Page 169 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

Sakai Hōitsu’s atmospheric Moon and Arrowroot Vine (cat. 89). By the nineteenth
century, such detailed realism reflected not only the study of natural sciences in
Japan but also the advent of the Maruyama­Shijō school, founded by Maruyama
­
Okyo, which made a specialty of naturalistic drawing and painting. Rinpa com­
positions nonetheless remained formalized and decorative to a certain degree and
detached from any recognizable landscape setting. As the modernist poet Marianne

Moore observed, “poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”
For Kōrin and his followers, we might say, painting was the art of creating imag­
inary gardens with real flowers.
Owing in part to Kōrin’s famed “Yatsuhashi” screen, irises became closely asso­
ciated with the Rinpa repertoire, and images of irises were widely disseminated

in the form of woodblock­printed books. As the decades passed, Rinpa renditions
of irises gradually shed their literary connotations, and in some Rinpa works an iris
is just an iris, as in Hōitsu’s graceful design for Ōson’s Drawing Manual, referring

to his own art name. Indeed, in Hōitsu’s masterfully painted triptych of the rising
sun and selected flora, we get the impression that the trees and flowers, which
represent a simultaneous display from all four seasons, are simply a celebration
of nature at its most beautiful (cat. 88). Similarly, his top pupil, Suzuki Kiitsu,
envisioned irises during a rain storm, with a water insect darting over the swirling

waves of the marsh (cat. 90). Kiitsu’s brilliant Morning Glories is a superb
example of screens made for purely decorative effect (cat. 91). In a subtle but sen­
suous painting Kiitsu rendered the same theme in ink and light colors using the

tarashikomi technique (cat. 92). Accompanying the painting is a poem praising
the flower by the celebrated Confucian scholar, poet, painter, and calligrapher
Kameda Bōsai (1752 – 1826). Ordained as a Rinpa theme by Kiitsu, the morning
glory, like the iris, was replicated in various permutations of woodblock printing
through modern times (cats. 93, 94).

In the highly stylized plant and floral motifs of fin­de­siècle Japanese lacquer,
ceramics, and cloisonné, we can observe an exchange of influence between the
aethestics of Rinpa and Art Nouveau, another movement that drew inspiration

from organic structures. Because Art Nouveau emerged from the same sensibili­
ties as Japonisme — a term referring to the widespread influence of Japanese
aesthetics in mid­nineteenth­century European art — there was in turn a revival
of certain traditional Japanese forms and motifs. The noted cloisonné enamel
flowers

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