Japanese Screens

Japanese Screens Through a Break in the Clouds

Under the direction of Anne-Marie Christin Edited by Claire-Akiko Brisset and Torahiko Terada

Contents

9 Foreword Claire-Akiko Brisset and Torahiko Terada

II.

The Eighth to Sixteenth Centuries: Screens for Palaces and Temples

11 Preface

Through a Break in the Clouds

Anne-Marie Christin

47 Earliest Emergences Geneviève Lacambre 79 Folding Screen with Bird Feathers Forming

I.

Form and Function of the Screen 35 Functions of the Screen Anne-Marie Christin 39 The Japanese Screen:

A Vertical Universe Torahiko Terada

Characters in Tensho Script Pascal Griolet

81 Poetry and Screen in the Classical Period Pascal Griolet 89 Bound Fan Papers with the Lotus Sutra Pascal Griolet

92 Landscape with Sun and Moon Toshinobu Yasumura

99 The Encounter with the Distant West Yoshiya Ishida 108 The Cypress Trees Screen Pascal Griolet

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III.

The Edo Period: Aristocratic Splendor and Bourgeois Appropriation 115 The Edo Period (1603–1867) Geneviève Lacambre 140 Western Kings on Horseback Yoshiya Ishida

145 Scene from the “Gatehouse” Chapter from the Tale of Genji Anne-Marie Christin

191 The Beauty in the Folds of a Fan Fujiko Abe 201 Screens Adorned with Fans

Floating in the Current Makoto Yasuhara

205 Fan-Book Screens Makoto Yasuhara 211 Pasted-Paper Screens Marianne Simon-Oikawa

148 The Summer Battle of Osaka Castle

215 Prints for Pasting Marianne Simon-Oikawa

153 Famous Scenes of Edo:

216 Abe no Yasuna and Shinoda Kuzu no ha

Geneviève Lacambre

Screen Space and Cartographic Space Masato Naitō

160 The Hikone Screen

Jacqueline Pigeot

165 The Tale of Genji Screens: Various Episodes Anne-Marie Christin

170 Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maples with Poem Slips Anne-Marie Christin and Michel Vieillard-Baron

175 The Battle of Ichi no Tani Anne-Marie Christin

178 Irises at Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges) Screens Jacqueline Pigeot

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183 “Whose Sleeves?” Screens Yoshiya Ishida

Marianne Simon-Oikawa

Epilogue: The Modern Screen 244 In the Era of Japonisme

and the Twentieth Century Geneviève Lacambre

263 Tsuguharu (Léonard) Foujita

and the Aesthetic of the Screen Yōko Hayashi-Hibino

267 Saeki Yūzō and the Letters

on the Door

Yasuo Kobayashi

219 Behind the Screen

Marianne Simon-Oikawa

223 Play of Folds, Play of Gazes Marianne Simon-Oikawa 226 White Cat Hissing at Its Reflection Marianne Simon-Oikawa

APPENDIX 272 Notes

228 In the Folds of the Illustrated Book Marianne Simon-Oikawa

274 Bibliography

230 The Phoenix Screen

276 Chronology

Toshinobu Yasumura

235 Books, Scrolls, and Screens:

279 Index of Names

The Demons of Kawanabe Kyōsai Shigeru Oikawa

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Preface

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Foreword The autumn wind rushes in through the break in the clouds —Mizuta Masahide, in Conversations with Kyorai (1704)

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2 Anonymous Fans upon Waves, mid-17th century Single six-panel screen, detail Ink, colors, and gold leaf on paper, 40¼ × 113¼ in. (102.1 × 287.8 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

nne-Marie Christin was a professor at the Université Paris 7 Denis-Diderot (today the University of Paris) and founder of the Centre d’Étude de l’Écriture et de l’Image (CEEI). She long studied the relationships between text and image and desired to devote a large-scale work to the topic of Japanese screens. For this venture, she engaged French and Japanese contributors of diverse backgrounds.

She worked on this project for a number of years before her premature death in 2014. Thus, the manuscript had already achieved a certain degree of completion without being wholly finalized. The imagery to be used was yet to be decided upon and assembled at her passing. Faced with an incomplete program, we were led to make a number of editorial decisions to fill in certain gaps in the manuscript. We also decided to restructure the entirety of the text in accordance with the expectations of the publisher while remaining as faithful as possible to the spirit of Christin’s work.

