Edition: U.S. / Global

ART REVIEW; Japan's Love Affair With the Postcard Made the Medium the Message

Published: May 14, 2004

In perhaps the largest mail drop in art history, Leonard A. Lauder gave 20,000 postcards to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2002. ''Art of the Japanese Postcard'' displays 350 of them, dating from 1900 to 1940. Two things are striking about them other than their range, wit and beauty: how slyly self-referential many of them are and how many ways they find to be self-referential. But first, some history.

The curator of the exhibition, Anne Nishimura Morse, notes in the catalog that the first Japanese postcard, in 1873, came four years after the first postcard ever (issued by the Austro-Hungarian postal service). It was part of the emperor Meiji's attempt to modernize Japan. Until 1900 the Japanese government issued all postcards, then it loosened the reins. Artists, famous and unknown alike, began making New Year's postcards, advertising cards, cards to commemorate national events and cards announcing their own work. Early in the 20th century, the exhibition's wall text says, ''the postcard replaced the wood-block print as the primary graphic art form in Japan.''

Many of the earliest postcards are about the postal service itself. A few include a cameo photograph of a post office or of the minister of communications. One postcard shows a woman browsing through a postcard album. These cards are the equivalent of talking on the phone about talking on the phone. The medium was the message.

Other postcards refer to their own surface and the task of representing three dimensions in two. The cards that date from the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5), which were pictorial newsletters, are full of perspectival play. One shows a sailor diving, it seems, into the surface of the card toward a red sun beneath the surface. One shows horses, riders and their shadows from above. Another presents a ship sinking between the contour lines of a map. Of course Japanese art was famous for its floating, nongravitational compositions, but these postcards go even further.

There's also a long Japanese tradition of putting pictures and words together. The boom in postcards brought out the playfulness of that tradition. One postcard, a simple black, white and gray composition by Saito Shoshu, shows a snail leaving a slime trail of poetry by the haiku master Buson.

And most of the Japanese New Year's greetings cards are a mix of animals and numbers indicating the year being rung in. A card depicting a baseball-playing monkey under an indecipherable scoreboard signifies the year 1932.

Finally, many of these cards refer to the crosscultural exchange that they helped create. In the early 20th century, Japanese artists visited Europe to see what the West was up to. By this time they were able to borrow back some of their own traditions, traditions that had been lifted and altered by Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard and many others. Thus the exhibition provides a kind of art-historical hall of mirrors.

A postcard by Kajita Hanko from the series ''The Tale of Genji'' shows a trio of cats playing in front of a shoji screen. It seems to allude to Gauguin's painting of a trio of puppies. Another card, ''Plum Tree,'' has strong echoes of van Gogh in his Japanese mode.

The background of Fujishima Takeji's postcard ''Maiko and Hand Drum,'' from the series ''Beautiful Women and Music,'' is a dead ringer for the oak leaf patterns that Matisse made decades later.

''To Tomita Beach,'' an advertising postcard showing a swimmer on a diving board, seems to be a rendition of a famous Vogue swimwear ad. But then again the diagonal slice of the board is a Japanese touch. Which came first: the East or the West?

In Japan the yoga artists wanted to paint like Westerners while the nihonga artists tried to hold to some of their own ways while taking note of the Western ones. And they battled out their differences on postcards. Two Western styles in particular caught the attention of Japanese postcard artists, Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

In the case of Art Nouveau, it's probably because that movement had a lot to do with Japanese art already. The Japanese were just taking back what was rightfully theirs.

One of the show's surprises is the near absence of photography. It's not because purely photographic postcards didn't exist.

Mr. Lauder includes a few to go with his preface in the catalog. But in this exhibition photography takes a back seat. A few advertising cards include an inset, gilt-bordered photo of the store or tourist attraction that is being advertised. A postcard advertising Bayer Aspirin is based on a photograph of a Bayer billboard in Osaka.

Collecting postcards was a Japanese craze for some 30 years. In 1906 one newspaper reported that when the general post office ran out of a limited set, collectors ''stoned the office and smashed window panes'' and ''seven people fainted.'' Maybe you have trouble picturing a postcard riot? Never fear. There is a postcard, dated 1906, showing just that.

''Art of the Japanese Postcard: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection'' is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, (617) 267-9300, through June 6.

Photo: ''Snail and Poem by Buson,'' a postcard by Saito Shoshu. (Photo by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)