Toshiharu Omuka David Burliuk and The

TOSHIHARU OMUKA

DAVID BURLIUK AND THE JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE*

David Burliuk lived in Japan for only two years, between 1920 and 1922, and during his short stay he spent the winter of 1920-21 in the Bonin Islands. While admittedly contemporary Japanese art did not exert an influence on Burliuk as an established artist whose ultimate destination was, as he said trankly_ to his closer acquaintances in Japan,l the United States, the impact of the intensity of his artistic theory and Futurist work on the Japanese avant- garde cannot be over-exaggerated. The ship which Burliuk took from Vladivostok reached Japan on October 1, 1920,2 and, together with Viktor Pal'mov, who accompanied him, he or- ganized an exhibition in Tokyo just two weeks later. The show (to be discussed below) presented original paintings by Russian Futurists to Japanese artists for the first time. Still this does not mean that their outstanding accomplishments were little known in Japan before the exhibition. The intro- ductory survey on Russian modern art in Japan below helps to elucidate the significance of Burliuk's ardent activities in Japan. No article in Japanese art journals, as far as we can tell, encouraged readers to pay serious attention to Russian Futurism at the time when its Italian counterpart was being fervently discussed and growing in popularity.3Iron- ically enough, an article which gave a partial, if distorted, view of Russian Futurism did appear in an art journal, Chuo Bijutsu, in April 1916-"iron- ically enough" because the piece in question was Alexander Benois' harsh and

* I would like to thank Mr. Nicholas Burliuk for providing me with rare documents md useful information about his father. I also wish to acknowledge the special help I re- ceived from Mr. Toru Asano, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Mr. Kazuo Yamawaki, The Museum of Modern Art, Hyogo; Mr. Masaaki Kanbara, The Fukui Pre- fectural Museum of Art; and Mr. Shoro Obigane, The Asahi Shimbun. 1. Interview with Mr. Tomojiro Morimoto, February 1977. 2. Chronicle, Mizue (Tokyo), No. 189 (Oct. 1920), p. 58. 3. For a detailed discussion, see Toru Asano, "Cubism, Futurism, and Taisho Era Painting in Japan" (in Japanese with English summary), in 1976 Annual Report: The Na- tional Museum of Modem Art, Tokyo (1978), pp. 85-105; idem, Genshoku Gendai Nip- pon no Bijutsu: Zenei Kaiga (Tokyo: Shogaku-kan, 1978), ch. 4. notorious criticism of the Last Futurist Exhibition "0,10"in 1915.4Although the propagation of Russian modernism thus started in a very prejudicial way, the later developments certainly demand our attention. In coming to appreci- ate the Russian accomplishments, the Japanese were actually ahead of the West which, in 1914, lost contact with the Russians owing to World War I. Kanae Yamamoto is well-known in Japan as one of the talented artists who led the "original print" movement in which he insisted on a violent de- parture from the traditional Ukiyoe prints which were produced by system- atic collaborations among illustrators, woodcutters, and printers. In 1912 Yamamoto came to Europe and settled in Paris. Judging from his letters to family and articles contributed to art journals, he was not strongly attracted by the latest artistic trends of Cubism and Futurism in Paris. After the out- break of World War I, Yamamoto vainly tried to remain there. Toward the end of June 1916, he left London for home via Scandinavia and Siberia, but, un- fortunately (or fortunately), he was forced to stop in Moscow for some months. During his stay, however, as with Burliuk in Japan, Yamamoto's activities were numerous and energetic. He painted people and landscapes in Russia, visited the famous collections of Shchukin and Morozov5 and was deeply im- pressed by the peasant crafts. A letter to his family in the early months reveals,

4. The review of the exhibition was originally published in the newspaper Rech', 9 Jan. 1916. Incidentally, Evgenii Kotvun argued that "0,10" (Zero-Ten) in the title of the exhibition must be "0-10," not the erroneous "0,10," making much account of Male- vich's own expression in his text From Cubism to Suprematism (1915) and of Puni's re- ference to ten participants in his letter to Malevich (E. Kovtun, "The Beginning of Su- prematism," trans. by John E. Bowlt in the catalog Von der Flfiche zum Raum/From Surface to Space [Koln: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1976] , pp. 44-45, and his introduction to K. S. Malevich, "Pis'ma k M. V. Matiushinu," in Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Push- kinskogo doma na 1974 god [Leningrad: Nauka, 1976], p. 181). Andrei Nakov had questioned this view for several reasons and has suggested that "low' meant the "10th Land" in the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun and that the comma was a "causal separation" (A. Nakov, "Malevich's Transrational Trip to the '10th Land'," in the catalog Kasimir Malevich [London: Tate Gallery, 1976] , p. 21). Indeed, attentive readers of Malevich's text notice the fundamental difference between "0,10" and "0-1." The latter concept is wholly in the order of "three-dimensional" thoughts, ordinal numbers, and arithmetic. The latter exerted a direct effect on the sun in the Futurist opera and was why the Futurists conquered the sun. The annotation in parenthesis was, therefore, nec- essary for Malevich to prevent "0,10" from becoming the arithmetical interpretation one-tenth. Taking the comma on Malevich's cover of the book Troe (The Three [St. Pe- tersburg: Zhuravl', 1913], dedicated to the memory of Elena Guro) into account, we might conclude that the enigmatic sign should symbolize an intermediation of temporal death and ressurection, that is, the negation of reality (Zero) and the affirmation of the future (Ten). 5. He contributed an article on the Shchukin Collection which he wrote in Moscow in September, to Waseda Bungaku (Tokyo), No. 133 (Dec. 1916), pp. 59-67.