The basic principle of this book—and what makes it unique in the editorial landscape—is elucidated in the preface, in which she develops a cultural and comparative approach to “oblique space” in contrast to the European tradition of trompe-l’oeil, which unfolds upon a surface that is most frequently two-dimensional and continuous.

Long before the Baroque “fold” dear to Gilles Deleuze, the Japanese screen was indeed meant to be used folded rather than flat. Thus, it constitutes a space that is fundamentally three-dimensional and all the more so in that, according to practice, it is often split, with the two elements of the pair being physically separated. The principles of the fold and of discontinuity, which would have been taken into account by the painter, allowed the viewer to see different images emerging, depending on the position

that he or she occupied with regard to the support; thus, the observer could play endlessly with the “hidden/shown”—or better “hidden/ revealed”—aspect of this expressive form, to use the terms proposed by Christin. By its very nature, the screen offers itself to the viewer according to a visual path that the artist has integrated in advance into the overall composition. It draws “its necessity not only from what it denotes by its frontal view but also from the oblique emergence of its motifs.” Hence, in the perception of the image, the observer plays a role that becomes all the more active as changes in position alter what is perceived. The viewer is at the center of the plastic arrangement and vivifies it through mobility.

This reflection constitutes a common thread that Christin suggested to the various contributors of this work; it is a thread to which they, one by one, responded with surprising unity.

We have attempted as much as possible to give this book the form and content that Christin envisioned, and we are deeply grateful to Citadelles & Mazenod publishers for making this possible.

—Claire-Akiko Brisset and Torahiko Terada N.B.: A pair of screens consists of a right-hand and a left-hand screen, with the former representing the point of departure for viewing them. The composition of the whole always takes account of this spatial arrangement. In this volume, the pairs of screens reproduced in a double-page spread are positioned in accordance with the organization prevalent in Japan and not with the reading order normal in the West, where texts are read from left to right. When pairs are reproduced on a single page, the righthand screen is positioned above the left-hand one; where they are reproduced on successive pages, the right-hand one comes first.

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Preface

Through a Break in the Clouds annE-mariE christin

I 3 Tawar aya Sōtatsu (active 1600–1643) (painting) and Kar asumaru Mitsuhiro (1579–1638) (calligraphy) Scene from the “Gatehouse” (Sekiya) Chapter from the Tale of Genji, early 17th century Single six-panel screen Ink and colors on gold-leafed paper, 37⅝ × 107½ in.

(95.5 × 273 cm) Tokyo National Museum

n the fall of 2008, the Tokyo National Museum shared with the world the exhibition titled Treasures by Rinpa Masters—Inheritance and Innovation. One of those masterpieces was a screen by Tawaraya Sōtatsu,1 a Japanese painter of the early seventeenth century (plate 3).

Its composition possesses an impressive simplicity. Within a vast space covered with gold leaf that occupies more than half its surface waits the square, sightly truncated mass of a coach with massive black wheels that is stopped and unhitched. All of its curtains are lowered, and it is surrounded by the silhouettes of small figures, almost all of whom are seated and clad in white with tall black hats. At the edge of the group stands a servant keeping watch. This group is unsettling in the same enigmatic way, and with the same charm, as could be found in a painting by surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. However, this screen was not conceived as a single composition: it is divided into six leaves, and it is only through the joining of all these leaves that the existence of an actual place comes to light.

Incidentally—and contrasting our Western exemplar de Chirico—nothing here casts a shadow. Another notable difference from Western aesthetics is that the scene is complemented by an inscribed text near the left corner of each panel; yet it is one that also doesn’t fit the Western paradigm of, say, the painted phrases found in portrayals of the Annunciation in the Italian Renaissance. The calligraphic text is not directly associated with any of the depicted figures; it simply floats in the air while mirroring the semicircular structure formed by the seated group.

