The Met has been celebrating its Department of Asian Art's 100th Anniversary all through 2015 and into the current year. The Masterpieces of Chinese Painting exhibit I reviewed in December is part of that event as is the show I saw more recently, Celebrating the Arts of Japan, a selection of works from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection. Judging from the pieces on view, Ms. Burke was an exceptionally discriminating collector. Together with her husband, Jackson Burke, she began acquiring masterpieces of Japanese art in the 1960's. They began with ukiyo-e, the woodblock prints that are to Western eyes the most accessible forms of Japanese art. Upon her husband's death in 1975, Ms. Burke continued on alone until her own passing in 2012. The number of masterpieces contained in the Burke collection is astonishing. It's no wonder that it was the first Western collection ever to have been exhibited at the Tokyo National Museum.
After having seen so many great landscapes at the Chinese painting exhibit, it's not surprising that the works I was most drawn to here were of the same genre. In some cases it was easy to make a direct comparison. Take, for example, Landscape after Xia Gui, a Muromachi period work attributed to the Buddhist monk Tenshō Shūbun. I had only just seen Xia Gui's Mountain Market, Clearing Mist and been incredibly impressed with the painter's brushwork. In his own work, which consisted of two six-panel folding screens placed side by side, Shūbun (if he were indeed the artist) employed the same technique of using rough strokes in the foreground and then ink washes to make the background appear to dissolve in mist. He also made deliberate use of the "one corner" style but here moved the detailed foreground closer to the work's bottom center. The influence of the "one corner" style can also be seen in the much later Goose and Reeds; Willows and Moon, a six-panel folding screen by Edo period artist Maruyama Ōkyo. Here almost all the detail is at the bottom on the first three panels with the fowl strategically placed a bit higher on the fourth panel; the fifth and sixth panels are left completely blank.
The extensive use of massive folding screens is uniquely Japanese. While most Chinese works are done on a handscroll so that the landscape is slowly revealed to the observer as the scroll is unwound, the Japanese screens in contrast offer huge panoramas that deliberately overwhelm the viewer. These two totally different approaches to apprehending the same subject create in the mind vastly different impressions.
A similar difference in presentation could be seen in the juxtaposition of Sakai Ōho's 1839 Six Jewel Rivers (Mu-Tamagawa), a small format handscroll, with Utagawa Hiroshige's 1857 Six Tamagawa Rivers from Various Provinces (Shokoku Mu Tamagawa), a series of six polychrome woodblock prints. As the museum's website notes of Hiroshige's work, "the groupings and postures of the figures in each of the prints nearly exactly echoes those found in a set of handscrolls by Sakai Ōho." But though the subjects and their arrangement are nearly identical, one experiences completely different emotions when viewing the two artists' paintings.
My favorite works were those that showed the Japanese pursing their characteristic love of beauty. As anyone who has traveled through Asia knows, aesthetic appreciation in the East can be expressed in forms completely unfamiliar to Westerners, as in the gold leaf painted folding screen Women on a Bridge Tossing Fans into a River that shows elegantly appareled court ladies standing on a low bridge and talking among themselves as they watch the current carry their painted fans away. Or in Zhou Maoshu Admiring Lotuses, a hanging scroll by Kaihō Yūsetsu portraying the Chinese philosopher bending over the edge of a small boat to better see the lotuses floating on the lake's surface. In the same manner, the Japanese love of music is expressed in highly stylized form in the mystical representation of Jizō Bosatsu Playing a Flute, a hanging scroll from the Edo period painted by Kanō Tan'yū that depicts the bodhisattva standing on a cloud with the moon behind him as he plays his phoenix-headed flute.
Though not announced as such on the museum's website, this is a two part exhibit. The first rotation runs through the early part of 2016 (contact the museum for an exact date) while the second rotation continues through January 22, 2017.
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