Spare Clarity

By ROBERT HUGHES

Wabi is one of the key ideas in traditional Japanese culture. It has to do with spareness, poverty and austerity. A teahouse, made of bare, unlacquered wood, with its straw thatch and river stones, displays wabi. Wabi is the rough, salty irregularity of a classical tea bowl, the plain twig in a flower arrangement, the coarse black cotton of a kimono. Its meaning extends beyond the sphere of aesthetics into a more general discipline; it suggests an uncluttered and precisely lived life in which the individual is brought into a clear relationship with nature and with his society. No matter how sumptuous or even exclusive they may be, the masterpieces of traditional Japan stake their existence on this perfect clarity of image and technique. Such is the lesson of two fall exhibitions of Japanese art, seen at its utmost pitch of refinement. One is a selection of 235 works of the Rimpa school--scrolls, screens and lacquer--at the Tokyo National Museum, the other a show of inros, netsukes and sword guards from the Charles A. Greenfield collection at Manhattan's Japan House.

Boneless Brush. The word Rimpa means, literally, "school of precious gems." Though the Rimpa school spanned 250 years and produced some of the finest decorative art Japan--or the world at large--has seen, its members were few and their identity often vague. Its founder was Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637). In 1615, a warlord gave Koetsu some land in the mountains around Kyoto. The artist laid out a village there: papermakers, dyers, weavers, calligraphers, lacquer masters and painters settled in it, with Koetsu presiding over them all. The collaborations that followed make it excruciatingly hard to determine which artist did what painting; Koetsu's style is almost indistinguishable from the early manner of his pupil Sotatsu.

Koetsu and Sotatsu reacted against the hard, linear, brushpoint drawing derived from the Chinese that dominated Japanese art in the early 17th century; instead they used the mokkotsu or "boneless" technique, dropping pigment into wet pigment, staining and mottling the shapes of flowers, twigs and thunder-god with infinitely subtle gradations of color, preparing the paper with washes of gold or silver dust or with a snowy, glistening mixture of eggshell white and flakes of mica. These hallmarks--which must in their time have seemed very "Japanese," in elaborate contrast to the austerities of Chinese brush technique--helped form the Rimpa style, and were superbly developed by Ogata Korin, born a century after Koetsu. A part of Korin's signature (see calligraph) is now used as the symbol for the Rimpa style.

Korin, it seems, was one of those exquisitely chic and talented spendthrifts whom the Japanese remember with fond envy. The son of a wealthy artist-merchant in Kyoto, he dissipated a fortune by such gestures as wrapping his box lunch for a cherry blossom-viewing picnic in costly gold-leafed and painted bamboo sheaths, then nonchalantly flinging them away into the river. But he was no dilettante. Korin's work embraced most mediums, even the decoration of plates, on which he collaborated with his brother Ogata Kenzan to produce works like the hexagonal iron-brown dish bearing a figure of Juro, the dumpy little god of longevity. Korin had an almost miraculous sense of materials; witness his writing box, with a design of irises, pool and bridge. The iris leaves and stems are gold lacquer, the flowers mother-of-pearl inlay, the bridge columns are rendered in silver while the planks, which run diagonally across the lid and down the sides, are dull inlaid lead. What Renaissance casket would not look fussy and florid beside this container? But it was in painting that Korin's virtuosity showed; especially in his screen Red and White Plum Trees. It is to Japanese decoration what Matisse's Red Studio is to modern decorative art.

Elegance. For Korin used traditional motifs: the S curve of the river, for instance, and its stylized scrolls of water, refer back to 16th century Momoyama screens. Yet he infused these motifs with a new, tense elegance. The line of the white plum branch, dipping down and then shooting up off the top of the screen, is electric. The river, boldly placed to unify the two separate screens, swirls with energy. Indeed, later artists bestowed his name on this way of painting water. "Korin waves" recur in a long screen of gray cranes by Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858). A copy of a Korin (now in the Freer Gallery), Kiitsu's frieze of birds, with their dipping beaks and stilted legs, is a distillation of variety in unity. Sakai Hoitsu's (1761-1828) screen of Thirty-Six Immortal Poets is virtually a compendium of Rimpa techniques and virtues: the sprightly drawing of flower and tendril; the formal presentation of each poet in a separate cartouche, as in a print. In his more realistic vein, as in a screen depicting Flowering Plants of Summer, Hoitsu possessed epigrammatic powers of observation: the fronds bend and bow under the summer rain, weaving a delicate lattice of green against the now tarnished silver ground.

With the Greenfield collection at Japan House, scale and focus change: it is a triumph of the small. "Intimacy" here is more than a catchword, for nearly every item in this array--reputedly the best private collection of its kind in the world--was designed to nestle in the hand, and their ravishing tactile subtleties are lost behind glass. The largest are Suzuribako or writing boxes: a 16th century case with a gold-lacquer hare, or Kinyosai's delicately humorous image of a lady spurting ink from her mouth onto a wall to form the characters for "perseverance in love."

Carved Toggles. Often in the West, miniatures compel the worthless gawking one reserves for Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peach-stone kitsch. Not in Japan, where the image and the scale were one--partly by a happy fluke of social pressure. The Imperial sumptuary laws forbade merchants and samurai to wear excessively rich garments, so male vanity expressed itself in three special kinds of objects: inros, the tiny compartmented cases for carrying seals, or later medicine; netsukes, the carved toggles that fastened the inros to one's sash; and tsubas, or sword guards. The amount of craft lavished on these small things almost surpasses belief. So, often, does their sculptural quality: witness Issan's tiny, writhing red dragon netsuke. To complete his inro bearing the motif of a Chinese ship, Ritsuo (1663-1747) had to apply some 80 coats of lacquer--the dangerously toxic sap from a Japanese relative of poison ivy. Lacquer is slow drying; it had to be left for days or even weeks between coats, and laboriously burnished with charcoal and powdered deer horn. To examine these objects is to realize how vast a language of craft has been lost to Japan, and to the world, since the 19th century.

The instinct for design required a counterpoint between the case and its toggle (usually made by different artists). Over the centuries, most inros have lost their netsukes, and one of the delights of the Greenfield collection is the care with which appropriate matching has been restored. Thus a war helmet and mask on Koma Kyuhaku's 18th century inro are complemented by a fierce little demon mask with ivory horns. In a sense, the extreme limit of aestheticization was reached by the makers of tsubas. Considered merely as an object, the 19th century sword guard of the blue-black copper alloy known as shakudo, inlaid with gold maple leaves (the gold patchy, as in autumn), is sumptuous enough. But the idea of dying with so delicate a work of art attached to one's stomach by two feet of razor-sharp steel could only have arisen in Edo Japan. .Robert Hughes

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