An exhibition label provided a summary of the anecdote illustrated on the screen for those unfamiliar with the story. It was taken from an episode in chapter sixteen of the Tale of Genji: “The Gatehouse” (Sekiya). In this episode, while on a journey, the prince’s train fortuitously encounters

a coach, by which is seated a lady with whom the prince was formerly in love. The dramatic moment of this encounter is neither depicted nor even suggested by the image. The protagonists are invisible. Perhaps it is in this aspect that the similarity between the vision realized by Sōtatsu, on a screen, and by de Chirico, as a painting, is best understood. For both, the value of an image does not have to do with its faithfulness with regard to an external narrative, which can only serve as a pretext, but solely with the emotion that the viewer experiences before it and which is transposed from other sources—literary for Sōtatsu and oneiric for de Chirico. Such value endows this image with a form of higher coherence that renders it mysteriously readable.2 The exhibition held other surprises for Western viewers. The choice made by Tawaraya Sōtatsu and later Ogata Kōrin3 of the screen as a pictorial support was indeed part of a context wholly foreign to them. It rested largely upon a desire to break with the Chinese tradition that had established the scroll, vertical or horizontal, as the preeminent form for painting. This tradition had been taken up and enriched in Japan, where the narrative scroll was used for a number of masterpieces. Sōtatsu himself had exploited its linear rhythm in creating the spectacle of a flight of cranes traversing a space of over forty feet accompanied by a succession of poems by the great authors of classical Japanese poetry, inscribed

by Hon’ami Kōetsu (plate 4). The choice of the screen aimed to highlight what was unique to Japanese culture and inspiration—termed yamato-e, combining an ancient name for Japan and the word for picture or painting—as a style that had begun in the tenth century, that is during the Heian Period (794–1192). The structure specific to screens, articulated in an ordered succession of oblique surfaces and which had to wait another

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three centuries to attain its fully realized form, was itself one of the products of this era.4 This is why other objects of daily life—fans, boxes, and kimono fabrics, whose decoration was also visibly imbued with literary reminiscences familiar to the Japanese—were also tied in with the screens for the exhibition. These objects, somewhat surprisingly, were highlighted in the museum’s display cases with as much care and attention as the screens themselves.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. First of all, it should be clear that the parallels between Japanese and European art should not be limited only to the prints of the ukiyo-e masters disseminated in Europe during the nineteenth century and to their influence upon European painting. A form of out-of-phase proximity, of a modernity that was both actual and illusory—since it proceeded neither from the same history of pictorial techniques nor from the same aesthetic ideal—animated the art of the two cultures in a way that was both parallel and interdependent. It is, nevertheless, still necessary to understand of what exactly this enigmatic proximity consisted of and how screen painting was involved.

Prior attempts to answer these questions have led to explanations that are either partial or contradictory. The anthology assembled by Geneviève Lacambre in the catalogue for the exhibition Le Japonisme (1988) bears witness to this.5 Second, it is noticeable that what chiefly impressed Western artists upon discovering Japanese prints was not so much the differences that separated these images from those they had created—and even less 4 Tawar aya Sōtatsu their exoticism—but rather that they made this discovery at the precise (active 1600–1643) (painting) moment when such prints could help them resolve their most pressing and Hon’ami KōEtsu problems. In France, the 1860s were the years when landscape painting, (1558–1637) (calligraphy) which had shaken the academic hierarchy of genres twenty years earlier, Anthology with Crane Design, turned toward pleinairism (open-air painting). “Our landscape artists early 17th century are animals that are far too herbivorous,” noted Charles Baudelaire bitHandscroll, detail Ink, gold, and silver on paper, terly in 1859.6 To the newfound ambition which aspired to be “natural” 13⅜ in. × 44 ft. 6 in. but labored to find adequate means to express it, Japanese prints offered (34 × 1,356 cm) (complete length) solutions that were at once relevant and innovative. As Louis Gonse sumKyoto National Museum marized in 1898, Japan had “given . . . the practice of clear tones, the taste for simplification, and the boldness for certain innovative truncations in the structural arrangement of paintings.”7 These images offered a great deal more: they made certain of the most fundamental facets of Japanese art immediately accessible to their European counterparts. This is what made their revelation so overwhelming for a painter like Théodore Rousseau; from 1862, he had been so gripped by a desire to make these

