Page 64 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

for free reinterpretation in an individual style, the wont of a talented calligra-
pher of Kōetsu’s status.
Kōetsu’s innovative style is particularly celebrated for the way in which he plays

with the reader’s expectations. Sometimes, for example, he inscribed kana charac-
ters in complex, archaic forms so that they resemble kanji (Chinese characters);
at other times he rendered kanji in such an abbreviated and delicate manner that at

first glance they resemble kana. Another characteristic of his handwriting style is a
sudden and conspicuous variation in stroke width, which according to orthodox
technique would usually be more modulated. Kōetsu was also a master of the art of
“scattered writing” (chirashigaki), in which the columns of a poem or letter are
written in varying lengths to create an attractive arrangement on the page. A love

poem rendered by Kōetsu on subtly decorated paper (cat. 9) must be read begin-
ning at the center of the page, and only after reading to the far left is the poem
completed by reading the columns on the far right.

Even in Kōetsu’s epistolary writings, including notes jotted off to friends,
we can detect his distinctive hand. In a letter announcing a tea gathering (cat. 11),
for example, the extreme variation in the size and style of the characters within
a single page demonstrates that the writer was conscious of impressing the recipi-
ent with his abilities in cursive script. The balance of dark and light, watery and

crisp characters is particularly effective, as is the use of chirashigaki. In this case,
Kōetsu employed an ancient convention of letter writing in which the ending
(usually on the far left) is completed at the far right of the page by going back and

writing columns of text in the margins of the opening lines. In effect, anyone read-
ing this letter must skip over alternating columns of characters when starting
the letter, since those belong to a postscript. At the end of the letter and the end
of the postscript, respectively, we can spot the calligrapher’s distinctive signa-
ture: a cipher conflating the two characters used to write his name.

Representing the courtier-calligrapher Nobutada’s celebrated brush-writing
style is a superb six-panel screen recently acquired by the Yale University Art
Gallery, New Haven, which features six waka by women poets of ancient times

rendered in large-character kana calligraphy (cat. 14). From the Metropolitan
Museum’s collection is a screen decorated with shikishi bearing waka and Chinese designing nature
poems juxtaposed together (cat. 15). The poems, taken from the famous Anthology
of Japanese and Chinese Poems (Wakan rōeishū), were compiled in the early eleventh

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