Today Hokusai's Great Wave is one of the most recognisable images in the world. In fact Westerners tend to equate Japanese art with wood-block prints, which, as Timon Screech writes in Obtaining Images, 'would have chilled the blood of the shogunate and of most sober-minded people of the period'. To Japanese of the time, wood-block prints were akin to pin-up posters by and for the lower orders. Real art was very different.
Screech is Professor of the History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the author of memorably witty and insightful books such as Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan, 1720-1810, a study of prints that to Western eyes look decidedly pornographic. Obtaining Images is his most ambitious work yet, a crisply written and copiously illustrated account of Japanese art throughout the Edo period (1603-1868). In it he explores not just the art but its context: why it was made, for whom, how much it cost, who would have seen it, and what it meant to the people of the day.
A detail from a handscroll shows a bridge over the River Sumida in Edo, present-day Tokyo, bustling with people. But who would have commissioned it, and why? Works painted on folding screens, room dividers or scrolls to hang in alcoves were for public display, but a small painting on a fan or a handscroll, like this one, was for private perusal. People who seldom went out, such as high-ranking ladies, had handscrolls to while away the long hours, enabling them to picture the lively world outside their walls, which they had very little chance of ever seeing themselves.
The higher a person's rank, the more secluded their life was. Dutch merchants stationed in Nagasaki had an audience with the shogun once a year. When one merchant tried to sneak a look at him, an official promptly shoved his face down on the floor. A Japanese who went to Russia brought back a portrait of Catherine the Great. The revelation that there were countries where commoners could actually depict and see their ruler was so subversive that the traveller was locked away for the rest of his life.
This affected portraiture. If the artist, a lower-class man, was not allowed to enter your presence, let alone look at you, how could he paint your portrait? The Kanō, the official painters of the shogun's court, had military rank and could mix more freely with the higher orders. But they still couldn't look on people of very superior rank. When the retired emperor Go-Mizunoo wanted his portrait painted, his son, who was a monk and thus allowed to meet lay people of any rank, posed for the artist wearing his father's clothes. Then he sketched his father's face and the artist copied the sketch onto the portrait.
The Kanō were part of the apparatus of government. They painted castle and temple interiors with images that bolstered and underlined the shogun's power: landscapes, auspicious beasts and heroic battles of the past, against lavish gold backgrounds. Nij_ Castle, the shogun's residence in Kyoto, is a fine example of the Kanō style. The gold-encrusted walls of the vast audience hall are painted with pine trees, with one spreading its branches above the shogun's seat. Pine trees are venerable and long-lived, just as the shogun intended his government to be.
Every element in a Japanese painting has symbolic value, chosen for its auspicious nature. Catalogue entries that describe a work merely as 'birds and flowers' entirely miss the point. Specific creatures have specific meanings and are associated with particular plants and seasons. Cranes go with pines, tortoises with bamboo, and all four signify long life. Screech quotes a humorous poem to the effect that the inept artist adds bamboo to an image so that the viewer will know that the animal in his picture is a tiger, not a cat. Tigers went with bamboos, cats with peonies.
by Leslie Downer, Literary Review | Read more:
Image via: Wikipedia
