Asian Art and Architecture: Art & Design 382/582

Momoyama Period 1573 - 1615

Edo Period 1615 - 1868

Design List

687 Chinese Gate Nishi Hongan-ji Edo c 1600

698 Thunder God Tawaraya Sotatsu Edo c 1600

699 Zen Priest Choka Tawaraya Sotatsu Edo c 1600

700 Teabowl Hon’ami Koetsu Edo early 17th c

701 Deer Scroll Sotatsu & Koetsu Edo early 17th c

702 Two Scenes from Tale of Genji Tawaraya Sotatsu Edo early 17th c

720 Daruma Hakuin Ekaku Edo early 18th c

P’s C Nichiren Wandering in Utagawa Kunioshi Edo c 1830

The Momoyama is a short period historically, if a rich one esthetically. It marks the period between the end of the Ashikaga Shogunate and the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was a period of brilliantly decorated medieval castles. Politically and socially it is one era. Its most important moment culturally was the closing of Japan to outside contact in 1638. On one side this meant that it would be two centuries before the West was to develop any real idea of Japan. On the other it meant another of the long separations between Japan and the rest of East Asia.

Unlike the short lived and violent Momoyama period, the Tokugawa was a period of prosperity and relative peace. At the same time the ruling elite attempted to enforce a strict ban on changes in the social hierarchy. Whatever class one was born into one was expected to maintain. Though there was the saving grace of great variability within each class. The Samurai class at the top included the foot soldier as well as the ruler. The Chonin, townsmen included laborers as well as merchants. Neo-Confucianism was the guiding ideology. Buddhism withered in Japan, much as Christianity did at the same time in Europe, as the focus of society grew progressively more secular. The capital was moved to Edo, modern Tokyo. If he Samurai were the leading class, they were now more administrators than swordsmen. Following their Zen orientation luxury was condemned, but following their developing power, it grew apace in some areas.

Even such forms as the garden of the Sambo-in seem to radiate the new luxury. If its tea house was a rustic structure, it is one transported here from its original setting elsewhere. The scene itself covers every inch with a vastly variegated selection of every plant imaginable. Approach a bit of grass and find it a patchwork of one grass standing beside another. All sorts of plants in rich profusion. Stone bridges and islands in the brook. If it is a garden it is not a humble one.

ink, color, and gold leaf on paper 60"

One of a pair of two fold screens. The pair is a Wind God. The style of painting that came to a peak in the Momoyama was one of extreme luxury, and sensuous luxuriance. Tawaraya (or Nonomura) Sotatsu was active from the late 16th to the early 17th century. Largely lost beneath the work of his student, Korin, he is now seen as the light of the school as his work has been isolated and studied. With Korin he is seen as the originator of the rimpa school.

The Thunder and Wind God screens reveal his style. Each shows an isolated figure on a cut gold leaf ground. The individual figures are isolated asymmetrically, toward a corner, the top and edge cropping the image. The god is a broad caricature painted in strikingly bold calligraphic lines. The iconography goes back to at least the Gupta period in India. The thunder god dancing in a ring of drums can be found at Ajanta.

If the drawing style is a striking Chinese brushwork, the bold colors are as clearly Yamato-e. Bright, brilliant color. And also the accident accommodating washes of clouds. The composition’s asymmetry is further extended by the rippling sashes. Each of the gods flies off to one side; together they balance. But balance isn’t the goal, off into the corner tension is the goal and it succeeds.

Ink o paper, hanging scroll 37 3/4"

The Zen Priest Choka is Sotatsu version of the theme we’ve seen in China in Kun Can (662) of later in this same century. A comparison of the two reveals more or less what one might expect. The Chinese is tersely spelled out in striking black strokes, each one stronger than the last. It is asymmetrical, but solidly balanced for all that. If it favors one edge, it still reaches out and touches the other. The Japanese work is far more daring. It is entirely lined up on one side leaving the entire right half of the work and much of the left totally empty. And despite some control in the washes that compose it, the majority of painting is in puddled washes almost as free as hatsuboku. It pushes the elliptical to the limit. This puddling technique that emphasizes the texture and coloristic effects of coagulating paint is called tarashiko-mi. While the wet water based pigment is drying a darker ink or color is added to it. And it is Sotatsu great glorious effect.

