Greetings from Japan

Would the Japanese postcards now on view in the Torf Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts be there if they hadn't come with a famous name attached?

The MFA is big on celebrities: Their collections, their portraits, and artists who are themselves celebrities account for a big share of the museum's programming.

The name that goes with the postcards is Leonard A. Lauder. An heir to the cosmetics fortune and the high-profile chairman of the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Lauder has also been, since childhood, a collector of the postcards that became all the rage in Japan after the government issued the first examples in 1873.

He has given nearly 20,000 of them to the MFA. The announcement of their exhibition caused some wary museum-watchers to cringe. Were we talking about a boy's collection of baseball cards or stamps? Was this going to be another in the string of recent museum-lite shows - motorcycles at the Guggenheim, fashion retrospectives everywhere, or the MFA's pictures of celebrities by the celebrity photographer Herb Ritts, an exhibition underwritten by celebrity designer Donna Karan?

No, it turns out. The Japanese postcard show is museum-worthy, with or without Lauder's name attached. Purists might argue that these little gems are not high art, but purists are losing ground these days as all sorts of media are being added to the list of what art museums are showing. In fact, ``old-fashioned'' museums that have always combined ``fine'' art with historical artifacts now seem quite forward-thinking in their lack of hierarchy - the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem being a case in point.

Besides creating a visually fascinating record of an era when Japan was trying to figure out its relationship to the West, the ``Art of the Japanese Postcard'' exhibition of some 350 examples from the Lauder collection complements the museum's extensive holdings in Japanese art (including the 20th-century graphic works in the current ``Japanese Design in Transition: 1900-1940'').

The very idea of the postcard - sending an image and greeting to someone in another place - symbolizes the porosity of Japanese society in the late 19th century. The postcard was invented by the Austro-Hungarian government in 1869; it took the Japanese Ministry of Communications only four years to start producing its own examples. When the ministry authorized private groups to produce them in 1900, artists and the public celebrated with an outpouring of creativity. Collections were formed; magazines were devoted to the subject. The most aesthetically dramatic postcards have the allure of other diminutive art forms - Indian miniatures and Faberge eggs among them - without their preciousness.

Some early postcards were stiffly official promotions of various achievements - modernizations including trains, telephones, and airplanes. From the beginning, though, most of the compositions showed extraordinary flair and invention. In one example, a running figure who looks like a Japanese version of Mercury is half-covered by the large red ``T'' that became the official logo of the postal service in 1887. The ``T'' reads as the might of empire protecting its emissaries.

The show is arranged thematically. Some works in the humor section won't strike Westerners as particularly funny; others, including Komeno Hakusui's ``New Techniques for a Beautiful Moustache,'' are delightfully silly, with the blond handlebar of the sleeping Westerner being lifted by a couple of helium balloons.

Postcards used as advertising are especially eye-catching, and innovative to the point where the tantalizing image doesn't necessarily tell you what's being promoted - a very contemporary tactic in the West. One lovely image of a woman in a bathing suit sitting on a diving board and gazing into an endless blue sea turns out to be an ad for a beach.

Postcards celebrating Japan's military might in the early 20th century are more somber and legible. Yet as propaganda goes, these little works from the era of the Russo-Japanese War aren't hysterically aggressive: The first thing you notice about ``Map of the World Centered on Japan with Eagle and National Flag'' and ``Advancing Soldiers Viewed From Above'' is their brilliant compositions, not their bellicose messages.

In the section devoted to postcards by highly regarded ``fine'' artists is Maruyama Banka's ``Lotus Pond,'' a drizzly, celadon-colored view reminiscent of Monet's water lilies but actually inspired by the English watercolorist John Varley.

Also in this section are six examples from Nakazawa Hiromitsu's series of ``Beautiful Women'' and ``The Senses.'' They represent smelling, tasting, sleeping, and other ordinary activities, each personified by a woman playing the same role that a Greek goddess or Christian saint might do in Western art.

The most fascinating connection to the West, however, is the borrowing of European styles that are wedded to Japanese subjects. Art Nouveau and Art Deco were particularly popular. (The exchange worked both ways: The sinuous lines of Japanese art had been a big influence on the development of Art Nouveau in Europe.) Kajita Hanko's postcard called ``Student'' is a perfect East-West synthesis: A young woman wearing a yellow and red kimono and holding a cherry blossom is shown in profile against an aquatic green and blue background of Art Nouveau's signature whiplash curves. The two parts of this image are both dominated by patterning.

The rise of the Japanese postcard coincided with the very moment when the most avant-garde artists in Paris, then the most artistically avant-garde city on earth, were borrowing heavily from Japan. Late-19th-century French artists fell in love with Japanese woodcuts, with their flat, clear drawing that allowed unexpected jigsaw-puzzle compositions. Look at many a Mary Cassatt and you'll sense the almost overpowering presence of Japanese prints.

But by Cassatt's time, these woodblock prints were already somewhat outdated - replaced by the proliferation of postcards.