Friday, May 15, 2015

Japan Society: Life of Cats

One of the more lighthearted exhibits to be seen this season is that currently installed at the Gallery at the Japan Society.  Entitled Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection, it focuses on the representation of these ubiquitous felines in ukiyo-e works of the Edo Period.

It was through studying reproductions of ukiyo-e while still in high school that I acquired my first introduction to Japanese art.  The attraction these works held for me was their accessibility - they could be readily understood even by one who at the time possessed no real knowledge of Asian art.  Though the colored woodblock prints were not valued highly during the era in which they were created in Japan, where they were seen primarily as inexpensive graphic works to be kept in household albums, they had an enormous impact on nineteenth century European art history.  They were at the center of the movement known as Japonisme that influenced artists as diverse as Whistler and Manet.  In his painting La courtisane, Van Gogh went so far as to copy the work of the ukiyo-e artist Keisai Eisen.   Beyond such straightforward imitation, Van Gogh also began to heavily outline the figures in his paintings, a technique he was inspired to adopt from his study of the ukiyo-e works available to him.

The show at the Japan Society has been somewhat arbitrarily divided into five sections - Cats as People, Cats Transformed, Cats Versus People, Cats and People and Cats and Play.  Taken together, they offer a great deal of insight into Japanese society during the Edo Period.  Nowhere is this so evident as in the irreverent The Enlightenment of Daruma by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.  The artist, best known for his "Bloody Prints" such as The Lonely House on Adachi Moor (1885), was capable of traditional renderings of religious figures as can be seen in his 1887 portrait of Bodhidharma, founder of the Zen school of Buddhism.  But here he subverts the image of that same figure by showing him lounging lazily on the floor beside a cat and a sake-drinking Kwannon.  In fact, many of the works at this exhibit are parodies of famous stories with cats taking the place of the original human characters.  A good example would be Parody of Umegae Striking the Bell of Limitless [Hell] by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.  In many instances, the use of cats in place of humans in ukiyo-e works was an attempt to circumvent the stringent restrictions placed upon artists by the Tokugawa Shogunate's Tenpō Reforms issued between 1841 and 1843 that severely limited the types of subjects considered fit for depiction.

The Cats Versus People section focuses on the legend of the nekomata, the domesticated house cat that in old age grows two tails and becomes a form of evil spirit, or yōkai.  There are countless stories in Japanese folklore of these cat-spirits who terrorize the humans, including their former owners, with whom they come in contact.  One artwork at the exhibit, Utagawa Kuniyoshi's From the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road: Scene at Okazaki (1835), depicts a scene from a ghost story in which the vengeful spirit of a murdered woman emerges from a cat-shaped stone in order to frighten travelers along the Tōkaidō Road.  The series was probably intended to exploit the success enjoyed by Utagawa Hiroshige in his unrelated The 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō that had been published shortly before.

The Cats Transformed section is fascinating for the different ways in which that much wilder cat, the tiger, was shown in Japanese art.  Tigers were not native to Japan (neither, for that matter, were domesticated cats which had originally been imported from China by monks wishing to preserve sacred texts from the depredations of mice) and presented a challenge to those artists who wished to depict them faithfully.  I had already noted this last year when visiting The Flowering of Edo Period Painting at the Met Museum.  In my review of that exhibit, I wrote:
"The Japanese interest in the inhabitants other lands is also evident in a far more playful work, Tiger (c. 1630-1640) by Tawaraya Sōtatsu.  It only takes one look at the painting to realize the artist has never in his life seen a real tiger.  The creature depicted here, as cute and harmless as a kitten, is an unwitting caricature of the terrifying predator."
Most of examples shown at the current exhibit, including a representation of a leopard as a female tiger, were way off the mark.  But there were some notable exceptions, most particularly the utterly realistic silk scroll painting Majestic Seated Tiger (1895) by Kishi Chikudō.  

Of all the works shown at the Cats exhibit, the most beautiful was the oldest, a lightly colored eighteenth century print attributed to Isoda Koryūsai and entitled The Third Princess and Her Cat (c. 1770).  It was done in a long narrow format known as hashria-e ("pillar print") as it was meant to be displayed hanging from a pillar.  It depicts a famous episode from the Genji monogatari in which a playful cat lifts the curtain to reveal the Third Princess to a passing nobleman and thus unwittingly brings disaster upon the entire household.

The exhibit continues through June 7, 2015.

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