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However, it was not only necessary to avoid making a “picture”; it was also necessary to think in terms of a screen. This is the sense one gets of Bonnard’s third attempt: the Nannies’ Promenade, Frieze of Carriages, a four-leaf screen, executed in tempera on canvas and also painted in 1894 (plate 9). The solution chosen by Bonnard was to give the connections between the leaves a strategic importance within the composition itself—he resorted to procedures he had seen frequently utilized by the Japanese. The first is seen in the frieze of carriages at the top of the screen, a seemingly secondary motif that has a curious effect on account of its repetition, making it somewhat reminiscent of certain Honoré Daumier lithographs.16 In reality, however, it refers to a similar theme in Japanese iconography—that of the riding stable (plate 10). The frieze’s major role here is to allow the artist to maintain the optical continuity of the screen in the horizontal alignment of the carriages despite the folding of the leaves, and thus to connect compositional elements divided into two subgroups: the group of nannies in the background at the left and the young woman with her children and dog in the foreground at the right. The frieze introduces one group and the other at that same time that it serves as a frame for both. Finally, through an illusionistic effect initiated by Hasegawa Tōhaku and his disciples—who embarked upon the break between the Japanese aesthetic and the Chinese tradition in the sixteenth century—the frieze suggests the physical presence of the carriages due to the folds of the screen in which they seem to be embodied.

The second procedure employed by Bonnard consists in conjoining the panels two by two through various contrivances: the identical

10 Kanō school Stable, 16th century Single six-panel screen Ink, colors, and gold on paper, 60½ × 141½ in. (153.7 × 358.2 cm) Honolulu Academy of Arts

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Functions of the Screen annE-mariE christin

S 21 a

Anonymous Screens within Screens, 18th century Pair of six-panel screens, right-hand screen, whole and detail Ink, colors, and gold on gilt paper, 67 in. × 12 ft. 4 in. (170 × 376 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

imilar to the evolution of Japanese writing, the Japanese screen originated in China but later developed a complexity and autonomy that were Japan’s own. Two types of screens came from China: simple portable single-panel screens with wooden bracket feet (called tsuitate in Japanese) and folding screens with conjoined multiple panels—ranging from two to six, and at times were as many as eight. The Japanese term for these screens—byōbu—is derived from Chinese and means “barrier against the wind.” The screen was attested in China during the Han Dynasty (206 bcE–220 cE) and imported to Japan during the eighth century.1 The primary function of such screens was to introduce a partition of space, whether natural or architectural, to define temporary areas of various arrangements with differing degrees of significance (plates 21a-b). This separation was material, social, and symbolic. Placed behind the imperial throne, a screen would be simultaneously perceived as an object that enhanced and validated the authority of the emperor, while being an extension of his person. They were therefore indispensable for court ceremonies in addition to being used as diplomatic gifts.

They could be found in aristocratic residences, serving as temporary walls that were easily transportable. The Chinese screen was also a support for paintings, in a function that appeared somewhat later, as Chinese art history scholar Wu Hung attests: “Very likely the screen achieved its independence during the Han and post-Han, when it gradually separated itself from other types of ritual paraphernalia and luxury goods, and finally redefined itself as a kind of framed painting.” 2 These various functions were adopted at the Japanese court during

the eighth century; from there they spread little by little into private residences, temples, and ultimately the whole of Japanese society. Their use was expanded and renewed during the Heian Period (794–1192) because of several factors. The most prominent examples are the architectural innovations of this time.3 Sliding door screens composed of several layers of paper or fabric stretched over wooden frames—fusuma—introduced a new type of mobile partition and pictorial support into domestic space; fusuma were then combined with screens. The influence of scenes that were either continuous or overlapping—depending upon whether the panels were open or closed—encouraged artists over the centuries to create sophisticated visual interplays, which for their part inspired the decoration of screens. Shōji were initially conflated with fusuma, but would later be differentiated as white, translucent, unpainted panels.

The appearance of folded fans with a paper support (ōgi) in the tenth century played an important role in the history and evolution of the Japanese screen. This could be associated with a new Japanese interest in the relationship between poetry and painting—as well as in the famous sites in Japan—whose preferred support appears to have been the screen.4 Screens and fans indeed shared a basic material characteristic that painters exploited for centuries: the multidimensionality of their space. Both are subject to a series of folds eliciting models of composition and specific interplays of views not found on flat surfaces. Parallel folds in screens and convergent folds in fans create a discontinuity in the image, whether in a large or miniature format. There is thus a tendency toward the fragmentation of the perceptual arrangement and toward the

