At the start of his collecting, Kitaev was under the spell of Hokusai. “I was enamored with him more than anybody else… Later I found other artists who were more refined and elegant, and some of them no less powerful.” Revealing in this excerpt is not his fascination with Hokusai, but Kitaev’s ability to admit that there were other artists, perhaps less famous, but more refined and no less powerful: “The works of Hokkei [1780–1850] and Hokuba [1771–1844] I also like very much – there is power and harmony in them.” In the same letter, Kitaev muses on the calligraphic nature of Japanese painting:
And because of this the imagination of the Japanese is incomparably sharper than European; it often allows but a mere hint, whereas ours demands the full elaboration. The consequences of this are manifold. For us, an artist creates volume by shading, whereas, for a Japanese, a sharp outline of familiar objects would be enough. We demand perspective (albeit conventional…), and in the Japanese imagination almost all perspective draws by its own facilities: if it is necessary for a hawk to fly over a forest, an artist will draw a few upper tree branches; if the hawk sits on the ground, the artist gives its exact position on the ground and a hint of this ground at the side; sometimes the artist just indicates somewhere at the top a cliff and it is enough – the imagination of the Japanese viewer will find [the hawk] below on the ground[218].
Kitaev also provides enthusiastic insight into the Japanese aesthetic of displaying paintings:
In the books on Jap[anese] painting I did not find advice on their characteristic habit which is not to turn (as we do) numerous paintings into elements of interior decoration (which become much too familiar and no longer attract attention) by hanging them permanently on the walls. They change their paintings every day and savor the freshness of perception! Isn’t it the case with literature, when it remains more fresh from the distance of time, you always discover in a talented piece new charms that escaped your attention in previous readings. So they applied this method of rereading pictures again and again. You should also add to this the calligraphic nature of their painting, and the aesthetic, visual rereading will appear in all its entirety and total freshness[219].
Kitaev is talking not only about psychological aspects of visual perception but is also drawing together the Japanese way of conceiving imagery through a combination of the visual and verbal. In this subtle perception possibly lies one of the predilections of Kitaev as collector: surimono, with their symbiosis of word and picture.
It is important to stress here that, despite all the love that Kitaev felt toward ukiyo-e prints (these confessions are lavishly scattered throughout his letters), his most serious interest was painting. In a very engaging way he describes scrolls and screens that he bought or could not buy because of price or availability. Kitaev wrote that painting represents Japanese art best of all and called exhibitions of his collection “exhibitions of painting.” In this respect, he resembles the first American nineteenth-century connoisseurs of Japanese art, Henry Bowie (1848–1921) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who, while admiring Japanese classical art, were rather lukewarm about prints. (Fenollosa later changed his mind, possibly because of the art market and job opportunities.) Kitaev mentioned Fenollosa and his collection in two letters.
Sergei Kitaev’s dream “Encyclopedia” never became the scholarly catalogue nor his collection the touchstone for future connoisseurs that he envisioned.
Exhibitions
In a letter written in December 1916 to Vasily V. Gorshanov, a member of the Society of Friends of the Rumyantsev Museum, Kitaev gives a short appraisal of his collection:
Since the time [I formed my collection], a whole series of books on Japanese art has been published. I have them now, and thus I can more clearly understand the colossal material I collected. Besides that, I canvassed all Europe, excluding only Spain, Portugal and the Balkan Peninsula, studying museum and private collections. In 1910, in London, I saw the exhibition “The Treasures of Old Art of Japan” (I have its illustrated catalogue), which was temporarily brought from Japan by the special order of the Mikado on the occasion of the Japan-British Exhibition[220]. It occurred only once in the whole of Japanese history, and the reason was to show it to the British king, the nobility, the members of the British-Japanese Society, and also Franco-Japanese Society, specially invited from Paris. It was not shown to the general public. I saw it as a member of the Franco-Japanese Society, in the club’s building, methodically, part by part, during three days, and this was a lucky opportunity to compare my kakemono [hanging scrolls] with those exhibited there. Based on the aforementioned, I was convinced that my collection occupies the second place in Europe, both in quality and quantity. The first would remain forever the collection of the engraver Chiossone, who bequeathed it to the Academy of Arts in Genoa[221].
Kitaev visited the largest museums in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, London and elsewhere, meeting with their curators. “Hokusai,” Kitaev observes in a letter to Pavlinov, “is represented more fully [in my collection] than even in Chiossone’s. He reiterates this claim in several other places in the letter: “Hokusai is just an amazing spontaneous force. You will see this when you look on those thousands that I have… This edition [of Manga] is in fifteen books; I have it in the most rare excellent first printing. Likewise, I have the famous One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji in three volumes in the first edition[222].” In the Brief List, he gives the following numbers: Hokusai color prints – 3 large and 337 medium size; black-and-white – 1666 large and 394 medium. Besides those he adds 80 large and exactly 1000 medium-sized color prints in late editions.
In October 1896, Kitaev proposed an exhibition of his collection to the
