Hiroshige

He thinks of the Froebel blocks his mother gave him as a child, the geometric kindergarten gifts, cubes, spheres, triangles, that he arranged and rearranged for hours on a low table by the window, learning without knowing he was learning that complex form could be built from simple, honest units.

He thinks of the Japanese woodblock prints he first encountered at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the flattened planes, the deep horizontals, the way a print by Hiroshige could suggest an entire landscape with a few deliberate, uncluttered lines.

And he thinks with something closer to contempt than nostalgia of the houses that surround him now in Oak Park and across the whole of prosperous American suburbia, the turreted, gabled, over-decorated piles that his fellow architects keep producing for clients who want their houses to look like small, confused castles, houses stacked awkwardly upward with a fussiness of gingerbread trim, houses that seem embarrassed by the ground they stand on and eager to disguise it.

He does not want to disguise the ground.

Rain in the sky of the heart, rain in the willows.

But then he saw this face, this face like flame, this quiet lady, this portrait by Hiroshige, and took it home with him, and with it came what unexpected changes, subtle as weather.

The dark room, cold as rain, grew faintly fragrant, stirred with a stir of April, warmed its corners with light again.

And smoke of incense whirled about this portrait, and the quiet lady there, so young, so quietly smiling, with calm hands, seemed ready to loose her hair.

Yet there was only sunlight there, until he saw those young eyes quietly smiling, and held his breath to stare, and could have sworn her cheek had turned a little, had slightly turned away.

Sunlight dozed on the floor, he sat and wondered, nor left his room that day.

And that day and for many days thereafter he sat alone and thought no lady had ever lived so beautiful as Hiroshige wrought.

Or if she lived, no matter in what country, by what far river or hill or lonely sea, he would look in every face until he found her.

Each week, it seemed, I found a new idol to worship.

The Japanese above all, Hokusai, Utamaro, Hiroshige.

There were Renoir, Whistler, Monet, Van Gogh, Botticelli, Marc Chagall, Holbein, Utrillo, Leon Bakst, Memling, Seurat, Modigliani, Rousseau, Bruegel, Bosch, Van Eyck, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and so on, ad infinitum.

Now and then I bought a print and hung it in some conspicuous place, a sure way to kill an idol.

Oh, wow.

And these are works by William Blake, by Ensor, by Hiroshige, Durer, my friend Huma Baba's work, and then we have two vitrines in the space where it's sort of like, you know, archives and pages from my notebooks and little sculptures and things like that.

So, and you know, I walked through it with other people in that room and it's like a room that you just want to live in.

It's kind of like you hear, you know, there's a video on the side that, that, that I picked five songs that I would listen to in my studio.

About 200 works are on show, pulled from the British Museum's collection of roughly 40,000 Japanese art pieces.

Expect Edo period folding screens, hanging scrolls, picture scrolls, and ukiyo-e prints from eight well-known print artists, including Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, and Sharaku.

Two pieces worth watching for, Maruyama Okyo's Tiger and Cub screen, and a collaborative firefly painting with a connection to Britain's King George V.

On hours, because today is Friday, the museum stays open late until 8:00 PM, with last entry 30 minutes before close.

The museum is going to open a major Japanese landscape exhibition featuring works by.

Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Hasui.

I did it.

I did it.