SACKLER EXHIBITION DRAWS COMPARISONS BETWEEN EAST ASIAN PAINTING AND JAPANESE LACQUER DESIGN

Released: September 11, 1998
Contact: Kate McShea Ewen
(617) 495-2397

The special exhibition Nature As Metaphor: Paintings from China, Korea, and Japan will be on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum from September 12, 1998 through July 18, 1999. A companion exhibition to Symbol and Substance: The Elaine Ehrenkranz Collection of Japanese Lacquer Boxes, on view at the Sackler from September 26 1998 through January 3, 1999, Nature as Metaphor reveals that similar themes and styles inform East Asian paintings and Japanese lacquer designs alike. Japanese lacquers manifest a pictorialism unknown in China's carved cinnabar lacquers or in Korea's mother-of-pearl-inlaid lacquers. The birds and flowers, and even the figures and landscapes, that ornament Japanese lacquers find parallels in painted screens and scrolls. In traditional Japan, artists such as Ogawa Haritsu (1663-1747) and Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891), among others, were as well known for their lacquers as for their paintings, a circumstance that naturally forged close links between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional arts; by contrast, such breadth of proficiency was virtually unknown amongst artists in China and Korea. Thus, the exhibition, which includes nearly one-hundred scrolls, album pages, ceramics, fans and other decorative art objects, will help to place Japanese lacquer in the greater context of East Asian art. Nature as Metaphor is organized by Robert D. Mowry, curator of Chinese art. The Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway.

Nature as Metaphor also introduces a selection of later Chinese, Korean and Japanese paintings that feature the details of nature, rather than its vast panorama, as their principal subject matter. Although the landscape, with its towering mountains and rushing streams, was the most important subject matter of later East Asian painting, it was never the only focus. The human figure also occupied a distinguished place as a subject in the painting of East Asia as did the flora and fauna of nature. The paintings encompass a wide range of themes and styles but focus on that genre known as bird-and-flower painting. These same themes frequently grace Chinese, Korean, and Japanese lacquers, ceramics, and other decorative arts of the day. East Asian artists developed rich traditions of bird-and-flower painting, the plants, in particular, often standing as symbols of human values.

Visitors to the exhibition will want to see the humorous scroll painting by Ogawa Haritsu who is featured in Symbol and Substance with a number of excellent examples of Japanese lacquer boxes. The painting, The Courtesan Eguchi as the Bodhisattva Fugen with a White Elephant, depicts a beautiful, contemporaneously dressed Japanese woman standing in clouds above the dim specter of a boat and beside a rather imaginatively rendered elephant. It refers to the story of the famous twelfth-century courtesan Eguchi, who was believed to have achieved such a high degree of enlightenment that she was actually an emanation of the Boshisattva Samanthabhadra (Japanese, Fugen Bosatsu), who is often depicted riding on a white elephant. Ogawa Haritsu, who is best known by the sobriquet Ritsuo, was strongly influenced by Chinese art and is credited with the invention of a number of difficult illusionistic lacquering techniques.

Another painting of note is Shibata Zeshin's tiny urushi-e painting Mountain Landscape with Flying Goose and Rising Moon, a picture executed in lacquer. Zeshin was a gifted and multi-faceted artist who worked in two distinctive media, lacquer and painting. Trained early on as a lacquer artist, Zeshin was sent to study with various established painters in order to improve his sense of design. From that time on he began producing both innovative paintings in a traditional Japanese style and tours-de-force lacquers. Much later in life he began to paint urushi-e-an exacting art form he himself developed that won him much notoriety but which proved to be beyond the capabilities of any of his followers. Mountain Landscape with Flying Goose and Rising Moon is one page from an album of sixteen lacquer paintings and, characteristically, does not betray the painfully slow and difficult nature of working in this potentially toxic, labor-intensive medium.

Gold leaf, the most important material employed in decorating Japanese lacquers, also plays a significant role in Japanese painting and calligraphy, where it is sometimes used for pictorial description but where it is occasionally used for mere embellishment of the silk or paper ground. A section of a handscroll mounted as a hanging scroll in the exhibition, which is decorated with silver and gold and silver leaf, exemplifies a Japanese fascination with sprinkled gold and silver decoration that found its ultimate expression in maki-e (sprinkled design) lacquer. The portion of the scroll, produced in the Heian period (c. 1150) by an unknown Japanese artist, describes the story of the Bodhisattva Medicine King (Yakuo Bosatsu) from Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra. The extant text lists the disease-curing blessings promised to all who worship the Lotus Sutra . Delicately painted lotus plants line the upper and lower edges of the composition.

