The Emperor's Show

By ROBERT HUGHES

Some collections are more private than others, and for several hundred years, the art collection of the Japanese imperial household has been one of the least accessible in the world. Very few commoners, and even fewer foreigners, have entered the precincts within the moated palace in the center of Tokyo where it is kept. Although items from the imperial collections have gone on loan to Japanese museums, a representative selection has never been shown. But when Emperor Hirohito makes his visit to the U.S. next month, he will be the first Japanese-monarch to set foot on American soil; as a gesture of good will, 35 of his paintings, screens and objets d'art have been sent to precede him. The show opened last week at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and will move next month to the Japan House Gallery in Manhattan, whose enterprising director, Rand Castile, worked more than a year negotiating this coup.

It will provoke great curiosity. On the whole, the curiosity will be rewarded: there are splendid objects in the group (see color opposite and next page). The earliest is a 14th century hand scroll of portraits of Emperors, seated in their ceremonial robes like weighty butterflies. There is an exquisite passage from the Tale of Genji copied out on silver-dusted paper by the great 17th century calligrapher Konoe Nobutada. The screens include two designs of drying fish nets, probably by Kaiho Yusho (1533-1615)--resplendent documents of the moment when Japanese painting, having absorbed its Chinese influences, became fully Japanese.

Small Events. But the high points of the show are twelve hanging scrolls, six by Ito Jakachu and six by Sakai Hoitsu. These artists represent the poles of style and temperament in Edo period painting: Hoitsu with his feathery, elusive washes of ink painted wet into wet; Jakachu with his steely drawing and complicated patterns. Hoitsu was nobly born, the younger brother of a feudal lord. However, he wanted to paint, and, being a most elegant dilettante, educated to the fingertips, he ran through a succession of styles before fixing the manner of an earlier master, Ogata Korin, who had been dead for almost a century. But his own paintings were much less formalized than Korin's. Hoitsu was an exquisite observer of small events: a patch of lichen on the pale bark of a branch, rendered with a diffused blot of malachite green; the lively flutter of peony leaves, each surrounded, with a kind of inlaid distinctness, by a barely noticeable fringe of untouched background.

In 1823, when he was in his 60s, he produced one of the supreme examples of the art of color-painting on silk, the imperial collections' Flowers and Birds of the Twelve Months. It would be hard to imagine a subtler, less cluttered image of nature than the cherry branch and spray of white blossoms in the February scroll (opposite); in this whispering refinement, Hoitsu was far removed from the earlier Jakachu (1713-1800).

Jakachu has never been well represented in the West, mainly because his finest paintings, the almost legendary 30 scrolls depicting animals and plants, all belong to the imperial collections. To look at the dense patterns and twining lines of a Jakachu in reproduction is at first to be reminded of Victorian illustration, as though he were an Eastern Aubrey Beardsley or Arthur Rackham. Not so. In fact, he was nearer to being a cross, improbable as it may sound, between Audubon and Vincent Van Gogh. When Jakachu painted the arrogant feathers of a cock's ruff, each sharp quill imbued with fiery distinctness, he could give them the vitality of a Van Gogh sunflower. His range of notation, the "handwriting" that constitutes larger shapes, was astounding--as a scroll of shells and coral branches, stranded on a tidal beach among outrunning threads of water, attests. The aim of such work was encyclopedic; Jakachu wanted to give a complete account of known biological fact, and he was the most "scientific" artist Japan produced in the 18th century.

Decline of Taste. A quarter of the paintings in the show and most of the craft objects--porcelain, lacquer, carvings, metalwork--were made after 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Edo Bay like some astronaut landing on an unvisited planet. This marked the beginning of Japan's cultural infatuation with things Western and, by no coincidence, of the decline of traditional Japanese taste. The aesthetic slippage of the Meiji period could not be more vividly illustrated than by the objects chosen for this show. To take an English simile, if Queen Elizabeth II authorized an exhibition from the royal collections, half made up of Renaissance drawings by Leonardo, Michelangelo and others, the rest of cairngorms, antlers and Landseer spaniels from Balmoral, the effect would be roughly the same. In Japan, of course, anything collected by the Emperor or his ancestors is of immediate interest, since he is (or was until the U.S. occupation) a god. Nevertheless, it is rare to encounter an object as preposterous in its Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peachstone virtuosity as the dancer in full samurai armor chiseled by Unno Shomin, a late19th century court artist. It is less a sculpture than a mantelpiece ornament.

Even in painting, the traditional assurance was flickering out by the 1880s. One scroll by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), of a cataract thundering vertically into a gorge, has a real sense of sublimity--a white blade of water dividing the black walls of rock. But in general it is clear that in the expressive Chinese phrase, the "mandate of heaven" had been withdrawn from most traditional-style Japanese painting by the turn of the century. No matter; the viewer goes to this show for its older works, and they are superb.

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