Читать книгу Contempory Netsuke - Miriam Kinsey - Страница 9

Foreword

by HANS CONRIED

THESE LATE years have witnessed an amazing proliferation of books and articles on netsuke. The treasure first mined by Brockhaus and Weber has been ably refined and mounted by many latter-day scholar-collectors and enhanced by the miracles of modern photographic reproduction, so that we now have answers to almost all our questions about the good old masters and the good old works that have fascinated collectors for a century. One might well believe that, save for reports of occasional new discoveries, little remains to be said. Or so it seemed until the arduous spadework of Mrs. Kinsey revealed that wonders have not ceased and that the netsuke tradition is alive and flourishing in our own time.

“Netsuke-itis” is now a common affliction, an intense acquisitive urge that subsides, normally, only with the onset of severe financial insufficiency. Two general categories of the disease emerge: a craving for the old and a craving for the new. Despite the virulent nature of the disorder, it would now seem that sufferers from both varieties can safely share the same ward, and sometimes even the same bed.

This patient can diagnose his own malady as the kind most prevalent thirty years ago. This was, understandably, a predilection for the “honto” or “true” netsuke, with its aura of samurai times, the signs of wear from usage, the "good color” (if ivory), and the contained form that made it practical. Pieces of this type were readily available, at modest prices, to the collector who had an early start in the quest. True, new netsuke were offered for sale occasionally—the specimens from the So school, for example, which were always of a very high order, even if sometimes “too fussy." But these pieces we were inclined to think unworthy of our attention. Perhaps more to the point, they were considerably dearer than the far more numerous old netsuke whose makers were no longer concerned with the price of rice. This fact, for me at least, may have added an acidity to grapes that hung high.

But times change, and opinions, opportunities, and tastes change with them. Today the demand from collectors and speculative dealers far exceeds the supply of available netsuke, old or new, good or bad. And a whole new generation of young Japanese carvers has been inspired to engage in a craft that not many years ago seemed to be dead or dying. They carve as well as many of their forebears, and their work is more and more in demand.

Here, then, is the book collectors have been waiting for: a thorough compilation of those craftsmen and artists of our own time who, although frankly serving collector rather than wearer, maintain so high a standard of dedicated skill that their work can be judged with that of the old masters.

Mrs. Kinsey, with enterprise, energy, and effort, and, I am sure, with Mr. Kinsey's generous help, has placed the lives and works of these contemporary netsuke-shi within reach of our grateful hands.