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mobility of space—they are both capable of being more or less open and thus extended. This tendency finds its culmination in the combination of screen and fan, with the leaves of the fan capable of being detached from its blades in order to be mounted or pasted on the screen. This welldocumented practice could have been a protective measure to better preserve a support as fragile as that of a fan, as well as to present a collection of fans—whether they were thematically coherent (genji-e, for example) or not. Moreover, this practice gave rise to a pictorial genre that is also found on lacquered boxes, for example, which spreads fan motifs in space and thus permits the multiplication of decorative surfaces in accordance with the principle of “picture within picture” (gachū-ga). This crossing of boundaries, as well as the formal fluidity between different material supports, must be considered in relation to the fundamental importance of the fold in Japanese visual culture, which is found in the history of the printed book. The latter format also exploited the possibilities of oblique space in its very structure—since the leaves, at times those of detached fans, are organized around the central fold; the interplay of supports offered by woodblock prints, which were derived directly from the book, offer another example of this.

21 b Anonymous Screens within Screens, 18th century Pair of six-panel screens, left-hand screen Ink, colors, and gold on gilt paper, 67 in. × 12 ft. 4 in. (170 × 376 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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39 a-b Kanō Eitoku (1543–1590) Scenes of Kyoto and Its Surroundings, 1565 Pair of six-panel screens, whole and right-hand screen Ink, colors, and gold on paper, each screen 63⅛ × 143 ¾ in.

(160.4 × 365.2 cm) Yonezawa City Uesugi Museum, Japan

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Poetry and Screen in the Classical Period Pascal griolEt

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lthough practically no screen from the long and brilliant era of the Heian court, from the end of the eighth century to the end of the twelfth century, has come down to us, one can still see numerous depictions of them in illustrations (plate 52). Moreover, certain anecdotes from literary sources give us insights into their uses.

The following excerpt, taken from chapter twenty-four of the Tales of Time Now Past (Konjaku Monogatari-shū), a work written during the first decades of the twelfth century, is one such case.

52 Anonymous Tale of Genji, Episode “The Oak Tree,” 12th century Handscroll Ink and colors on paper, 8⅝ × 19 in. (21.9 × 48.4 cm) Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan

thE story of how lady isE comPosEd a PoEm for a scrEEn during thE Engi Er a In a time now past, Emperor Daigo commissioned a screen to be used in the coming-of-age ceremony for one of his sons. In order to have poems for the poem-squares on the screen, he told a group of poets, “Each one of you compose and submit poems for the screen.” The calligrapher Ono no Michikaze was commissioned to inscribe onto the screen the poems that everyone presented. It so happened that in the first panel depicting spring, there was a poem-square next to the scene where a woman in a carriage was going along a mountain path as the cherry blossoms were blooming. The emperor had overlooked the poem-square and did not request a poem for the scene from any of the poets. As Michikaze was inscribing the poems, he realized that the poem was missing. The emperor observed the problem and said, “What should be done about this? The day of the ceremony has already arrived—surely no one could compose on such short notice.

But to have a poem missing for such a charming and interesting scene

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a procedure that originated in China and was broadly adopted in the mural paintings of Zen temples in the Muromachi Period (1336–1573). This phenomenon is also seen in our pair of screens, which display the still-hesitant spatial arrangement characteristic of the early years of this period: spring to the east, autumn to the west, summer to the south, and winter to the north. In later works depicting four-season landscapes or an array of flowers and birds, the seasons conversely follow each other in a linear manner from right to left: spring, then summer, on the righthand screen; autumn followed by winter on the lefthand one. Compared to Flowers and Birds of the Four Seasons with the Sun and the Moon from the Idemitsu Museum collection (plate 59), which is representative of yamato-e style decoration, our pair of screens possesses a primitive sensibility. All of the mountains are uniformly rounded. Not one of them has the slightest bluff or escarpment. The lines that delineate their contours are no different than those that form the trunks of the trees, the waves, or their crests. At most, the curves of the trunks and of the waves are more bowed.

The gold and silver decoration, however, merits particular attention. In the upper-left section of the right-hand screen, one immediately notices a cloud made of gold leaf of all sizes, variously clipped or even torn, and arranged in a haphazard way. To the right of this cloud a decoration of silver powder and leaf can be seen.

