Page 40 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

stage for the legend of Tanabata, a story from East Asian themselves as adherents of the Rinpa school, their works
folklore in which the Weaver Maiden (represented by the draw on the same aesthetic approaches to natural forms
star Vega) and her beloved, the Herdboy (the star Altair), underlying the work of all the premodern artists intro-

are able to meet in the sky only once a year, on the sev- duced in this volume.
enth day of the seventh month of the lunisolar calendar, In the epigraph to part three of this essay, Kamisaka
the date on which the Star Festival has long been cele- Sekka looks back to Kōrin as a revolutionary in taste and

brated in Japan. identifies him as the sole creator of “pure nihonga.”
The Rinpa aesthetic likewise permeates the realm of We can only speculate whether Kōrin, who was trained in
contemporary Japanese craft-art, which continues to enjoy traditional Chinese as well as yamato-e styles, would have
strong international appeal. The ceramic artist Wakao viewed such an observation as encomium or disparage-
Toshisada (b. 1932) employed age-old techniques to inject a ment. The fact remains, however, that the pictorial idiom

dynamic Rinpa mode into his works, including a platter that Kōrin consolidated in the early eighteenth century,
with a motif of cranes traversing what we may imagine is with its remarkable propensity to abbreviate, formalize,
the rising sun of the new Year (cat. 59), an ancient motif and, in effect, “design” nature, was recognized both in his

here given startling new life. The lacquer artist okada own day and in successive generations, and that it eventu-
Yūji (b. 1948), who occasionally borrowed directly from ally earned international acclaim as a distinctly Japanese
traditional Rinpa motifs, created a purely abstract ren- means of pictorial expression.
dering of wave patterns using mother-of-pearl and the
labor-intensive dry-lacquer technique (kanshitsu), both

adapted and updated from the Edo period (cat. 46). In
glasswork, Fujita Kyōhei’s (1921 – 2004) lidded box embel-
lished with red and white blossoms evokes Kōrin but is

also an utterly modern experiment in abstract coloration
(cat. 74). nakagawa Mamoru’s (b. 1947) Clearing of the
Evening Sky (Sekisei), a bravura display of metalwork,
extracts the purity of clouds lifting over landscape forms,
again bringing Rinpa into the twenty-first century

(fig. 12). Even if none of these artists would identify

Fig. 12 nakagawa Mamoru (b. 1947). Clearing of the Evening Sky (Sekisei ), 2005.
flower vase; cast alloy of copper, silver, and tin with inlays of copper, silver, designing nature
3
13
3
and gold, h. 8 /4 in. (22.3 cm), W. 9 /16 in. (25 cm), d. 6 /4 in. (17.2 cm).
the Metropolitan Museum of art, new york; William r. appleby fund, 2008
(2008.464)

39