Japanese Art 1910-1940
March 16-24
Daily 11am-5pm, and by appointment
The exhibition focuses on screens and scrolls, 1910-1940, a time of great change for Japan and its arts. Superb works were created for the domestic market, in contrast to the export-oriented output during the Meiji era. Though most painters of the Taisho and early Showa eras typically remained focused on traditional themes, they often experimented with new materials and perspectives. They shifted from stylized depictions of nature to naturalistic botanical studies. Making trips abroad, many painters incorporated foreign elements from their travels into their work.
Next to painting, bamboo baskets and intricate gold lacquer boxes from the Taisho and Showa eras will highlight the technical perfection, exploring new worlds of expression and design.
(1885-1962)
Deep in the Woods, 1930s, Japan
Pair of two-panel folding screens; mineral colors on paper
Size each 67½ x 74¼ in. (171.8 x 189 cm)
Sealed at the lower right-hand corner of the right-hand screen; the upper seal worn and illegible, the lower seal Ishizuchi
Hasegawa Chikuyū (birth name: Hirai Takejirō) moved to Kyoto at a young age to become an live-in pupil of Tsuji Kakō (1870–1931). Hirai took the art name Chikuyū and at age twenty-three was adopted into the Hasegawa family, taking their surname. After winning prizes in both 1907 and 1908 at the “Exhibition of New and Old Art” in Kyoto, he decided to move to Tokyo to extend his creative horizons and break free of the constraints of traditional painting styles.
In 1916 he traveled to India and spent two years touring the subcontinent’s Buddhist sites, making sketches of ancient sculptures and wall paintings, then lived for a time in Osaka before returning in 1919 to his native Matsuyama where he remained for five years developing a new pictorial manner, eventually moving back to Osaka in 1924. During the 1920s and 1930s he went on no fewer than six sketching tours of China, finally settling once more in Matsuyama in 1944. Until his death in 1962 he was a pillar of the local artistic community, contributing to its postwar revival, playing an active role in the foundation and leadership of multiple art associations, and fostering the emergence of a distinctive local painting style.
This intense composition is a powerful demonstration of Chikuyū’s success in freeing himself from the norms of Kyoto painting as it had crystalized in the early years of the 20th century. By moving to Tokyo, he had equipped himself to absorb international influences, then by settling in Ehime for the last eighteen years of his life, he had time to become deeply involved in the landscapes and flora of his native Shikoku. Chikuyū takes a dive into the overlapping foliage of a summer day, with leaves of pine, bamboo grass, azalea, and other shrubs surrounding a fallen tree trunk, itself rich in growths of moss, lichen, and bracket fungus. The plants are ideally suited to depiction using the rich green and blue mineral pigments of lazurite or malachite that are used in Nihonga painting and lend this unusual pair of screens a fascinating richness and density.
(born 1875–1880, still active 1926)
By the Fence, 1912, Japan
Pair of two-panel folding screens; ink and mineral colors on silk
Size each screen 61½ x 69 inches (156.5 x 175.2 cm)
Signed at lower right of the right-hand screen Ippō zu (painted by Ippō) and sealed Ippō
While the fence provides overall structure, the chief subject, given pride of place on the right-hand screen, is a young shrub of kiri (Paulownia), a plant more often seen in earlier Japanese art in stylized form as part of a crest used by several leading families as well as the imperial house. Here, by contrast, it is shown as it appears in real life, having already flowered, its larger leaves now beginning to decay, while tiger lily and a cereal crop, perhaps maize, flourish to either side. Given the screen’s date of autumn 1912, it is just possible that Gōda intended the kiri as a visual metaphor for the Meiji Emperor, who had died in July of that year, the other plants thus symbolizing rebirth and renewal. The scene is completed by sparrows perched on stems of the kiri, a grasshopper resting at the top of the fence, and a group of a turkey cock and two hens foraging at the foot of the composition.
Gōda applied his mineral pigments lavishly yet almost never allowed them to form a solid block of color, carefully modulating the surface of each and every leaf. While the striking close-up overall composition sometimes calls to mind the semi-abstraction of Rinpa, Gōda’s close and careful naturalism marks this screen out as a representative masterpiece in the most avant-garde style of its time.
