Kaii Higashiyama Art Album 1 Book "A trip to beautiful Japan" - 美しい日本への旅
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: **JAPANESE TEXT ONLY**
Few Japanese artists of the twentieth century achieved the spiritual luminosity and quiet grandeur of Higashiyama Kaii, whose landscape paintings became a defining expression of postwar Japanese identity. This beautifully assembled volume presents a curated collection of Kaii's most celebrated works, chronicling his lifelong journey through Japan's serene forests, tranquil shores, and mist-draped mountain paths, rendered in his distinctive style that bridges traditional Nihonga techniques with a deeply personal, contemplative vision. Each composition radiates a meditative stillness, inviting the viewer into landscapes that feel simultaneously real and transcendent, suffused with a gentle melancholy that speaks to the Japanese aesthetic ideal of *mono no aware* — the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Beyond their visual beauty, Kaii's works carry a profound cultural and philosophical weight, illustrating a post-atomic Japan reaching for peace and spiritual renewal through its connection with the natural world. His mastery of light and atmosphere — the way dawn mist softens a stand of birch trees or moonlight silvers a distant sea — places him in a lineage of great nature artists while remaining unmistakably, intimately his own. For collectors, scholars, and anyone captivated by the intersection of art and the human soul, this volume stands as an essential testament to one of Japan's most beloved National Treasures — leaving one to wonder what further depths of stillness his brush has yet to reveal.
Author: 東山魁夷
Format: Hardback
Published: 2008, Kodansha
Genre: Travel & exploration
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: **JAPANESE TEXT ONLY**
Few Japanese artists of the twentieth century achieved the spiritual luminosity and quiet grandeur of Higashiyama Kaii, whose landscape paintings became a defining expression of postwar Japanese identity. This beautifully assembled volume presents a curated collection of Kaii's most celebrated works, chronicling his lifelong journey through Japan's serene forests, tranquil shores, and mist-draped mountain paths, rendered in his distinctive style that bridges traditional Nihonga techniques with a deeply personal, contemplative vision. Each composition radiates a meditative stillness, inviting the viewer into landscapes that feel simultaneously real and transcendent, suffused with a gentle melancholy that speaks to the Japanese aesthetic ideal of *mono no aware* — the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Beyond their visual beauty, Kaii's works carry a profound cultural and philosophical weight, illustrating a post-atomic Japan reaching for peace and spiritual renewal through its connection with the natural world. His mastery of light and atmosphere — the way dawn mist softens a stand of birch trees or moonlight silvers a distant sea — places him in a lineage of great nature artists while remaining unmistakably, intimately his own. For collectors, scholars, and anyone captivated by the intersection of art and the human soul, this volume stands as an essential testament to one of Japan's most beloved National Treasures — leaving one to wonder what further depths of stillness his brush has yet to reveal.