ARTS
Great art from Japan
John McEwen
77 he Great Japan Exhibition (Royal -L Academy, Part 1 till 20 December; Part 2, 28 December to 21 February, 1982) certainly lives up to its title even if it is not quite as inclusive as it implies. The art surveyed is only that of the Edo Period, 1600-1868, categorised by the Japanese as the Early Modern period. The Edo Period began with the banishment of Christianity from Japan, and it was the fear that Christianity might return if economic contacts With Europe were retained, that led to the isolationism which is the political hallmark of the era. By 1639 Japanese citizens were forbidden to go abroad and all foreigners excluded except the Dutch and Chinese — whose ships were only allowed to trade under strict government regulation at the single port of Nagasaki. In the absence of the Christianity — particularly the Catholicism — that had briefly come to dominate the country, Buddhism returned, but more as a social convenience than an expression of religious faith. The Edo marks an era of secularisation, therefore, expressed in its art by an outburst of decoration and design at the expense of traditional religious subjects. There is little sculpture, much painting — most of the things, in fact, that embody Japan for the West: screens, fans, NO masks, kimonos, lacquer, elaborate Samurai armour, netsuke, the wood-block prints of Utamaro and Hokusai. 'The deficiency of religious sense encountered today among the Japanese is to be ascribed to the circumstances of Edo times,' writes Professor Masahide Bito in the splendid, and wonderfully cheap (£5.90), catalogue. It is this that makes the Edo Period so much closer in Spirit to the modern age than its fabled and, by the 19th century, quaint isolationism might lead one to suppose.
In matters of food and art the Japanese are gourmets rather , than gourmands. Sometimes, as in the tea ceremony, the sensual delights of both can be savoured at the same time. Art is an ultimate refinement, best understood and appreciated when the Perceptions of the viewer are also, through Peaceful circumstance or tranquillising ritual, ultimately refined. The scroll is taken from its drawer, the fragile screen is unfurled for a limited time and a specific occasion. Japanese art is a derivation of Chinese art, and in no way more than its practicality. The scroll is a picture taking up the minimum of space, the screen is also a tern-Porary wall. Many of the grandest pictures acted as sliding-doors. There is nothing outlandish about Edo art. It is unframed, unforbidding, undetached. However far removed from basic function, it nevertheless remains physically practical. The most elaborately sculpted netsuke still acts as a toggle, the most exquisite cup still holds tea. In Japan art seems at once less taken for granted than it is in the West and more integral to life. For this reason few of the treasures in the present exhibition have been publicly seen before, and never all at a go. To a Japanese the installation at the Academy, free of clutter though it is, must appear something of a jumble sale; to Western eyes it comes as a relief. You leave visually and intellectually satisfied, but not gorged. In half an hour you are ready to see the whole thing again.
Part of the credit for this effect must go to the exhibition's designers, the architect Kisho Kurokawa in association with Kiyoshi Awazu and Alan Irvine. At £2.2 million (a government indemnity looks after the insurance) the show is the most expensive ever mounted at the Academy, and an unprecedented £400,000 has been lavished on the installation. The place is transformed, several galleries having been reconstructed. In part, the complexity of the installation has been due to the exacting nature of the conservation requirements — the Japanese apparently being more strict than anyone in the world about this — but a significant part too is a matter of pure, and very successful, design. Lighting often sets a mood — portraits of the two dictators most important in shaping the policy of the Edo Period, great unifiers of Japan after a century of civil war, are hung at the outset in a room of semi-darkness eloquent of power and imposition. The gallery following it, devoted to the transitional Momoyama Period, is highly lit to emphasise the dawning of the new age, an era requiring the decorative trappings of power and a time also of peace that would lead eventually to a wealthy merchant class of artistic patrons. Decor emphasises the exhibits no less subtly. Fabrics have been specially dyed in neutral and sympathetically natural colours. Gallery 4, displaying objects of the more domestic side of early Edo life, is panelled throughout in Oregon pine veneer. The floor and walls of the central hall are lined with stainless steel and aluminium foil to dramatise the theatrical masks and costumes of NO. The climax of the exhibition takes the form of a dominating, centrally placed, magnificently lacquered and decorated palanquin, made for the wedding of a great 17th-century Shogun. Its obstructive position in the middle of the room is as symbolic of power as the darkness of Gallery 1; and the tyrannical nature of the man-borne object itself, the secrecy of its yoked cabin, is an equally powerful metaphor of the marital government, isolationist policy and inward looking social system that categorised the Edo Period as a whole.
Two aspects of the art have been especially emphasised: screen painting and costume. Examples can be found in most galleries whereas the display of other items is more concentrated. Attention is drawn to the superior quality of certain objects by the Japanese system of grading artefacts in much the same way as we do buildings. Best (of which there is one example) is for an item to be deemed a 'National Treasure', followed in order of merit by the categories 'Important Cultural Object' and 'Important Art Object'. About an eighth of the exhibition is of this rarity. Painting has been especially privileged and Sir Hugh Casson's stated hope in the Preface that the show will make the names of the great painters of Japan — Korin, Sotatsu, Okyo, Rosetsu — as famous in England as those of the Edo printmakers, certainly deserves to be realised. Specific names, of course, are one thing, general familiarity quite another. The briefest tour of the exhibition will reveal the extraordinary degree to which Edo culture has penetrated Western art and taste. Its influence on our painting alone is as prevalent today — something too often overlooked by the pundits — as ever it was in the time of the Goncourts. Inevitably, other, less happy, influences are also called to mind: all that muddy pottery beloved of Hampstead; all those garish designs of seasonal tints that go to the heads of suburban hostesses. But it is interesting to note too the extent of Western influence on Japan, encouraged if anything by a curiosity born of isolation: Shiko's sketchbook analyses of birds, more lively than most Western bird pictures; Hokusai's use of perspective and shading in his famous views of Fuji. Japanese art is a lesser affair than that of China, but it is perhaps for that very reason that the West has found it more approachable.
For conservation reasons many of the more fragile pieces will be replaced by items of equal standing for Part 2 of the show, turning it into virtually another exhibition. The catalogue, however, covers both Shows. Among the most prominent exhibitions that have mushroomed as a result of the Academy's initiative are One Thousand Years of Art in Japan (Colnaghi, 14 Old Bond Street, WI till 27 November); Chesel, Wheel and Brush (Bluett and Sons, 48 Davies Street, WI till 27 November); Bird and Flower Paintings (Milne Henderson, 99 Mount Street, WI till 11 December); Japanese Works of Art (Mayfair Hotel, Stratton Street, WI till 31 October); a oneman show of prints by Kiyoshi Awazu, codesigner of the Academy's exhibition (50 Earlham Street Gallery, WC2 till 8 November); the architecture of Kisho Kurokawa, fellow co-designer (Heinz Gallery, 21 Portman Square, WI till 19 December); and finally the Gallery Edo, 2 Old Bond Street, WI, which Opened this week with a mixed exhibition of Japanese and Chinese art (till the New Year).
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