Exhibited: Sixth Bunten national art exhibition, Tokyo, 1912
Published: Monbushō (Ministry of Education), Monbushō Dairokkai Bijutsu Tenrankai zuroku Nihonga no bu (Illustrated Catalogue of the Sixth Exhibition of the Ministry of Education: Painting in Japanese Style), Tokyo, Shinbi Shoin, 1912, p. 179: “By the fence,—a pair of screens. By Ippō Aida.”
(1880-1937)
Mountain Landscape, circa 1916-1920, Japan
Pair of six-panel folding screens; ink and mineral colors on silk
Size each screen 66 x 147 in. (167.5 x 373 cm)
Signed at lower left and right: Keigaku and sealed: Nishii Keigaku with a second seal
Nishii Keigaku, a prolific and successful artist, was born Nishii Keijirō in Fukui Prefecture, the son of Nishii Keibi, an official painter to the Matsudaira clan, lords of the local feudal fiefdom. In 1902 Keigaku went to Kyoto to study with Yamamoto Shunkyo (1871–1933), a leading landscape painter: Yamamoto’s career largely overlapped with Nishii’s and he painted many screens that clearly influenced the latter, only nine years his junior. Nishii quickly began to win prizes with several art associations and showed regularly at the national Bunten salon from 1907 to 1918. In 1919 he joined other painters in forming the “Japan Free Painting Group” and presented his work regularly at the group’s shows; he also traveled and painted extensively in China and Korea.
Starting during the mid 1910s, Nishii’s large-format works tend to depict actual, rather than imaginary locations, typically in the regions of Japan or sometimes in Korea. This majestic pair of landscape screen shares close similarities—in point of colors and brush techniques used to convey the appearance of clouds and wind-blown, foggy trees—to another pair of screens with a mountainscape entitled Unzan kōitsu (“Cloudy Mountains, Lofty Eminences” or “Untrammeled Scholar Among Cloud-Filled Mountains”), that Nishii showed at the 1916 Bunten national art salon.
(1887–1980)
Autumn Scene, ca 1930-1938, Japan
Pair of two-panel folding screens; ink, mineral colors, gofun (calcified crushed shell), and silver on paper
Size of each screen 67¾ x 66¼ in. (172.3 x 168.5 cm)
Signed at top left of the left-hand screen Misao; sealed Misao saku (Made by Misao)
A native of Tokyo, Kawabune Misao began to study in 1904 with Kobori Tomoto (1864–1931), a painter known almost exclusively for Japanese history painting in an adapted version of the traditional Tosa style. Kawabune also did history subjects at the outset of his career and during the war years 1940–1944, but otherwise focused on outdoor tree, plant, and bird scenes, nearly always in square format, with the subjects generally viewed at close quarters rather than as part of a landscape.
Like many of Kawabune’s nature scenes this one is set in autumn, when an ancient female mountain willow tree, leaning almost horizontally, its trunk partly broken away and its leaves already turned yellow, is releasing its seed-bearing fluff in a gentle breeze. At the top of the left-hand screen, a brown-eared bulbul, with characteristic red cheeks, perches acrobatically on a branch while at far right a kingfisher flies past, its brilliant colors offset by a small stand of bamboo below. The bird’s frozen movement lends the entire composition a sense of stillness, recalling similar subjects depicted two or more centuries earlier by artists in the Rinpa lineage such as Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), whose work is often characterized by a sense of flatness and semi-abstraction. This stillness, along with the screen format and the decorative application of flakes of silver leaf, gives a decided Japanese flavor to what might otherwise have seemed like a Western-style display of advanced naturalism. Other essentially Japanese touches here include the use of spattered gofun (powdered oyster shell) to render the flying fluff and the wet-on-wet or puddling technique seen in the handling of the moss on the tree’s trunk.
