Idealistic Landscape in Japan and Sesshū. Introduction, Publication and Commentaries by Svetlana I. Marakhonova
Elisseeff’s manuscript “Idealistic Landscape in Japan and Sesshū” housed at the Orientalists’ Archive of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts was written around 1920. It may be connected with the series of his lectures on Japanese and Chinese art delivered at the History of Arts Institute in Petrograd in 1917-1920. In his article Elisseeff was the first among the professional Russian and European Orientalists to study the art of Sesshū, an outstanding Japanese artist. The author compares the individual creative style of Sesshū with his Japanese and Chinese predecessors. He shows an exclusive role of Sesshū in the Japanese monochrome ink painting (suiboku-ga) during the Muromachi period. Elisseeff shows the very beginning of the “ideal” landscape genre in China and its heyday in the Sung period connected with the Chan Buddhist philosophy. Its postulates were personified in artistic images, especially in scenery. He follows the development of the suiboku-ga painting in Japan and its departure from its Chinese origins. The suiboku-ga painting was connected with a lot of Zen Buddhist artists, the most prominent of whom was Sesshū. Biographic data of Sesshū and his connections are given.