Ernest Francisco Fenollosa

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Fenollosa around 1890
Fenollosa's grave (2002)

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (born February 18, 1853 in Salem , Massachusetts , † September 21, 1908 in London ) was an American professor of philosophy and economics .

Life

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa graduated from Harvard in 1874 . 1878 already mediated Japan acting zoologist Edward S. Morse Fenollosa a lectureship in philosophy and economics in Tokyo . He taught at the University of Tokyo , the University of the Arts Tokyo and at the Imperial Normal School and was manager of the visual arts department of the Imperial Museum in Tokyo.

He was an important educator during the modernization of the Meiji period and a passionate orientalist who, together with Okakura Tenshin, campaigned for the preservation of traditional Japanese art ( Nihonga ).

He soon became interested in Japanese art, traveling around the country, looking at the art treasures in the temples and regretting that Japan pounced on modern Western art and neglected its own traditional art. The young Okakura Tenshin accompanied him on his travels as an interpreter . With him, who found a job in the Ministry of Culture in 1880, he compiled the first list of Japan's national treasures and found ancient Chinese scrolls which had been brought to Japan by Zen monks centuries earlier . The Japanese then appointed him their Imperial Art Commissioner - making him the first foreign specialist in Japanese and Chinese art to achieve international renown.

Starting with the large pair of adjustable screens Matsushima des Ogata Kōrin , Fenollosa acquired a large number of works of art that can be seen today as the Fenollosa-Weld Collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts . In 1884 he was "adopted" by Kanō Hōgai and accepted into this famous family of artists as Kanō Eitan ( Japanese 狩 野 永 探 ). In 1886 he sold his collection to the doctor Dr. Charles Weld and returned to Boston in 1890 , where he became curator of the Oriental Collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. When he divorced his wife and married an assistant, the Boston Society did not forgive him: in 1896 he had to give up his position at the museum. Fenollosa went back to Japan, but found no suitable position there and returned to the USA in 1900. During a stay in London he suffered a stroke and died there. His ashes were transferred to Japan and buried on the site of a secondary temple of the Mii-dera (also Onjō-ji), the Hōmyō-in, high above Lake Biwa . Fenollosa's widow was able to get the young Ezra Pound for the publication of his estate, u. a. about the Noh theater , win.

Works

  • Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 1912. Reprinted from ICG Muse, 2000. ISBN 4-925080-29-6

literature

Web links

Commons : Ernest Fenollosa  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Ernest F. Fenollosa American orientalist and art critic , from www. britica.com, accessed June 18, 2018
  2. A Setting Fit for a Shogun (English), at query.nytimes.com
  3. Dichter / Pound Verse im Käfig , on www.spiegel.de, accessed on June 18, 2018