Page 270 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

fig-4
Ogata Kôrin,
The Eight-Fold Bridge,
right screen of a pair of
six-panel screens;
ink, color, and gold on paper,
3
70.5 x 146.3 (27 Ax 5772),
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York

269

This ancient convention of suggesting classical places by means of scenic markers was pared
down to its elegant minimum by painters of the Rinpa school during the seventeenth century. The
eight-fold bridge episode furnished one of the most easily identifiable, hence most popular, points of
entry into the courtly past, even for those with a shaky knowledge of it. Prostitutes could wear the
iris motif on their robes with the assurance that the allusion would be recognized (see cat. 252).
The Ogata brothers, Kórin and Kenzan, exploited the eight-fold bridge motif in lacquer, ceramic,

and painting. Kôrin (1658 -1716), a professional painter, established a paradigm for the theme with an
economy of motif and a maximum of sumptuousness (fig. 4). He reduced the motifs to two: the monu-
mental iris, painted simply but sensuously in two colors of expensive lapis lazuli with malachite green
stems, and the bridge, wittily textured with his signature puddles of pigment. Kórin also painted the
motif on Kenzan's pottery. 20
The contrast between Kôrin's version and that of his brother Kenzan (1663 -1743) reveals
the flexibility of Rinpa landscape. Kenzan's biography shows a man whose temperament mirrors the
Chinese recluse-literatus. While still young, Kenzan adopted the name Shinsei (Deep Meditation)
and moved to a "retreat" in Omuro, outside Kyoto, which became the center of a salon of learned and
lofty people. His interests embraced Chinese and Japanese culture alike — he was too multifaceted
to be pinned down to either. Kenzan was thus no ordinary artisan. He was among the earliest Japanese
potters to sign his pots, thereby making his own subjectivity an essential component of his product.
His works have an individualist directness absent in Kôrin's polished screen.
Kenzan imparted an innovative twist to his "nostalgia-scape" of the eight-fold bridge (cat. 163).
Although the blue pigment on the irises has been completely lost in places, the painting is colorful
and richly textured in the "boneless" technique of painting without outlines. The work is more casually
executed than others of this school, such as Watanabe Shikô's Flowers and Trees of the Four Seasons
(cat. 162). Kenzan embedded the images in calligraphy (part of the prose introduction plus the poem)
that is so densely written as almost to sink the image into the background, evoking but not replicating
the traditional decorated papers of the classical age. Kenzan, moreover, is the sole performer in this
rendition of the ancient "three perfections": painting, calligraphy, and poetry. Since professional artists