Where the Chinese picture emphasizes the narrative theme of the monk’s situation, the Japanese work emphasizes the abstraction of the painting. How did two artists come up with such similar works? Just like the Buddha images we have seen all year, this was a conventional type. Originally a Chinese Buddhist theme, this one came to Japan through both painted and wood block print versions. (One of the things left out of our survey has been the Buddhist development of woodblock printing in China that produced the first printed texts (in the 8th century), and subsequently the development in Korea of movable metal type (in the 14th century). The impelling force behind the first of these developments was the ability to multiply images of the Buddha, other deities, and even texts was a merit making one. Each repetition of an image being like the repetition of a prayer or good deed.

Thus the originality of Sotatsu painting is not in its absolute uniqueness, but in the quality of its variation on the established theme. This individualist’s virtuoso image of a monk’s dilemma is yet another sort of Buddhist art. Not an icon for worship but a conventionalized individualist expression that made merit for the producer and purchaser

Raku stoneware h 3 3/8"

Sotatsu’s wife was possibly related to Hon’ami Koetsu and the two were known for collaboration on a number of projects. Koetsu was a tea master known for his teabowls and his calligraphy. This bowl is famous for its orange and moss green glaze and it slight asymmetry. The deliberate irregularity and even roughness of the object are valued elements of the rusticity in "tea taste," discussed earlier.

ink, gold & silver pigment on paper 12 1/2" x 30’

Sotatsu and Koetsu collaborated on the Deer Scroll paintings. Sotatsu the painter producing the elliptical notations of deer frolicking in gold and silver paint, and Koetsu the calligrapher adding the poems from a well-known imperial anthology in black ink. Looking at the final result it is clear that both are painters and calligraphers. The rich variety of line and effects in the writing equaling those seen in the deer, the elliptical freedom of the deer, disappearing beyond a boarder to leave only a hoof or two dangling, or turning into a perspective that converts a body into a strange character.

The entire effect more line a musical duet than what we are used to as painting in the west. A hand scroll is produced that can be slowly rolled through as poems and deer arrive and pass before the eye. Verbal and visual surprises counterpointed in time. At the end of the piece is the seal of Sotatsu and the signature of Koetsu, the two blended together.

The taste for asymmetry and simplicity are merged in an object that simulates sparseness in extreme decorative luxury.

ink, color, and gold leaf on paper 6’ x 11’ 7 1/2"

ink on paper 51 1/8"

Ink and color on paper, 34.7 cm (approx a foot)

Woodblock prints grew into a popular art imagery of note in the later 17th century. From much earlier woodblocks were used to produce less expensive reproductions of various sorts of scrolls, decorations and icons. They were used to produce the outlines later filled in by hand in paint. So skillful were the block cutters of China that they could produce works like the Mustard Seed Garden and the Ten Bamboo Studio, which were manuals of how to paint in the Chinese ink style. And they were used in independent pictures. But in the later 18th century they were taken up in Japan by new years card makers who quickly built up a market for separate pieces that soon developed into a thriving popular trade in decorative prints showing everything from local pinup beauty and the latest fashions to advertisements for the Kabuki theater. With the growth of trade came technical and esthetic innovation and by the late 18th century full color prints from large number of precisely coordinated blocks were commonplace. This was the form that in the 19th century had such a significant effect on the Impressionists and all later Western art, in bringing the East Asian and particularly Japanese esthetic of compactly composed decoratively flattened imagery West.

Utagawa Kunioshi was the last major star of the woodblock print genre. Due to restrictions applied by the Bakufu the major subject matter of the form shifted from figure to landscape motifs in the early 19th century. So that by the time the restriction on narrative was lifted a great sophistication with setting had been developed. Kunioshi was particularly noted for his large scale, elaborate pieces with myriads of figures in tensely dynamic poses. Here, in Nichiren in pieces I put into the syllabus, you can see both of these skills applied to advantage.

The monk-founder the Nichiren sect is shown wandering in the course of his 1271 - 1274 exile. It was here, deserted by his followers, he developed his views to the form that molded the sect that grew after his death. The tiny figure of the monk is seen hunched over with his back to us, his head covered by a hat his body swathed in a robe, up to his calves in the snow as he trudges up a barren hillside beside a bent and barren tree. Hardly more than an outline sketch the full isolation and difficult path of the exile is indelibly clear. Behind him a series of closed huts circle around a promontory point. The sea melts softly into the sky and that in turn into the dark cloud above. Flecks of snow fall all around. An evocation of the monk’s plight that maintains its decorative distance and yet tells the story.

This was one of a great number of scenes from Nichiren’s life produced in precisely the same format for sale in the marketplace individually or in sets of any size. The exercise was as much a marketing phenomena as a religious one.