(1888-1946)
Scenes of the Twelve Months, circa 1915-25, Japan
Twelve paintings mounted as a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink, mineral colors, and gofun on silk
Size each screen 55 x 127 in. (140 x 322.5 cm)
Size each painting 44 x 16 in. (112 x 40.5 cm)
Each signed Naohiko and sealed Aida
Well-known as a Western-style watercolorist, Aida Naohiko here adopts Japanese conventions and a vertical East-Asian format to depict a series of twelve charming, delicate, and atmospheric landscape subjects, each of them related to a particular month of the year and labeled with a cartouche in the form of two overlapping squares of Japanese paper. Some paintings in the series recall the work of painters in the neo-Rinpa style pioneered by Kyoto-based artist and art director Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942).
Born in Aizu-Wakamatsu, some 200 miles north of Tokyo, Aida Naohiko (known early in his career as Torahiko) exhibited regularly at the Bunten official national salon and its successors from 1909 until 1943, eventually reaching mukansa status (free from the requirement to submit his work for selection) and serving as a jury member. He was a member or founder-member of several leading associations devoted to watercolors or Western-style painting, including the Nihon Suisaigakai, the Hakujitsukai, the Hakubakai, and the Taiheiyōgakai.
The twelve scenes are as follows, from right to left:
First Month: Sunrise on New Year’s Day
Second Month: Mountain Home in the Snow
Third Month: Plum-Blossom Village
Fourth Month: Cherry Blossom in the Mountains
Fifth Month: In the Willow's Shade
Sixth Month: The Scent of Flowers
Seventh Month: Evening Cool
Eighth Month: Waterfall Deep in the Mountains
Ninth Month: Rainstorm
Tenth Month: Evening Moon
Eleventh Month: Pasture
Twelfth Month: Withered Grasses in the Mountains
(1895–1937)
Twittering Birds, circa 1932, Japan
Two-panel folding screen; ink, mineral pigments, gofun (shell powder), and gold wash on silk
Size 67¾ x 66¼ inches (172.3 x 168.5 cm)
Seal at lower right, no longer legible
Three schoolgirls, perhaps on a field trip, dressed in uniform frocks, white stockings, and white shoes, each holding an umbrella, one with a brimmed and beribboned hat and the other two each with a bright dab of red lipstick, pause to examine a large cage containing small wild birds. A slender maple grows in the foreground and in the background are hollyhocks and a pine; pigeons roam free outside the cage.
The screen is unsigned, bearing only a seal that became illegible, but a very similar composition, less ambitious and showing a single girl, again with a birdcage as the other main subject, was exhibited by Matsushima Hakkō at the Thirteenth Teiten Exhibition in 1932.
A native of Okayama Prefecture, Matsushima Hakkō graduated in 1921 from the Painting Department of Tokyo Art School, where his teachers included Yuki Somei (1875–1957). He was first selected for the Bunten national exhibition in 1918. In the same year that Matsushima graduated, he immediately became an instructor at the Women’s School of Art. The following year, 1922, he received a merit award for a painting of a young lady, shown at the “Tokyo Exposition”. In 1936 he executed a mural for the Tōkyō Yōseikan, an important educational building, depicting the moment when the Tokugawa shogun agreed to transfer powers to the Meiji emperor. In 1937 Matsushima died.
Most of Matsushima’s nine other submissions to the national exhibitions are similar in style and subject to the present work, all figural and typically depicting young women (sometimes Chinese) in elegant domestic settings, executed in the same beguilingly naïve manner. So few of his works are extant that it is hard to make technical comparisons, but the present screen is remarkable for the care and attention to detail that the artist lavished on this charming scene; especially noteworthy are the skillful rendition of the hollyhocks seen through two layers of the cage’s slender bars and the subtle deployment of gofun, powdered oyster shell, to model the girls’ elegant frocks.
