The Delicate Thread: Teshigahara's Life in Art

by Dore Ashton

Painter, filmmaker, potter, calligrapher, ikebana master, designer, and impresario--Teshigahara is an artist in the fullest sense of the word. In Dore Ashton's sparkling account of Teshigahara's life and work, the artist shines as a seminal figure who has vaulted boundaries between the arts in a quest for new ways to express creativity. No discussion of postwar Japanese visual or cinematic arts can be complete without him. It was perhaps inevitable that Teshigahara's life in art would be a quest for between past and present, inherited and avant-garde forms, Japanese tradition and Western innovation. As the son of the multi-talented artist and ikebana master Sofu, Teshigahara grew up with an acute consciousness of Japanese art history. Yet he reached maturity in the wake of World War II, and his artistic consciousness was forged in that crucible of intellectual and artistic energies where, with young talents like Kobo Abe and Segi Shinichi, he sought to rebuild a Japanese identity from the ashes of defeat. His first medium was film--one of the few artistic domains unexplored by his father. The young Teshigahara established his name with documentaries, historical dramas, and adaptations of Abe's novels, most notably The Woman in the Dunes. During the 1960s he was the driving force behind Tokyo's alternative performance center, Sogetsu Hall. In the 1970s he broke new ground again, establishing a pottery at Echizen, only to succeed to the head of the Sofu ikebana school upon his father's death. With typical exuberance, Teshigahara has extended ikebana art to embrace bamboo and create applications for set design and installation. Meanwhile he continues his forays into other media. Drawing on extensive firsthand and published sources, Dore Ashton traces the eclectic influences on Teshigahara. She clearly sets off the dynamic tensions at play in Teshigahara's work, and pays particular attention to his contemporarie--essential given the artist's collaborative spirit. The Delicate Thread is a fitting tribute to an exceptional artistic personality and a fine biography in its own right.

Genres: Film

208 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Dore Ashton (1928, – January 30, 2017) was a writer, professor and critic of modern and contemporary art. She was the author or editor of more than thirty books on art.

Reviews

[Dylan Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://archive.org/details/delicatet...

Elucidates a lot about Teshigahara's role in the Sogetsu Arts Center and his life and career as an itinerant of the arts. Especially interesting to learn more about his unwavering support for the avant-garde community and his creative philosophies in mediums beyond cinema.

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very nicely presented, printed on high-quality paper and featuring plenty of photos of Teshigahara's art, some of which are full-page in glossy colour.

Ashton writes from an art history/art theory perspective, making this book a bit academic for my taste. I would have preferred more material about Teshigahara's life, and especially about the making of his films, as my interest in him is mainly as a result of Woman in the Dunes, Pitfall and The Face of Another. The first two are covered to some extent, but the last is virtually dismissed, while equal weight is given to the many other art forms in which Teshigahara engaged.

The text is well-written and fairly interesting; for the most part, it avoids the pretentiousness common in such books, and Ashton is good at putting Teshigahara's work into context, but sometimes strays from the subject matter a little too much.