The Art and Architecture of Japan by Robert Trent Paine; Alexander SoperReview by: Glenn T. WebbJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 36, No. 2 (May, 1977), p. 135Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/989118 .

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Robert Trent Paine and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of Japan (revised Waterhouse-Kobayashi edition), Harmonds- worth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1975, 495 PP-, 311 illus. $z2.50 (paper).

When the Pelican History of Art volume on Japan first appeared in 1955, it was the most authoritative work on the subject in English. Paine and Soper became a basic text for Western students of Japanese art history. It is still very important. In 1975 it was pub- lished in a paperback edition, "fully revised" by David Waterhouse and Bunji Kobayashi.

The late Robert Treat Paine's text on Japanese painting and sculpture is the gentle testimony of a lifelong disciple. He tempered the somewhat romantic doctrines of his famous predecessors at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Fenollosa and Okakura, with the views of contemporary Japanese schol- ars, and served it all up in his own reasoned, low-keyed style.

Paine was a humble man whose respect for

Japan was virtually unlimited. His section in the Pelican history is the orthodox view of the subject, based firmly on Japanese schol- arship. Some of the accounts of individual artists are a bit too "pat" (e.g., the ceuvres of Mokuan, Jasoku, S6tatsu are not clear- ly worked out); but then the traditional sources, such as the nineteenth-century Koga Bik6, present these artists in the same way. Paine's treatment of the tradition of literati painting in Japan is the shortest and least satisfying section, but again, this accurately reflects Japanese scholarship at the time he was working. Indeed, even the theories that were new in the 1940s of Tsuchida and Doi concerning Sansetsu and T6haku (theories we take for granted now) are worked into Paine's account. Waterhouse has acted wise- ly, I think, in not tampering much with Paine's text. His "revision" is primarily a matter of additional bibliography at the end of the book.

Kobayashi's revision of Alexander Soper's section on architecture has also been handled wisely. Before Soper there was precious little in English on the subject. Edward S. Morse, one of the most colorful figures in the history of early Japanese-American relations, told us what it was like to live in Japanese houses in the i88os; in 1937 Bruno Taut inspired modem Western architects with his rhapso- dy on the beauty of the principles behind those same houses; and A. L. Sadler's book, published in 1941, was the very first proper history in English of Japanese architecture, but it was lightweight stuff compared to Soper's Evolution of Buddhist Architecture in Japan (1942) and his section in the book under review. Soper gave us the first good history of Japanese architecture in English, and for breadth of coverage, it is still the best.

Whereas Paine chose not to modify Japa- nese scholars' views on painting and sculp- ture to any degree, Soper was more selective. He wove his history around the traditional major monuments, incorporating basic in- formation about them and only the most reasonable theories of native scholars. The questions he asked and most of the terms he used were firmly within Western traditions of scholarship. He makes statements that no Japanese scholar at the time could have pro- duced. "The tea-house is a kind of inside-out sculpture in planes, lines, and textures, un- derstandable only when the observer is in his proper place inside it, feeling its enclosure around his body. Its appreciation comes as the climax to a series of impressions . .. like the final passage of a sonata .. " That doesn't tell you much about the teahouse as a feature of traditional Japanese life, but it is nice to hear, anyway. Sometimes the sound is less pleasing, as when he praises native (as opposed to Chinese-style) architecture for its lack of monumentality and low, horizontal space, but criticizes it when he thinks it gets

too big for having the "proportions ... of a basement." I suspect that what went on in that space would not interest Soper very much. He is, after all, interested primarily in objects, and he has presented a totally con- vincing picture of how Japanese buildings, as objects, evolved.

Our understanding of that picture has changed very little in twenty years. Kobayashi has added terse paragraphs (wrapped in brackets) that sometimes correct but more often substantiate with recent evidence the points that Soper made (although the pagoda at H6rin-ji, which is the only monument that has been destroyed since 1955, is cited on pages 3o0 and 316 without correction as "still extant"). The most valuable aspect of the revised Paine and Soper is Kobayashi's extensive bibliography: nine pages of well- organized material, in both Japanese and English, including references to all relevant articles in the Japan Architect.

GLENN T. WEBB

University of Washington

135

for whom this part of the city possessed no historic significance. Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities did not remain unread, but only Alexander Mitscherlich pursued her observations in his Die Unwirt- lichkeit unserer Stddte-Anstiftung zum Un- frieden of 1965. Surely it is not by chance that the students in Frankfurt, where Mitscher- lich taught, reacted to these problems earlier than other university communities--some through the medium of research (we thank them for the work under discussion); others more violently, who by means of house occu- pations and street battles with the police want to stop that which by and large can no longer be stopped.

The absence of material on the economic and social circumstances which led to the painful changes and destruction of the "Westend" is the greatest gap in this book, which in its present form remains smooth and agreeably presented. What is written about the destruction, the downfall (Abgdnge)-- for the most part confined to the catalogue-- betrays nothing of the explosive power of this theme. Still the work was not undertaken in vain. We must extend thanks to the au- thors and to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for this book, since it demonstrates how very urgently and in what detail the cataloguing of those parts of the bourgeois, nineteenth- century city must be undertaken.

HANS-CRISTOPH HOFFMANN

Bremen Translated from the German by the Editor

John Woodforde, Bricks to Build a House, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1976, zo8 pp., 16 color pls., Iiz bl. & wh. illus. $o10.50.

This is the sort of book of which one tends to be wary. On one flap of its drab and ama- teurish dust jacket, its author is depicted as a radio critic for the Sunday Telegraph, his previous books including The Story of the Bicycle and The Strange Story of False Teeth. On the other flap is a notation that the book is a London Brick Publication. London Brick, it becomes evident in the text, manu- factures half of all clay bricks used in Britain, and is the largest single brickmaker in the world. Mr. Jeremy Rowe, a London Brick executive, suggested the idea of the book to its author. It seems probable from the amount of space and approbation bestowed upon London Brick in the text that the book origi- nated as a giveaway public-relations device for that firm. The book is, nevertheless, an attractive, enjoyable, thoroughly readable, richly informative volume for anyone who wishes to acquire a general historical back- ground in the manufacture and utilization of brick.

The book, much broader in scope than its title would indicate, is built loosely around a chronological history of brickmaking, with a justifiable emphasis on British experience. (The book is not strong in its treatment of American brickmaking, but here and there are sufficient passing references to give an adequate general impression of American

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