Beneath the golden cloud, streaks of silver and of powdered gold have been fixed upon the support. The crests of the waves, with their very particular forms, are highlighted with silver and embellished with silver powder. Similar gold and silver enhancements were doubtless present on the left-hand screen, but they have almost entirely disappeared, and only the golden clouds and the silver background remain visible. The highlights and the silver powder on the crests of the wave can barely be discerned. The refinement of this decoration reflects the richness of screens in

59 Anonymous Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons with the Sun and the Moon, 15th century Six-panel screen, right-hand of a pair Ink, colors, and gold on paper, 55⅛ × 121¼ in. (140 × 308 cm) Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo

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the fifteenth century to the first half of the seventeenth century, Western explorers opened up new maritime routes that allowed them to expand their commercial activities extensively. Their ships became more robust and efficient, while navigational techniques improved greatly. It was, moreover, very common in contemporary world maps to depict ships sailing across the sea. The idea of sails swollen with the wind doubtless struck the imagination of the Japanese of the time as well, who dreamed of unknown lands located beyond those of Asia they already knew.

The landing at the port is depicted on the right side of the composition of the first screen. A group of foreigners, among them the captain, is heading toward Jesuit missionaries who have come to greet them. The missionaries are accompanied by Japanese men and women, both young and old. Among the articles unloaded upon the quay, it is interesting to note objects the foreigners had collected from Southeast Asia, as well as a ham.

Upon the left-hand screen, a group of nanban people—again including the captain—is gathered upon a terrace in a land that is difficult to identify. The foreigners, all mustachioed and with capped heads, are seated in chairs in the Western style. The presence of one of them wearing glasses is also noteworthy. At the bridge entryway in the center of the image stand Jesuit missionaries dressed in black, while at the gateway located to the right of the terrace are two Franciscan monks, distinguishable by their bright habits. On the left is a building whose fantastic architecture suggests the imaginary and faraway character of distant places, even though the image was probably inspired by traditional Chinese architecture. At its entrance two women wait, also dressed in fantastical clothing. In contrast to the artists who worked at the seminary, the painters of the Kanō school lacked sources of information regarding Europe and could usually count only on their imaginations in depicting the buildings and women that would be so exotic to Japanese eyes.

64 a Kanō Sanr aku (1559–1635) (attrib.)

Southern Barbarians Screens, early 17th century Pair of six-panel screens, right-hand screen Ink, colors, and gold on paper, 65⅝ × 140½ in. (166.8 × 357 cm) Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo

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two dice, and played on a rectangular table, is similar to backgammon.

The three figures are seated on an indeterminate background with horizontal stripes reminiscent of golden clouds, and behind them is a screen punctuated with long thin clouds and a landscape of water and mountains with the silhouettes of some trees—a sort of subtly colored offshoot of traditional Chinese monochromatic paintings. The two women, with faces covered in white makeup, and the man, clothed in black with a short sword blade at his side, are images from the world of the samurai, judging by their attire and hairstyles.

In the second album, the ninety-fourth painting is by Toyohara Kunichika, a disciple of Utagawa Kunisada whose masterful ukiyo-e prints were available in Europe. The treatment of these three figures is

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quite different than those in Tatsunobu’s painting. They are musicians, and their clothing and hair evoke the “floating world” of the pleasure districts—these districts were established in large cities during the Edo Period (1603–1867), in order to channel the activities of prostitution and entertainment. The courtesans in these districts practiced a refined art and were the arbiters of fashion. These musicians are playing three traditional instruments—the koto, shakuhachi, and shamisen—and here too in an indeterminate space punctuated in the upper section by a cloud, while a flowered screen closes off the space at the top right.

In the Meiji Japan that opened itself to the West, two opposing tendencies coexisted which impacted the teaching of the fine arts. On the one hand, there was the desire to adopt the techniques of Western oil painting;

152 a-b Hashimoto Gahō (1835–1908) Dragon and Tigers, 1895 Pair of six-panel screens Ink, colors, and gold on paper, each screen 63⅛ in. × 12 ft. 1½ in.

(160.5 × 369.5 cm) Seikadō Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo

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on the other, there was a continued faithfulness to the Japanese tradition.

This loyalty was encouraged by Ernest Fenellosa (1853–1908), an American professor who taught the famous scholar of Japanese arts Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913) at the Tokyo Imperial University. It was in this context that one of the great entrepreneurs of the age, Iwasaki Yanosuke (1851–1908)— the second president of Mitsubishi, a firm that began in 1869 in maritime transportation before later diversifying—established an important collection of books, manuscripts, and art objects from China and Japan to avoid the dispersal and disappearance of masterpieces of ancient culture in the face of westernization and one-sided trade to Western countries.