Three important examples of "bird-and-flower" painting that also exhibit similar motifs as those found in Japanese lacquers are a hanging scroll, Branch of Blossoming Plum, by Liu Shih-ju (Chinese, 1517-after 1601) and two album leaves, Wagtail on a Bramble and Wagtail on a Rock amidst Pinks, attributed to Cho Chi-un (Korean, born 1637).

A native of Shan-yin (modern Shao-hsing) in Chekiang province, Liu Shih-ju was one of the foremost specialists of ink plum in the sixteenth century. He is said as a boy to have been deeply impressed by the work of a renowned fourteenth-century plum blossom painter, Wang Mien (1287-1359) and to have vowed to devote his life to mastering the subject painted by this master. Not content with merely copying, Liu wandered the hills of his district studying plum trees to enrich his understanding of the subject. Because it blooms in February, before donning its leaves, the Chinese plum (Prunus mume) is associated with winter and is regarded as a symbol of strength in the face of adversity. In addition, its blossoms symbolize feminine beauty and its weathered trunk the humble scholar.

Cho Chi-un and his father, Cho Sok (1595-1668), rank among the most important painters of the mid-Choson period (1392-1910). The father and son are best known for their paintings of birds, usually of magpies but occasionally of wagtails and others, as seen in the handsome leaves Wagtail on a Bramble and Wagtail on a Rock amidst Pinks. Attesting to their mastery of brush and ink, Cho Chi-un and his father typically forsook the use of outlines, relying instead on the hard edges of carefully controlled ink washes. These two album leaves rank among the finest works attributed to Cho Chi-un.

Another important and entertaining Japanese painting is Gibbons Playing in an Old Tree Along the Banks of a Stream from the Edo period, c. 1630 (artist unknown). Three gibbons-a species of tailless apes that superficially resemble monkeys-hang from a tree branch in a configuration commonly known as "monkey trying to catch a reflection of the moon in the water," a favorite Zen theme satirizing human folly. Resembling humans in look and behavior, monkeys were closely observed and depicted in Chinese paintings as early as the thirteenth century, and in Japanese paintings in the fourteenth century by Zen monk painters of the Muromachi period (1392-1568). The Japanese had a special fondness for gibbons, as they were native to Japan. In addition to their Zen connotations, monkeys were connected to a popular belief, originating in China, that these animals were guardians of horses. In Japan the belief appealed particularly to the samurai whose horses were a symbol of power and of military might. From the viewpoints of both Zen and their role as guardians, monkeys became an appropriate painting theme to decorate samurai mansions and castles.

Nature as Metaphor: Paintings from China, Korea, and Japan is supported with funds from the John M. Rosenfield Teaching Exhibition Fund.

RELATED EVENT
M. Victor Leventritt Symposium
The Art of Japanese Lacquer
Saturday, September 26, 1998, 9:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Arthur M. Sackler Museum Lecture Hall
Free with complimentary parking, for more information please call (617) 495-4544
Focusing on one of the most elegant and diverse of such assemblages outside of Japan, Symbol and Substance: The Elaine Ehrenkranz Collection of Japanese Lacquer Boxes celebrates the Art Museums' 1996 acquisition of this fine collection and presents these works to our audience for the first time. The exhibition features fifty-six lacquer boxes ranging in date from the Muromachi through Edo period (mid-fourteenth through mid-nineteenth century), and seeks to explain not only their aesthetic beauty and symbolism, but also the intricate planning, painstaking labor, and supreme artistry that determined their construction and elaborate decoration. The specialists brought together for the day-long symposium will present lectures and films on various aspects of East Asian lacquer, providing an in-depth introduction to this vitally important artistic medium.

Schedule:

The M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Fund was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and greater Boston communities.

The exhibition Symbol and Substance: The Elaine Ehrenkranz Collection of Japanese Lacquer Boxes is supported with funds from the David A. Ellis Oriental Art Fund and the John M. Rosenfield Teaching Exhibition Fund.

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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and to all on Saturday mornings and all day on Wednesdays. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June; Wednesdays only in July and August. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.