Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo (近藤 麻理恵, Kondō Marie) is a Japanese organizing consultant and author. She has written four books on organizing, which have sold more than two million copies altogether and have been translated from Japanese into languages including Korean, Chinese, French, German, and English. In particular, her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) has been published in more than 30 countries. It was a best seller in Japan and in Europe, and was published in the United States in 2014.

She was listed as one of Time's "100 most influential people" in 2015.

Background

Kondo has said that she was interested in organizing since childhood. In junior school, she ran into the classroom to tidy up bookshelves while her classmates were playing in physical education class. Whenever there was nomination for class roles, she did not seek to be the class representative or the pet feeder. Instead, she yearned to be the bookshelf manager to continue to tidy up books. She says she experienced a breakthrough in organizing one day, "I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realized my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying."

Marie

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Tidying Up

Tidying Up is an oil painting by American artist Isabel Bishop. It is currently in the permanent collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Description

Tidying Up depicts a young contemporary (1930s or 1940s) working woman in an unguarded moment of checking herself in her hand mirror.

Bishop's work generally focuses on young women caught during the idle moments away from their jobs. Her active brushwork served to reflect the upward social mobility experienced by working women of this period, while her color palette recalls works of the Italian Renaissance. Bishop's subject matter is quickly rendered, and lines are expressive and dynamic. Her quick brushstroke evokes the everyday activity and animation of the modern city.

Historical information

Educated at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, Bishop was part of the loosely organized Fourteenth Street School, who were influenced by the realism of the Ashcan School. They painted scenes of daily life that concentrated on middle and lower-class peoples. Bishop focused on female subjects, usually in work settings. She spend more than ten years painting the secretaries, sales clerks, and blue-collar workers who lived or worked in and around Union Square. Her favorite subject was women going about their everyday lives, eating, talking, putting on makeup, taking off their coats. These ordinary motions produced facial expressions that Bishop felt revealed the personality of the people she portrayed.

Japanese art

Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture, ink painting and calligraphy on silk and paper, ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints, kiri-e, kirigami, origami, and more recently manga—modern Japanese cartooning and comics—along with a myriad of other types of works of art. It has a long history, ranging from the beginnings of human habitation in Japan, sometime in the 10th millennium BC, to the present.

Historically, Japan has been subject to sudden invasions of new and alien ideas followed by long periods of minimal contact with the outside world. Over time the Japanese developed the ability to absorb, imitate, and finally assimilate those elements of foreign culture that complemented their aesthetic preferences. The earliest complex art in Japan was produced in the 7th and 8th centuries in connection with Buddhism. In the 9th century, as the Japanese began to turn away from China and develop indigenous forms of expression, the secular arts became increasingly important; until the late 15th century, both religious and secular arts flourished. After the Ōnin War (1467–1477), Japan entered a period of political, social, and economic disruption that lasted for over a century. In the state that emerged under the leadership of the Tokugawa shogunate, organized religion played a much less important role in people's lives, and the arts that survived were primarily secular.