It was with this same purpose that he supported Hashimoto Gahō, one of the last representatives of the painting style of the Kanō school.

This painter taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō) from its opening in 1889; he then followed Okakura Kakuzō to the new School of Fine Arts (Nihon Bijutsu-in) in 1898. Tasked with many official functions, Hashimoto Gahō advocated for the renewal of tradition painting (nihonga).

The pair of screens, Dragon and Tigers, was commissioned from this artist and was the star attraction of the fourth exhibition for the promotion of industries at Kyoto in 1895 (plate 152). Although he does make use of shadows in the Western manner in this work, which still conveys a decorative power that is wholly Japanese, he does not limit himself to simple naturalism but endeavors to remain faithful to traditional aesthetics beyond the choice of the subject, which was both familiar and had been

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completely block the view, contrary to the traditional screen, this model uses the brilliant, albeit nonreflecting effect of lacquer—as formerly was the effect of gold in Japanese aristocratic residences—to modulate the space of the room in which it, either alone or in pairs, is placed. This paradoxical creation demonstrates the vitality of this type of furniture, whose combination of Japanese technique and avant-garde spirit was immediately admired by Gerrit Rietveld and Le Corbusier.

Around the same time, the Mingei movement was promoting a different form of reaction to westernization. Beginning in 1925, philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) advocated the return to a popular art. This turning back to local folkcrafts was, nonetheless, still indirectly influenced by contact with Europe, notably from the English Arts and Crafts movement and from the attentive reading by its originator of The Studio,

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an English journal.9 In search of a true mystique of beauty in everyday objects and their anonymous creators, Yanagi in 1936 founded the Nihon Mingeikan (Japanese Folk Crafts Museum) in Komaba, near Tokyo, with the financial support of Ōhara Magosaburō (1880–1943), a textile manufacturer from Kurashiki. Known primarily for its potters, the movement also included wood engraver Munakata Shikō and fabric painter Serizawa Keisuke. It also inspired the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi and the French designer Charlotte Perriand. It thus represented a sign of renewed interaction between East and West.

Munakata Shikō was born in the prefecture of Aomori in the northern part of Honshu, a region characterized by numerous vestiges of the Jōmon Period (8,000–300 bcE) and a strong tradition of ancient tales.

This energetic personality began his professional life with an artisan who

157 a-b Munakata Shikō (1903–1975) The Bodhisattvas Monju and Fugen with the Ten Great Disciples of the Buddha, 1929–48 Engravings mounted upon a pair of six-panel screens, each screen 68⅞ × 137⅝ in.

(174.9 × 349.6 cm) Fukumitsu Art Museum, Nanto, Japan

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produced kites, but he quickly discovered Western art and dreamed of becoming the Japanese Van Gogh. He turned to oil painting but later abandoned it for wood engraving and devoted himself to this art form from the 1930s onward. He carried out all the stages of artistic creation himself, from the direct cutting of wood to the printing, linking calligraphy and image in the process. Yanagi recognized in him an innovative artist whose original creations were linked to the tradition of Buddhist engravings. Munakata also mounted his engravings on screens and scrolls, the traditional Japanese supports (plate 157).

Encouraged by the dedicated collector Ōhara Magosaburō—who in 1930 founded a museum collecting Western paintings and sculptures as well as works of mingei in Kurashiki—Munakata obtained from the collector’s son Ōhara Sōichirō (1909–1968) a commission for large

decorative paintings for the family residence. In 1940, on the occasion of the patriarch’s sixtieth birthday, Munakata created a pair of screens decorated with images of carp (plate 158). There are thirty-two of them— the same number as the age of the son—painted in an unrealistic shade of red on a white background—elements as auspicious as the carp themselves. In accordance with the tradition of the ancient Japanese aristocracy, now transposed into the world of industrial patrons, these screens were used on Magosaburō’s birthday but were thereafter only employed within the context of family celebrations, with one exception: they were also displayed during the inauguration of the room of Munakata Shikō’s engravings in the Ōhara Museum of Art, where they still reside today.

The other supporter of this return to popular tradition influenced

by Yanagi was Serizawa Keisuke,10 who was first and foremost a graphic

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