Monday, Mar. 15, 1971
Screens Against the Wind
By Robert Hughes
Folding painted screens are an integral part of Japanese architectural thought: they occupy a shadow line between architecture and decoration. These delicate panels of rice paper stretched on lacquered frames, held together by paper or leather hinges, were the remote ancestors of today's plebeian room dividers and office partitions. Their name, byobu, means "protection from wind." From the 7th century, when the first byobu were introduced from China, the art of screen painting absorbed the best talents in Japan. Perhaps because, being in everyday domestic use, they were more liable to damage than scrolls, there are comparatively few fine examples in the hands of U.S. collectors. In a show drawing together the best screens in all New York collections, both public and private, the Asia House has mounted an exemplary exhibition of this ancient art.
By the 16th century, screen painting had become as central to the visual culture of traditional Japan as fresco painting was to Italians. The very size of byobu--which run to a width of twelve feet and more--was an exacting test of the painter's virtuosity in handling watercolor or sumi ink across large areas; it made the paintings into a kind of environment conducive to meditation and withdrawal. Because they were made for domestic use, the imagery of byobu is generally secular. But Western categories of what is or is not secular make less sense in the context of Japanese art, in which aesthetics is raised to the status of ethics, and any image, from a crane stepping into water to the gesture of a dancing girl, can disclose a web of references to safari, or illumination.
The climax of screen painting occurred during the Momoyama period (1573-1614) when a group of Japanese warlords moved Japan's capital from Kyoto to a fishing village called Edo, now the site of modern Tokyo. Their gloomy castles with gloomy interiors needed an especially sumptuous kind of decoration. Screen painters like Kaiho Yusho supplied it. Yusho's Fish Nets, with its jagged forms of dark blue sea and gold-leaf land, traversed by the swooping rhythms of the nets strung out to dry on poles, transforms an everyday sight into an event of monumental starkness and beauty. Fish Nets alludes to the passage of the seasons by showing reeds at different stages of growth, from spring on the extreme right to winter in the upper left. Elaborate genre subjects occur. A six-fold byobu by an anonymous 17th century artist (below) shows a house of pleasure --actually, a combination of country club and male brothel--and the diversions it provided: duck shooting, wrestling, dalliance, dance, all set down in minute and ceremonious detail. Fukae Roshu's Pass Through Mount Utsu, with its flattened, stylized mountain, green hills and brilliant red ivy tendrils hung against a spaceless ground of gold leaf, comes from a 10th century travel diary, the Tale of Ise. The voyaging hero has just given a mendicant priest a poem to take to a "lady in the capital"--
Beside Mount Utsu
In Suruga
I can see you
Neither waking
Nor, alas, even in my dreams.
Even still life could take on allegorical meaning. Whose Sleeves?, an exquisite 17th century painting of kimonos folded on a rack, was intended to evoke their absent owner even as an empty chrysalis implies the butterfly. Portraiture by absence: nothing could be more typical of that allusive quality in Buddhist art, which continues to perplex and delight Western minds.
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