Old Taoist

Rooting around in a Kyoto antique shop, Stephen Addiss came across a fine example of literati painting by a hand he didn't recognize. Little did he know then that he had discovered an artist he now calls the last of Japan's great literati, Fukuda Kodojin. Kodojin, who styled himself "Old Taoist," should have gone the way of other effete scholars with Japan's radical 19th-century modernization. Instead he wandered in the boundless realms of the three treasures--painting, poetry, and calligraphy--until his death in 1944. Addiss discovered the genuine article, a scholar of cultured sensibility who had mastered the ancient Chinese arts and expressed them with a style all his own. Addiss introduces us to that style through dozens of examples of Kodojin's painting and calligraphy, and over 250 poems. To translate the Chinese poetry, he recruited Jonathan Chaves, who shows the scholar's work to be elegant and wistful, echoing themes of Confucianism and Taoism. Kodojin's work transports us back to a time when art was a way of communicating among friends and not cheapened by exchanges of money. Old Taoist reminds us that even in a modern world, the pursuit of beauty and genuineness are not only possible but necessary. --Brian Bruya