365 Days at the Met

I come back to the theme that marked my entry into the Japanese galleries: how little I know about this country's history and art and culture.  My brief introductory exploration of these galleries only emphasizes how much I have to learn. Two things occur to me, though: 1) Japanese art would not be possible without Chinese art. There are so many ways in which the Japanese borrowed both subjects and styles of depiction from the Chinese, although they may have added their own special and distinctive touches (painting on folding screens, for instance). I'm not bad at distinguishing Florentine from Sienese paintings of the 14th century (or so I'd like to think, anyway!), but I am not sure that I could accurately identify many scroll paintings as Chinese or Japanese. 2) The representation of nature seems central to Japanese art. I realize that what I have seen in the Japanese galleries is part of a special exhibit whose theme is the depiction of nature, and that Japanese p...

October 19, 2018 Today's visit is to Gallery 232, the last of the Japanese galleries, whose central display raises troubling questions about art and nature, about  life and death, about art and ethics. There's a temptation to write about something, anything, else- the beautiful ikebana display of fuchsia-hued orchids in a corner, a painting showing two calligraphic characters that makes clear the pictograph origins of the character for "horse" - you can aee the animal's  four legs and flowing mane and tail in the strokes that the character comprises. But there is no avoiding confrontation with the main display, a taxidermied stag perhaps 6 feet high at the tip of its antlers, that is completely covered by clear glass spheres of different sizes, ranging from less than an inch to perhaps a foot in radius. The spheres have a magnifying function, and through the larger ones, you can see the slicked down hair of the embalmed animal and, more startlingly, its...

October 18, 2018 Gallery 231 has a large and varied display of screen paintings (many of courtesans in elaborate attire), landscape and seascape woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai, and both landscape and bird-and-flower woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. (Both these artists worked in the first half of the 19th century, I learn.)  Large cases also display two kimonos. At first, I found the color combinations on one of these jarring - olive, mustard yellow, salmon, brown, blue, all against a dark plum background with a pink facing. Now I really love the way the colors work together - though I might still skip the pink facing. In today's entry, I want to compare two prints, perhaps 14 inches high and 7 inches wide, of the same subject -mallard ducks - by Hiroshige. On both prints, the same haiku is shown. It reads: "A duck quacks- as the wind wrinkles- the face of the water." The print on the bottom  really seems to illustrate the haiku, which is writ...

October 15, 2018 Gallery 230 contains a handful of works that are mostly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several of these works, according to the captions, reflect the infusion of Western naturalism into the representation of traditional Japanese subjects. One exception is a large folding screen depicting a peacock sitting on a bough, his tail spread out behind him and occupying a  good half of the panel, while  his drab-colored mate looks on. Although the birds' plumage is presented in great detail, the screen as a whole strikes me as flat and decorative rather than naturalistic, especially because the blue "eyes" in the peacock's tail feathers stand out against a gold ground. It looks like something Klimt would have painted, if Klimt had been Japanese. Today's object is a silk scroll painting, perhaps 48 inches high and 18 inches wide, of a tiger. It was made by Kisi Ganku (1749-1838) in the early 19th century. Ganku, I read, was renowne...

October 4, 2018 Gallery 228 contains six painted scrolls from the Maruyama-Shijo school, whose artists, according to the caption, combined decorative and realistic elements in their works.  I cannot say that I see much realism in today's object, one of these screen paintings, perhaos 26 inches long and 16 inches high, that was executed by the school's founder, Maruyama Okyo, in 1769. Indeed, of all the things I have written about so far, this one seems the most enigmatic, the one that requires the closest looking. At first, I can barely discern that the subject is shore birds- this from the long dark bills and dots of ink that serve for eyes. I read the caption and see that that, more specifically, the painting is of white herons, and then I see the thin crests on the back of the heads of two birds shown in profile. But really, the birds' bodies are not depicted at all; the forms emerge only by being silhouetted against a light gray wash, where four bamboo stalks...

October 1, 2018 I 'm a bit confused about how the gallery numbers posted in the museum correspond, or don't, with those shown on the museum map. So I am not sure exactly where gallery 227 begins and ends. In any event, the works shown are part of a larger collection and share the theme "The Poetry of Nature." The paintings are from the Edo period (1615-1868), Edo being the former name of Tokyo. They exemplify several schools of painting, which I must say that I find difficult to distinguish. Many of them also reflect Chinese influence, and I am not sure I would be able to tell some of the Japanese landscapes from Chinese ones; they adopt similar motifs (mountains, waterfalls, streams, gentlemen drinking tea in pavillions, etc.). That said, one landscape depicting these motifs is painted on a 12-panel screen, and I don't recall seeing screen paintings in the Chinese galleries, while the Japanese galleries are full of them. A distinctly common-sense, non-c...