Page 12 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

i. the roots of rinpa in early seventeenth-Century Japan

The glossy purple-black of the poem’s words blends incredibly with those leaves.

Such a unique feeling for spacing, placing, and spotting has never elsewhere
been exhibited in the world’s art. Koyetsu’s is as new a species in spacing as
Shakespeare’s is a new species in drama.

— ERnEST F. FEnolloSA, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art 1

“Rinpa” is a modern term referring to a distinctive style of Japanese pictorial art
that arose in the early seventeenth century and which has continued into modern
times. literally “school of Kōrin,” Rinpa derives its name from the celebrated painter

ogata Kōrin, yet there was never a Rinpa “school” in the traditional Japanese
sense of masters training apprentice-heirs in a workshop setting or passing down
model books to sons or selected pupils. Rather, the term (which can also be
spelled “Rimpa”) is art-historical shorthand for various individual or workshop

artists across several generations who shared a set of stylistic preferences and
brush techniques.
The Rinpa aesthetic embraces bold, exaggerated, or purely graphic renderings
of natural motifs as well as formalized depictions of fictional characters, poets,

and sages. Underlying Rinpa design sensibilities is a tendency toward simplifica-
tion and abbreviation, often achieved through a process of formal exaggeration.
Rinpa is also celebrated for its use of lavish pigments, conspicuous or sometimes
subliminal references to traditional court literature and poetry, and eloquent experi-

mentation with calligraphy. Central to the Rinpa aesthetic is the evocation of nature
as well as eye-catching compositions that cleverly integrate text and image.
This volume surveys the process by which Rinpa artists of successive genera-
tions sought inspiration from nature in creating innovative designs that balance

realism with formalization. While the essay traces the development of Rinpa, high-
lighting the school’s most prominent proponents and introducing its distinctive
technical innovations, the thematic sections of the catalogue give concise overviews
of the primary pictorial motifs in the Rinpa repertoire. In contrast to previous

examinations of Rinpa, here the movement’s traditional literary and poetic sub- designing nature
strate, the refined culture of the Heian court (794 – 1185), is considered to have been
neither particularly exalted by Rinpa painters or calligraphers as a subject nor the

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