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Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: |
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Ordinarily, I might say that a major show of 18th century Japanese art could be a bit fusty and overly art historical, but this exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art dispelled any such notion. There was also a chance that it could – and it did – connect with the new wave of Japanese pop work taking over the world, which owes a lot to the collective past. Some viewers of Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush may have faltered when they noticed that all the work was under glass with appropriate low lighting. Of course, after a while, it didn’t matter because the work was still imbued with human gestures so alive that it appeared completely contemporary! (I went out immediately afterwards and purchased several reed pens.) It could have been the low lighting, brown inky coloration and odd formats that created my original bias but, if one disregarded the faded color and focused on the nature and variety of the marks and other technical methodologies, the show killed. Neither did it matter that all the mythology represented wasn’t fully understood, especially the historical references and actual calligraphy, because the show held together on sheer visual craft and invention. Ike Taiga and his wife, Tokuyama Gyokura, met in the 1750s, and they were no hacks. They were directly involved with adding new dimension to the art of Japan by adopting Chinese forms and content that went back to the 14th century and using Chinese poetry from a thousand years previous. These were adopted from the Chinese Literati tradition and literally adapted from Chinese printed painting manuals. Tiaga and his wife were not mere copyists: they took the brushwork landscape with bamboo and gave it a new twist. Combining their own traditions and particular skills – which were plentiful – they forged a synthesis that led to the creation of a masterful life’s work which greatly added to the Japanese classical tradition. The drawn marks themselves seem to take off from the page. Many are downright abstract and this is remarkable considering it was the 18th century. The eclectic style became known as Nanga. (Sound familiar?) The artist-couple lived the bohemian ideal in Kyoto for the most part and pursued it with gusto. Together, they came up with new traditions that would survive for hundreds of years. They successfully emulated scholars and became a Japanese cultural alternative: artist poets. A key development was taking the Chinese scroll landscape form with poetic four word forms and adapt the format. Some images were masterfully writ-large to fit large screens used to separate spaces in rooms. These new formats were truly magical. Technically, the exhibition is made up of the usual Chinese/Japanese suspects like fan painting, scrolls, images depicting Buddhist festivals and even some rather theatrical comic antics. There were scrolls attached to silk, painting directly on silk and also calligraphic poems made wholly of text, some large. Perhaps the mix of writing and drawing was a way to combine processes from both sides of the brain! If some of these looked like mundane calendars by lesser artists it was because it has been so overdone throughout the years. Each time Taiga and company seemed to break through the mundane, creating a mix of image and text that held profundity somewhere inside. I cannot remember ever scrutinizing pictures so closely, and I imagine that they would’ve been no less magical if they were advertisements for the local dentist. Without reading the actual words in Japanese it did take special efforts and intuitive sense to hopefully catch the poetic vibe. Sometimes a hint from the wall interpretation proved illuminating, sometimes not. But mostly, the diverse use of brush, water, and ink and remarkably resilient grayscale won out. Another surprise was the apparent influence this particular work had on later European drawing. Not only could one see influence this work had on the spot mark and stipple-making of Van Gogh, Seurat, and numerous others, but one could register the adaptation of the Eastern sense of flatness by the European moderns. Way ahead of its time. The creation of distance in Japanese painting is also different. It is not created through perspective but through subtle rendering of foreground versus background. Perhaps this means that mathematics is avoided, science left out? The space is metaphysical. Although there is atmosphere depicted, these images are not windows to fall through. The pictures always remain pictures. James Ensor was another artist who picked up on this technique and borrowed from the more cartoonishly characterized people depicted. These weren’t the first cultural borrowings
between East and West. Each eventually shared industrial secrets of mechanized
warfare which did neither side any good but eventually led to the modern
Japan. In art, perhaps there was a real connection and crossover between
the Japanese ways with flatness and how European abstraction became one
early catalyst to modernism. Modern art was not so Eurocentric after all!?
That was a significant discovery and can be certainly compared with the
huge follow-through now of Japanese influence. Today’s Manga and
Anime have the giant waves with figures, including ships of World War
II, which seem to mark the bygone days. Across the board, the work makes
less distinction between fine or commercial use. It is filled with dialogue,
text, spaceships, robots, sex, and apocalypse; but most of all, it has
the most familiar Japanese calling card: flatness. Back to InLiquid's Commentary section index © 2007 James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; image copyright ©Philadelphia Museum of Art |
