The Eagle & the God

In art, as in other human fields, history has been made by the mavericks. Last week Manhattan's Asia Institute was showing a pair of kakemonos (long vertical paintings) by one of Japan's great 19th Century painters: Kawanabe Kyosai, who knew exactly why he was kicking over the traces.

One kakemono is stylized--painted strictly according to Japanese convention. It represents a wind god with animal horns, ears, tusks and claws, plunging headlong, pop-eyed with fright, after his bag of wind.

The other kakemono is realistic, and proves that Kyosai was a sharp-eyed son of Japan's feudal age, which was, like Europe's, an age of falconry. It also shows why the wind god is in such a hurry: a naturalistically painted eagle, sudden as a thunderclap, is swooping down on him.

By his own account, Painter Kyosai was a problem child. He disliked cakes and toys, liked paddling after frogs. His first studied drawing, he recalled, was a frog he sketched in 1834--at the age of three.

By the time he was seven, Kyosai had become a full-fledged art student. He wrung the traditional Kano academy dry, and appropriated every technique of Japan's old masters. Then he opened his own highly unorthodox art school. For the edification of his students, he kept the school yard crammed with pets. Nature, Kyosai had decided, was more instructive than convention. He always knew that the eagle would eventually conquer the wind god.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.