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Description: Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano
Exhibitions are the most ephemeral of phenomena. Yet the afterlife of one or two exhibitions seen at key moments can be lasting and incalculable—transfigurative, even...
PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art
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Preface
Exhibitions are the most ephemeral of phenomena. Yet the afterlife of one or two exhibitions seen at key moments can be lasting and incalculable—transfigurative, even. Each exhibition brings together a conjunction of objects, paintings, and setting that is a unique event in time and space. Japanese tea masters have always known this; they describe it as ichigo ichie, “each meeting, only once.” But the ephemeral nature of each exhibition is also part of its significance and fascination, both for the curator and for the audience: a visual, intellectual, and emotional moment in time that matters to us, if the art and its presentation speak to us.
For me, one such experience took place here at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the winter of 1966. A group of us graduate students at Columbia University came down to see the exhibition Art Treasures from Japan, a survey of Japanese art from the seventh to the nineteenth century. Included among the works that stayed with me was a section of the Lotus scroll by Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637). The strong impressions of this initial encounter were reinforced in 1990 when I was able spend a month in research at the Tokyo National Museum.
By one of those happy accidents of fate, during that time the Tokyo museum was holding the exhibition Poetry and Calligraphy, and for one week during my stay, Hon’ami Kōetsu’s Crane scroll was on exhibition. My initial discovery of Kōetsu was through his calligraphy—his reinterpretation of the aesthetic of the Heian period (794–1185)—and this became the main focus of my looking. Even as his calligraphy engaged with the Heian poetic tradition, Kōetsu transformed this ancient style through his own bold brush work. The entire length of the scroll, more than forty-four feet, was shown in one very long case for one week. Although we viewers could not unroll the handscroll ourselves, as we moved along the length of the case it was possible to imagine the process. What became clear to me was a guiding principle of Japanese pictorial art, what might be called "shifting viewpoints.” Unlike a Western painting, which remains static in a clearly delineated, fixed frame, space in Japanese scrolls, albums, and screens is fluid, constantly changing as we unroll or roll up the scroll, open or turn the pages in the album, and walk or sit in front of the screen.
The participatory nature of Japanese art is evident in architectural spaces as well. It was by moving through Nijō Castle in Kyoto that this first struck me: the walls and sliding doors of every room form a painted panorama, or perhaps more accurately, a cocoon that envelops those within the space. The grand gestures of artists like Kano Tan’yū, who executed the tigers, hawks, and bird-and-flower panels in the castle, are at the other end of the aesthetic spectrum from Kōetsu, yet they were even more influential in the history of Japanese art. The Kano house and lineage of artists served for more than three hundred and fifty years in an official capacity as painters-in-attendance to the newly empowered military rulers (shoguns) of Japan. These rulers spent lavishly to adorn their residences with symbols of power and Chinese-themed imagery. They had precise expectations and standards that the Kano artists were more than capable of fulfilling and maintaining, thanks to their exacting training program, which served to instill in successive generations the techniques and imagery that set the aesthetic standards. This aesthetic would form the common cultural language for all of Japanese painting.
With the patronage of the Tokugawa family of shoguns for fifteen generations, the Kano house flourished, and their sons and students were dominant in the art world until the collapse of the shogunate in 1867. It is actually the works of this last generation of Kano artists—painters such as Kano Hōgai—that prompted my foray into the long and complex history of Kano art. In 1976, Professor Masanobu Hosono, curator of painting at the Tokyo National Museum, visited Philadelphia to research the paintings from the Meiji period (1868–1912) in our collection by members of the Kano school. This was an area little studied until then, as art of the late nineteenth century had been deemed too “recent” for serious consideration in Japan. Professor Hosono pioneered the field and was the curator of the great survey exhibition of the Kano school held at the Tokyo museum in 1979. What intrigued him about the Philadelphia holdings was not only the high quality of the works, but also the fact that they had once belonged to Ernest F. Fenollosa (1853–1908), the first American scholar-collector of Japanese art. Fenollosa was guided in his studies by members of the Kano family during his twelve-year sojourn in Japan from 1878 to 1890, and his Kano worldview is reflected in the collections that he helped form at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Over the past seven years or so, it has been a wonderful adventure to trace the Kano house back to its first generation in the fifteenth century with the co-curator of this exhibition, Dr. Kyoko Kinoshita, as well as many colleagues in Japan and America (named in the Acknowledgments). After the early twentieth century, the reputation of the Kano school suffered among collectors and art historians who preferred the Romantic view of the individualistic, eccentric artist, and who therefore dismissed the Kano painters as academicians and mere copyists. But most of Japanese art has been born of a tradition that seeks to emulate what has gone before, and that honors what is constant and sustaining in Japanese culture. As I hope this exhibition will demonstrate, the Kano artists are significant for the exquisite craftsmanship, rooted in skill and discipline, that enabled them to create works of lasting beauty that speak to us to this day.
FELICE FISCHER
The Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art and
Senior Curator of East Asian Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art