Ana and Paul stroll through Indian art. The Hindu painting - women twisting and writhing and riding on each other, reaching higher and higher - is more authoritative than suggestive. They talk about nothing - what they’re seeing, what they like and dislike seeing, what they did at work, what the weekend holds - becoming more than friends without saying so.
They pass through a door and move into a smaller space, half a continent away. To Japan. Edo Period prints. A docent is talking to a group of fidgety high schoolers:
"A circle has 360 degrees. Walk around an object - there you go, 360. Now if you were going to depict that object, draw it or paint it, or even take a picture of it, how would you do it? Press the button? Ha, ok, yeah. I mean, where would you place yourself in relation to the object? Where would you stand? Would you find the most picturesque spot? That would probably work, right? You'd be faithful to the object in the sense that you'd be showing it in the way most people are accustomed to seeing it.
But what about people accustomed to seeing it from the other side? And when the object is something really big - like a mountain, there isn't just the other side, there are many other sides. The problem becomes how many people? How many views?
Katsushika Hokusai decided on 36. One for every ten degrees, even though he didn't walk the degrees off using a protractor. Here are a few of them. Look at the differences in perspective - and distances. In some, Fujisan is in the foreground, the central charater, so to speak. In others, it’s background, a more liminal character.
Now we'll go upstairs and see how Claude Monet approached the same perceptional problem."
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