A much-anticipated harbinger of spring, the cherry blossom is also exemplary of the Japanese artistic aesthetic?a delight in simple, natural beauty and an attentiveness to the changing seasons. This spring will mark the centennial of Japan’s gift of three thousand cherry trees to Washington, DC, and this sumptuously illustrated catalogue is the companion to a celebratory exhibition at the National Gallery of Art featuring the work of Ito Jakuchu.Jakuchu (1716–1800), a wealthy wholesaler and talented painter, is, in Japan, the most recognized artist of the premodern era. His thirty-scroll set of bird-and-flower paintings titled Colorful Realm of Living Beings is a renowned cultural treasure, one of the most beautiful and skilled examples of how the natural world is depicted and symbolized in Japanese art. Presenting gorgeous flora and fauna in meticulous detail, the scrolls are reunited here with Jakuchu’s triptych of the Buddha Sakyamuni

Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchu

Arts & Photography

Lippit, Yukio

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Winner of the John Whitney Hall Book Prize Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award In this eloquent and far-ranging work, Yukio Lippit explores the seventeenth-century consolidation of Japanese painting by the famed Kano painting house, whose style evolved from the legacy of Zen monk-painters of the medieval era and intertwined Chinese with native Japanese practices. Legitimacy was transmitted from master to disciple in a manner similar to that in religious traditions. Lippit illuminates the role of key factors--bequeathal of artworks, authentication of art, painting in the mode of famous masters, collections of art, and the use of art in governance--in establishing the orthodoxy of the Kano painters and their paramount role in defining Japanese painting. The Painting of the Realm is pathbreaking in its analysis of the discursive operations of the Kano school and its posing of large questions about painting that exceed narrow artist-centered, formalist analysis. Lippit has undertaken a bold and dense study of painting production and reception, presenting original and compelling interpretations.

Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan

University of Washington Press

Transmitted from China to Japan in the 13th century, Zen Buddhism not only introduced religious practices but also literature, calligraphy, philosophy, and ink painting to Japanese disciples. This elegant book discusses these fields as they combined to encompass the evocative practice of figure painting within Zen Buddhism in medieval Japan.Focusing on forty-seven exceptional Japanese and Chinese paintings from the 12th to the 16th centuries--which together illustrate the story of the awakening of Zen art--the book features essays by distinguished scholars that discuss the life and art within Zen monastic and lay communities. The authors explore the ideology underlying the development of Zens own pantheon of characters created to imagine the Buddhas wisdom and offer fresh insights into the role of the visual arts within Zen practice as it developed in Japan in close dialogue with the Asian continent.

Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan

Levine, Gregory

History

Japan Society

During the early modern period in Japan, peace and prosperity allowed elite and popular arts and culture to flourish in Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The historic first showing outside Japan of Itō Jakuchū's thirty-scroll series titled Colorful Realm of Living Beings (ca. 1757–66) in 2012 prompted a reimagining of artists and art making in this context. These essays give attention to Jakuchū’s spectacular series as well as to works by a range of contemporary artists. Selected contributions address issues of professional roles, including copying and imitation, display and memorialization, and makers’ identities. Some explore the new form of painting, ukiyo-e, in the context of the urban society that provided its subject matter and audiences; others discuss the spectrum of amateur and professional Edo pottery and interrelationships between painting and other media. Together, they reveal the fluidity and dynamism of artists’ identities during a time of great significance in the country’s history.

The Artist in Edo: Studies in the History of Art, vol. 80 (Studies in the History of Art Series)

NGW-Stud Hist Art

A sweeping and lavishly illustrated overview of a transformative period in Japanese art-making Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868) witnessed the arrival of peace after centuries of warfare, together with economic prosperity, population growth, and increased urbanization. The arts of the period flourished, reflecting and inflecting these fertile conditions. Painting Edo: Selections from the Feinberg Collection of Japanese Art explores this rich visual culture, highlighting works from an unparalleled collection to showcase the masters of various Edo schools and lineages. Beautiful illustrations punctuate the catalogue’s essays: Yukio Lippit situates the works within a broad cultural history of early modern Japan, and Rachel Saunders focuses on a single artist, offering fresh perspectives on the late “bird-and-flower paintings” of Sakai Hōitsu. Together, these essays unpack the literary, artistic, and cultural histories that form the basis for how these masterful works would have been received in their time—and for how we can best understand them today. A complete catalogue of the Feinberg Collection will be published in July 2020.

Painting Edo: Selections from the Feinberg Collection of Japanese Art

Saunders, Rachel

Harvard Art Museums

Zen art poses a conundrum. On the one hand, Zen Buddhism emphasizes the concept of emptiness, which among other things asserts that form is empty, that all phenomena in the world are illusory. On the other hand, a prodigious amount of artwork has been created in association with Zen thought and practice. A wide range of media, genres, expressive modes, and strategies of representation have been embraced to convey the idea of emptiness. Form has been used to express the essence of formlessness, and in Japan, this gave rise to a remarkable, highly diverse array of artworks and a tradition of self-negating art. In this volume, Yukio Lippit explores the painting The Gourd and the Catfish (ca. 1413), widely considered one of the most iconic works of Japanese Zen art today. Its subject matter appears straightforward enough: a man standing on a bank holds a gourd in both hands, attempting to capture or pin down the catfish swimming in the stream below. This is an impossible task, a nonsensical act underscored by the awkwardness with which the figure struggles even to hold his gourd. But this impossibility is precisely the point.

Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting (Getty Research Institute Council Lecture Series)

Getty Research Institute

Kenzo Tange (1913–2005) is a peerless figure among twentieth-century Japanese architects, unmatched in his talent, influence, and versatility. This collection of essays represents a new generation of original research that reframes Tange in the context of Japan’s unique embrace of modern architecture as well as global discourses of cultural identity, technology, and the synthesis of the arts. Case studies on celebrated works clarify Tange’s wide-ranging interests and design methodology through collaboration with allied fields such as art, engineering, furniture design, and photography. The book will appeal to both specialists and general readers with an interest in the visual culture and built environment of modern Japan. Sen g Kuan is assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. He organized the exhibition Utopia Across Scales: Highlights from the Kenzo Tange Archive (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2009). Yukio Lippit is professor of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University. He is author of Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth- Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2012).

Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World

Science & Math

Evolution

Lars Müller Publishers

This publication focuses on the collection of Japanese secular painting in the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, a large part of which was acquired by the museums founders Adolf and Frieda Fischer before 1913. Six internationally renowned specialists of Japanese art present new insights and approaches to pre-modern Japanese visual culture in this exquisitely illustrated catalogue.The publication is divided into two parts: the first section discusses the reception of Japanese art and the dawn of East Asian art history in Germany, as well as shedding new light on the role of the monk painter as mediator between Chinese and Japanese concepts of secular art. The main body of the publication is the catalogue section. Here, 94 works (divided into seven subject categories) are presented: hand scrolls, fans, hanging scrolls and folding screens. All works are reproduced in full colour, many scrolls being shown in their entirety. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction, elucidating the historiographical, aesthetic and methodological questions that are central to current research in the visual culture of pre-modern Japan. The illuminating entries are followed by a comprehensive appendices section, including photographs of the paintings signatures, seals and transcriptions of the inscriptions in the paintings. Splendid Impressions will serve as a reference source not only for curators, scholars and students of Japanese art and culture, but also for anyone who has a personal interest in Japanese painting.

Splendid Impressions: Japanese Secular Painting 1400-1900, in the Museum of East Asian Art Cologne

McKelway, Matthew

Trede, Melanie

McCormick, Melissa

Mostow, Joshua S.

Croissant, Doris

BRILL

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