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In autumn, the
evenings when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the
hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours
and twos; more charming still is a file of wild geese like specks
in the distant sky. When the sun has set, one’s heart is
moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of the insects....
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
There are
some rooms at the Metropolitan Museum where one can stop these
days for a few long moments, sit in meditative stillness as if in
a Japanese garden (everybody else, it appears, is looking at
Indian Miniature paintings, magnifying glass in hand, for that
show has just opened). But here, where loveliness resides,
it is time to stay and be moved by the evanescent changeable moods
of nature in all its lyrical imaginings.
(Detail)
Autumn Grasses, Edo period, Pair of six-panel folding screens;
ink
and color on gilt paper
This story
goes a long time back, all the way back to the Heian Court, where
aestheticism reached some high crest of sensitivity, all this
expressed in language and all things visual, the interweaving of
the two so that both became calligraphy, and calligraphy expressed
both. Observation was everything, to be moved by nature was
refinement. It was an elite culture; lovers gave each other
poems. The nuances of color, the changing of the seasons—a
leaf that slowly disengages itself from the outstretched hands of
branches, floats softly to earth with a rustle that is like the
swishing of the silk of a robe of cherry with an underskirt of
gold....all this was to be noticed, was there to thrill the
senses, to be written down as poetry and literature, and then to
be captured and made beautiful again in scrolls and screens and
kimonos. The dance of seasons echoing all the emotions of
life and love. Autumn the season that is the most haunting
of all, this sadness an aesthetic one.
Writing
Box with Design of Gourd and Butterfly, Shibata Zeshin, Meiji
period, Powdered gold and silver (maki-e) on black lacquer
Here are
painted fans that unfold like screens; summer robes (kosode) of
flowers and autumn robes with leaves of changing color; exquisite
boxes of lacquer, tiered boxes, many with the recurring gleam of
gold (maki-e technique) on black lacquer, a writing box with a
gourd and a butterfly (how odd, how perfect); a picnic case from
the Edo era that disassembles and is of such perfectly harmonious
proportions (its dull gold sprayed with chrysanthemums); scrolls
with paintings of a rooster in a storm, peacocks (with peonies of
course, these pairings recurring motifs), an eagle swooping down
on a swan; and screens, glorious paneled screens of lacquer,
silver leaf, gold, ink, on gilt paper (everywhere gold, the gold
recalling the bronze-y sheen of autumn leaves, the color of the
season), and often with the same theme, this an old motif from
literature and poetry—that
of the moon and autumn grasses.
Melancholy
silhouettes of overlapping reeds or branches of leaves creating
their own whispering patterns, and somehow managing to be both
abstract and of nature, color reduced to golds silvers bronzes,
the gleam of moonlight, the darkness of leaves at night. The
moon stopped like a tear down curve of sky, sigh of autumn
grasses, a crying deer, all symbols that were evocative of the
season, the transience of life, of love. The soul howling at
the moon. And saying how beautiful it all is, how beautiful
and how sad.
(Detail)
Autumn Grasses in Moonlight, Shibata Zeshin,
Meiji Period, 2-panel folding screen,
ink, lacquer, and silver leaf on paper
And then a
few chosen objects of modern design that achingly capture the mood
of all that has gone before—a beautiful dish of bluish-green
porcelain like a leaf, color staining it like the faintest blush,
a stoneware urn that is rippled through, water turned to stone.
Listening
to the Waves, Sakiyama Takayuki, 2004,
Sand-glazed stoneware
And there is
much to see also at
Wonder of
the Age, Master Painters of India, 1100–1900;
we kept coming back to the paintings of Mansur (called 'Wonder of
the Age' by Emperor Jahangir). There are other delights in
these rooms of miniatures, other painters and paintings of princes
hawking, camels and elephants fighting, historical scenes, but
Mansur’s paintings of chameleons and peacocks reminding us of the
Japanese rooms with their changing seasons, his peafowl (we
noticed a flock of birds like specks in the sky, and they were
specks on paper too for this is a miniature) crying out to those
that stood in other rooms (surrounded by peonies, of course), his
chameleon of leafy verdigris . . . and autumn was spring again,
everything was green again . . . .
Mansur, A
Chameleon, Ink on paper, 17th Century
Visit:
A Sensitivity
to the Seasons, Summer and Autumn in Japanese Art
(closes
October 23rd)
&
Wonder of the
Age, Master Painters of India, 1100–1900, Metropolitan
Museum of Art
Tags: art
design
literature color
poetry
books
history
india
japan
museums
pattern
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A Sensitivity
to the Seasons, Summer and Autumn in Japanese Art
(through
October 23rd)
This piece
was written earlier, before the news of the death of Steve Jobs,
but we thought, as we read the New York Times obituary, that his
aestheticism was not that different from that of the Heian court:
'He [Steve Jobs] put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used
frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that
looked like works of art and delighted users. Great
products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose
yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to
bring those things into what you are doing.”'
The New York
Times
Picnic Set with Chrysanthemum Design, Edo period, Gold and silver
maki-e on "pear-skin" lacquered ground |
