In
the article titled “Towards a Standard of Beauty” Soetsu Yanagi describes his
early goals of creating a private collection of the simple folk pots that he,
along with Shoji Hamada found extremely beautiful and important to a larger
tradition. Yanagi started out with a small collection of his own, and after
being shut down by a Tokyo museum, decided that he wanted to grow his collection
of “folkcrafts” within his own museum. Yanagi and Hamada decided that in their
collection, they would only include the good.
The
Japan Folkcraft Museum, as they named it, included “the arts of the people,
returned to the people”, and the majority of the work inside the museum
represented examples of the country craft of the Japanese people as a whole.
The goal of the museum was to show people the beauty of everyday crafts made by
everyday people. Yanagi describes the differences and similarities between “the
individual craftsman and the folk craftsman”, as well as between “handwork and
machine work”. Although he does not write off machine-work completely (he does
recognize its merits), he goes on to say “…it seems to me that there is
something so basic, so natural in the hand that the urge to utilize its power
will always make itself felt.”
The
description of the museum, essentially his own home, is what I find to be the
most important, and informing part of the entire piece. To me, it exemplifies exactly
what Yanagi and Hamada find so beautiful about folk crafts; the ideas of simplicity,
directness, and usefulness. Of the structure he says, “It was an old long
gatehouse, built party of stone, and brought in piecemeal from Hamada’s
countryside. The main museum building was built to harmonize with it, to the
derision of many moderns. We did not employ foreign architecture. A quiet white
light penetrated into the interior through Japanese paper windows.” In many
ways, it is easy to imagine Yanagi describing the aesthetics of any simple folk
pot in the same matter.
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