(1882-1961)
Spring Evening, mid 1920s, Japan
Hanging scroll; ink, color, shell powder and gold on silk, in silk mounting
Overall size 59¼ x 27¾ in. (150 x 71 cm)
Signed and sealed at right Sōhei
An elegantly dressed young woman in three-quarter profile with a blossoming plum tree in the left background
Comes with a wood tomobako storage box inscribed outside: Spring Evening; signed inside: Inscribed in person by Sōhei, and sealed Sōhei
A young woman, her hair arranged in the Shimada style with elaborate hair ornaments made from tortoiseshell and silver, gazes pensively outside the picture plane, her face animated by the lightest hint of red pigment. Special attention is devoted to the delineation of her hairline, with the finest brush used to draw individual strands. To her right, in the background, an ancient plum tree has recently come into blossom, heralding the arrival of the New Year and the beginning of spring. An elegant, well-born young lady, she wears a quietly expensive silk kimono with simple decoration of family crests, offset by a more elaborate sash embroidered with gold rabbit-and-cloud motifs, perhaps suggesting that the painting was executed at the start of 1927, a rabbit year in the traditional East Asian chronology.
Yamaguchi Sōhei leaves us guessing as to whether this is a contemporary or historical scene; the same ambiguity is found in the work of, for example, the female artist Kitani Chigusa (1895–1947), another Osaka native who specialized in depictions of beautiful young women using the finest pigments. Better known as an illustrator than as a painter in Nihonga style, Yamaguchi Sōhei was born in Osaka and trained under local artist Nakagawa Rogetsu (c. 1859–1924) as well as teaching himself the techniques of Western-style watercolor painting. During the 1920s Yamaguchi Sōhei appears to have shifted his professional focus from painting to illustration, building a nationwide reputation for the images he created to accompany serialized novels in some of Japan’s leading newspapers.
ca 1920, Japan
Maki-e gold lacquer on wood
Size document box: 6½ x 15½ x 12 in. (16.3 x 39.6 x 30.4 cm)
Size writing box: 2 x 9¾ x 9 in. (4.8 x 24.5 x 22.6 cm)
Both boxes are rectangular with cut-off corners, flush-fitting lids, and silver rims. The writing box fitted with a frame with brush rests to left and right supporting two brushes and a raised central section with recesses for ink-griding stone and water dropper.
Both document box and writing box with wood substrate finished in highly polished blackened roiro lacquer and decorated in gold, aokin, silver, and colored takamaki-e and hiramaki-e with embellishments of gold hirame flakes and individually placed okibirame squares of gold foil.
The exteriors of both boxes decorated with overlapping, scattered squares of decorated paper (shikishi). The shikishi on the writing box with designs including a bugaku dancer in the Ranryō-ō role, pine trees by a Shinto shrine, fall foliage at Arashiyama, two with lines of poetry. The shikishi on the document box with designs including pine trees by a mountain stream, a bugaku drum partially visible behind an outdoor curtain, a bird on a branch of camellia, a mountain waterfall, the moon over Musashino plain, and lines of poetry.
The interiors of both boxes - finished in blackened roiro lacquer embellished with dense hirame gold flakes - are decorated in gold, aokin, and silver with some of the seven plants of early fall (nanakusa): kikyō, fujibakama, hagi, and ominaeshi, along with wild chrysanthemums, by a garden fence; the silver water dropper in the form of two overlapping shikishi with chrysanthemum blossoms, the inkstone with gold-lacquered rim
(1886-1961)
Document Box with Poem and Bush Clover, 1930s, Japan
Maki-e gold lacquer on wood with metal and shell inlays
Size 3¾ x 11¼ x 14½ in. (9.8 x 28.8 x 36.7 cm)
Bunko (document box) with overhanging lid decorated in gold hiramaki-e and lead and shell inlay with characters from a waka (33-syllable classical verse) over a yamimaki-e (black-on-black lacquer) ground depicting bush clover.
Comes with a fitted, black-lacquered wood tomobako box inscribed in red lacquer Asayasu waka bunko (Document box with a poem by Asayasu) and signed in gold lacquer Katei saku (Made by Katei) with seal Kōda Katei
The poem decorating this box, by Fun’ya no Asayasu (active circa 900), is number 37 in Hyakunin isshu (100 Poems by 100 Poets), an anthology compiled by Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241) and reads in full:
In the autumn fields / the wind blows hard down upon / white droplets of dew / looking like a broken string / of beads scattered on the ground
Kōda Katei was the younger brother of the prominent Kyoto lacquerer Kōda Shūetsu (1881–1933).
