Sculpture in Cutting Steel

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the humiliations of Japanese history took place in September 1945, just after the start of the U.S. Occupation. General Douglas MacArthur decreed that every sword in Japan should be confiscated as a dangerous weapon. Out went the Jeeps, and thousands of blades, some dating back to the 10th century, were rounded up from museums, private collections and shrines.

It was a moment of utter mutual incomprehension between two cultures. The Japanese felt that their principal art was being looted from them, and they were right. Hundreds of ancient swords, including 42 documented National Treasures made between the 12th and 15th centuries, vanished as souvenirs and have never reappeared. The Americans thought they were guarding against insurgency, and they were wrong. The Nippon-to--"art swords"--were ritual and aesthetic objects, the core symbols of Shintoism, and would not have been used in combat.

Today an immense ignorance of Japanese swords prevails outside Japan. There is one great private collection of them in the U.S., gathered over 40 years by Dr. Walter Compton of Elkhart, Ind. Last week 46 of his classical blades--the tachi or long cavalry sword, the shorter katana and the dirks known as tantos and wakizashis--went on view at Manhattan's Japan Society. The show is a scholarly event of the first importance, and its catalogue--mainly written by Japan's leading student of blades, 29-year-old Ogawa Morihiro--becomes at one stroke the standard text on its subject in English. But even for the non-expert the show is of overwhelming beauty.

Taxing Subtleties. The art of making steel reached its peak in Japan before the 16th century. Our present technology can dump men on the moon, but it cannot match the crystalline structure, hardness, flexibility and exquisite surface pattern of these ancient blades made in charcoal forges. Compared to Nippon-to, the swords of Europe are kitchen cutlery.

One can study a Renaissance bronze or a medieval ivory in a vitrine and appreciate it, though with some loss. But with a Japanese sword, appreciation is more difficult. The visual subtleties of a great blade are taxing. No gaze through a glass case can substitute for the experience of holding and turning it under natural light, observing the grain of the steel surface, the contrasts of polish, the relentlessly delicate curves of ridge and back, and the hamon or temper pattern--hard as diamonds and impalpable as blown frost--along its cutting edge.

The swords are, to Western eyes, paradoxical. At first, you cannot fail to respond to them as weapons, designed to cut and kill. But at the same time they are quite untactile. Bear down on the ha, the edge, and it will (to put it mildly) hurt you, being of surgical sharpness. Yet you hurt it. The skin of the steel can be ruined by the moisture and acids left by one fingerprint; breathe on it and it will begin to rust in 30 minutes. The blades conjure up tension between one's senses of sight and touch--threat and seduction, attraction and recoil. In the end, sight wins. The blades envelop themselves in august distances, and are wholly visual sculpture.

For this reason, connoisseurs of Nippon-to are apt to regard the military uses of their swords as a distraction, even as an embarrassment. The annals of samurai conduct are filled with prodigies of sword wielding: as recently as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, for instance, a Japanese officer charged a Russian machine gun, so the story goes, and cut clean through its barrel and water jacket with one swipe of his tachi. But the art swords in this show were not meant for such ends. Their unblemished state testifies that they can rarely, if ever, have seen battle. Kept in a Shinto shrine or an armory, polished no more often than a Rembrandt is cleaned, they are among the best-preserved artifacts of their age.

One example is the glittering arc of Kunimune, a late 13th century blade that Dr. Compton bought from a job lot offered by a Midwestern gun dealer. The sword, which had been looted from its shrine in Kyushu by a G.I. and has since been restored to Japan as a gift, is considered by Ogawa Morihiro "perfect in every aspect among all the existing national treasure blades." At first sight, it is difficult to imagine that the sword was finished by a contemporary of Giotto, a quarter of a century before Dante began writing the Divine Comedy.

Bark and Catfish Skin. Japanese swords have virtually no parallels in Western art. Only one shape in our cul ture seems to rhyme with the strict parabolas of a tachi's profile: Brancusi's Bird in Flight, with its soaring curvature, immaculate surface and absolute finality of line. The resemblance is not merely formal. Just as the abstract contour of the Bird is rich with allusions to nature, so the blade contains landscapes.

The terms that describe the ji-hada or patterns left on the steel by repeated folding and hammering--pine tree bark, catfish skin, straight grain and sugu-ut-suri, "a straight misty line of cloud"--are all derived from nature.

The edge pattern, made by painting a slurry of clay and steel filings along the blade just before its last firing and quenching, is even more pictorial. Its crystalline opacities resemble those of classical sumi-e ink painting, suggesting hills, river currents, islands or the wreathing of vapor. Dr. Compton likes to compare Kunimune's hamon to "low-lying mist on a swamp, with searchlights playing over it." These configurations are not seen as decoration, like inlay work or chasing on a Western sword.

They are an integral part of the blade's meaning, and their harmony with the larger forms, the curvature and taper, the size and type of the point, determines the significance of the work.

The idea that a sword could be valued as a manifestation of "nature" is peculiar to Japanese aesthetics. Without it, the blades would just be tools--ferally efficient but lacking the sublime distillation of will and spirit that, flowing in the austere metal, was once the essence of the smith's art.

Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.