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The accompanying drawings are taken from articles collected by the writer and now in the Field Museum of Natural History. These show the steps in the conventionalization of the human figure, as explained by the weavers. In the first four the forms are so realistic that they need no explanation, but E is more complicated.
It is necessary to use to a certain extent the arbitrary subject-divisions, such as portrait, landscape, and figure painting; and to refer also to realistic painting, which tends to depict things as they are, as opposed to the academic, which recognizes the wisdom of conventionalization or idealization.
I cannot in a paragraph deal effectively with this most difficult and complex question. I can only point the reader to analogous phenomena in the arts. All the arts are a conventionalization, an ordering of nature. Even in a garden you put the plants in rows, and you subordinate the well-being of one to the general well-being.
Both figures are so realistic that the intention of the weaver is apparent. In B, D, E, and F, the animal is still realistic, but the man disappears, and in his place is a formless object or straight lines which are identified as "something eaten." The pattern G is given as the next step in the conventionalization.
All conventionalization is in the interest of increased beauty of line. But too great a sacrifice of the natural contours of the body, as in some of the work of the Cubists, results in a lifelessness that cannot be atoned for by any formal beauty.
To appreciate Japanese art it is necessary to become accustomed to the conventionalization of treatment-to understand what the artist was after, and to judge from that standpoint. It is well to begin by studying works that are more like Western art-such things as "Moving Clouds" and "Evening: Nawa Harbor" in room 1-and then to progress to the works in which the conventions are more pronounced.
Even in the work of Surrey and Wyatt themselves we find poems which, were it not for the general tradition to which they belong, one would have no difficulty in regarding as a natural development and conventionalization of the native tendency.
Here the artist has welded the figures into an ornamental design in a way unparalleled in the work of other American sculptors. The opposite group is called "Music" or "Music and Poetry." It lacks the flowing grace and something of the richness of feeling of the other, though it is more dignified. There is the same conventionalization in treatment, again charming.
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