Japan's Picasso of the Flowers

Blue Wind blows new life into an ancient art

"There are many beautiful things," Sofu Teshigahara has written. "The silent beauty of a flower surpasses them all. Among beautiful women there are said to be silent beautiful women, but none can compare with the silent flower." Sofu (the name means Blue Wind) is revered for such views in a land where a beautiful blossom is a benison. Round, gnome-like Teshigahara, 77, is Japan's most innovative and successful master of the ancient art of ikebana, which bears about the same relationship to flower arranging as usually practiced in the West as Rachmaninoff to country rock. Within that art, Sofu is commonly referred to as "the Picasso of flowers."

Sofu's Sogetsu (Grass Moon) school not only has a multifoliate following (more than a million dues-paying members) in Japan but has won converts and mounted shows from Moscow to Milan, Manhattan to Paris (where Sofu was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor). Last week in Tokyo he formally opened his school's eleven-story headquarters building, designed by Japanese Architect Kenzo Tange. It overlooks the palace of Crown Prince Akihito, whose family has traditionally been a patron of the flower art.

Ikebana has been entwined in Buddhism almost since the religion was introduced to Japan in the mid-6th century; it started with floral offerings laid at the altars. Sofu has made it a highly secular art and brought it into the age of abstract expressionism. His Grass Moon school has gone beyond the simple (but stunning) classical ikebana arrangements of a bent twig and a dewy blossom arrayed in a water vase or a bamboo tube. In containers that may be ceramic sculptures or Chinese wine kegs, Sofu will blend the blooms with shells, stones, iron, leaves, driftwood, dried grass, dead flowers or dyed feathers. Explaining his break with tradition, he once proclaimed: "We should always look forward to a fresh and vivid world and not become buried in retrospection."

Sofu is not so much an iconoclast as a breath of Blue Wind in Japan's traditionally hermetic culture. He is an accomplished painter, in both Oriental and Occidental styles. His spiny wooden and metal sculptures have been exhibited in New York, Milan and Paris. He is considered by some to be among his country's finest calligraphers. The ikebana that the Grass Moon master teaches and practices appeals to modern Japanese--and Westerners--for whom visual impact is more important than spiritual complexities.

The son of Wafu (Harmonious Wind), a master ikebanist of the Misho school, young Sofu found himself disenchanted by what he called the "shackles of tradition. You could produce a masterpiece only when you succeeded in emulating 17th century masters in all possible details." At 18 he rebelled and invented an ikebana all his own. When he told his father it represented "an extension of his individualism," Wafu slapped his face. Seven years later the upstart left home to found his own school where his works could reflect his "burning and brimming emotion." Now his son, Hiroshi, 50, a famed film director (Woman in the Dunes) is vice president of Sofu's company and its chief ceramicist; his beautiful daughter, Kasumi, 45, also a vice president, is almost as celebrated a practitioner of ikebana as her father.

Thanks to an elaborate system of dues and payments for an arduously achieved series of diplomas, plus earnings from his many books, a monthly magazine and lecture fees, exquisite amounts of yen flow in to Blue Wind. It is only his due. Says Sofu: "If I were not around, ikebana could never have come anywhere near its present flowery apex." Sofu travels in a chauffeured white Cadillac and has a Western-style house that reportedly cost $830,000. In it, he has a regal art collection. Yes, the Picasso of Flowers owns several canvases by Picasso, the Sofu of painting.

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