rubber stamps and poetic imagery, blending word and picture. In 1987, he launched UNI/vers(;), also known as the Peacedream project—an international mail art publication with 35 issues, bringing together visual and experimental poets from around the world.

This publication entitled “Grrr” is an invitation to create meaning of this word on your own.

The note from the publisher in Spanish is translated as below:

“Grrr grrrr gr grrrrrrr gr grrrrrrrrr gr……

We invite readers to create their own translation of this message.”

This publication is a facsimile reissue of Guillermo Deisler’s artist’s book made in Antofagasta, Chile in 1969, under the aegis of Ediciones Mimbre (1963-1973). The facsimile publication was produced by Naranja Publicaciones after 50 years of its first publication. 500 copies were made that maintain the narration of the original and different printing techniques such as risography, letterpress, screen printing and stamping have been mixed.

You will find this and other artists’ publishing collections in our Reading Room.

#GuillermoDeisler #ArtistsBooks #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #Grrr

What caught our eye in this photograph were the beautifully hand-colored watermelons!

They sure look inviting during these hot summer days. But this print wasn’t originally a color print. It was a monochrome albumen print made from wet collodion or dry plate glass negative, and colors were added by Japanese artists or colorists using water-soluble pigments.

Introduced in Europe in the 1840s, the practice of hand coloring photographs became more refined and widespread in Japan. By the 1880s, it had become a common practice and a defining characteristic of Japanese tourist photography.

Visit Early Photography of Japan, a digital collection of more than 40 souvenir photograph albums and illustrated publications with over 2,000 images from Widener Library, the Fine Arts Library, and Harvard-Yenching Library. These images primarily document the early history of commercial photography in Japan and are representative of what is often called Japanese tourist photography or Yokohama shashin.

#HarvardFineArtsLibrary #SpecialCollections #EarlyPhotographyOfJapan #Hand-ColoredPrints #Photography #HarvardLibrary

For the last day of National Oceans Month.

These vintage postcard images are from our Postcard Collection. We wish you were here!

#NationalOceansMonth #Postcard #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #Harvard #HarvardLibrary