ERNEST FENOLLOSA (c. 1890s): "The mere representation of an external fact, the mechanical copying of nature, has nothing whatever to do with art. This proposition is asserted by all Oriental critics and is fundamental canon with all Japanese painters....
...Lines and shades, and colors may have an harmonic charm of their own, a beauty and infinity of pure visual idea, as absolute as the sound idea in music. The artisitc element in form is ... the pure simple music of a form idea... the fact that such a line organism may represent natural fact does not interfere with its purely aesthetic relation as a line.... Now such line ideas, apart from what they represent, ... are exactly what the Japanese conceive to be the basis of all their art."