(1890-1958)
“Three Treasures” Handled Flower Basket, circa 1927–1934, Japan
Bamboo
Size 18 x 10½ x 10¼ in. (45.6 x 26.6 x 26.1 cm)
Signed underneath Rōkansai saku (Made by Rokansai)
Comes with the original faceted and lacquered bamboo otoshi (water holder) and the original fitted wood tomobako storage box. The box is inscribed outside Hanakago (Flower Basket); inscribed and signed inside Mei Sanbo Rokansai saku (Name: “Three Treasures,” made by Rōkansai); three-part seal: Ro, Kan, Sai
The title alludes to the sanbodai, literally “stand for three treasures,” a small offering table with a tall foot and wide rim that features in Shinto ritual, particularly at the New Year. This is an early masterpiece in Rokansai’s informal yet tightly controlled Sō style, his freest manner which he himself described as the hardest to execute because it “offers the greatest potential for individual creativity.” The combination of sō-style plaiting with a time-honored, formal shape perfectly embodies Rokansai’s genius for combining tradition with modernity.
(1890-1958)
“Moon Rabbit” Flower Basket, mid-1930s, Japan
Bamboo
Size 14¼ x 6¾ x 6¾ in. (36.4 x 16.9 x 16.9 cm)
Signed underneath Rōkansai saku (Made by Rokansai)
Leached timber bamboo, diagonal plaiting over vertical elements, twining, knotting, wrapping, hexagonal plaiting (base); faceted and lacquered bamboo otoshi (water holder)
Fitted wood tomobako storage box inscribed outside Hanakago (Flower Basket); inscribed inside Getto Rokansai saku (Moon Rabbit, made by Rokansai); seal: Rokansai
Getto, literally "Moon Rabbit," is an ancient Chinese term referring to the belief, celebrated in No drama, that the moon is inhabited by a rabbit who pounds rice cakes. As often with Rokansai’s titles, its relationship to this basket is tantalizingly unclear. The balanced, compact form, typical of the artist’s mature period, is emphasized by a slight narrowing where the neck is secured by a bamboo band tied in a bow. This is more often seen in Rokansai’s later hanging flower baskets but for similar examples of standard baskets in this form, see Tochigi Kenritsu Bijutsukan (Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts), Iizuka Rokansai ten (Iizuka Rokansai: Master of Modern Bamboo Crafts), exhibition catalogue, 1989, cat. no. 68 (p. 60) and Erik Thomsen Gallery, Masterpieces of Japanese Bamboo Art, New York, 2017, cat. no. 22.
(1872-1950)
Square Handled Flower Basket, 1940–1945, Japan
Bamboo and rattan
Size 20¾ x 7¾ x 7¾ in. (53 x 20 x 19.5 cm)
Signed Chikubōsai kore o tsukuru (Chikubōsai made this)
Chikubōsai made this exceptional basket with susudake bamboo, rattan, and lacquer, using the techniques of kigozame-ami plaiting, parallel-line construction, interlaced-circle plaiting, bending, wrapping, and knotting.
The basket comes with its original fitted wooden tomobako storage box inscribed outside Hosoami suehiro hanakago (Finely plaited splayed flower basket) and inscribed inside Sen’yō Kusezato Chikubōsai kore o tsukuru (Chikubōsai of Kuse Village in the Sen’yō District [Sakai] made this), with seal mark Chikubōsai
Maeda Chikubōsai I is known for the high quality of his work. After a period of intense study of earlier bamboo pieces made or the sencha style of tea drinking, he made works which were presented to the Japanese emperor and imperial family. This important piece from the latter part of his career exemplifies his mastery of the parallel-line construction technique using very thinly split bamboo culms, the combination of a wide variety of plaiting styles, and skillful use of natural bamboo to form a natural handle that complements the precision of the basketry. The style of the signature on the base suggests a date in the early 1940s; around this time Chikubōsai was living at Kuse in the Sen’yō district of Sakai (Osaka).
|
|
Contact Us
