CMA Exhibition Feature : Flowers and Grasses

Special Exhibitions

Unfolding Beauty


Unfolding Beauty
	Exhibition Highlights
		Highlights on View July 15 – August 12



Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain, early 1600s Edo period (1615-1868) Pair of six-fold screens; ink and color with cut-gold foil and silver pigment on gold paper John L. Severance Fund 2000.4.1

Flowers and Grasses

In Japanese culture the relationship between words and visual imagery occupies a prominent role in describing how people look at and understand art. For more than a millennium, classical Japanese literature has provided the principal subject matter for artists and craftspeople working in a variety of media. Sophisticated patrons and the general public alike normally recognize texts from the past and the interpretations added to them by subsequent generations of writers and artists.

Over the centuries, specific styles of painting and composition have evolved to become intimately linked with classical literary themes. Artisans, calligraphers, painters, and designers have always understood the interdependence of word and image in their work and have sought to express it in fresh ways. Among the most favored visual motifs used to communicate the union of the verbal and the visual were plants, flowers, and the seasons. In some paintings the literary reference is readily apparent; in others it can be discerned only through study or explanation. In all, the goal is to describe the human emotional landscape--an enduring subject of Japanese art.



Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain, early 1600s Edo period (1615-1868) Pair of six-fold screens; ink and color with cut-gold foil and silver pigment on gold paper John L. Severance Fund 2000.4.2

The Tales of Ise enjoyed widespread popularity in 17th-century Japan when illustrated texts of the 10th-century literary classic were first printed. Episodes selected for illustration soon became part of an expanded yamato-e (Japanese style painting) repertoire known as "paintings of famous places," or meisho-e. In this way, Musashino Plain entered the established canon of Japanese imagery whose literary roots sprung from courtly aesthetics but was now accessible to a broader audience.

Musashino Plain had long enjoyed a close poetic association with both Mt. Fuji and autumn moon imagery. Consequently, joining these poetic subjects in pairs of byõbu appears natural. Some related byöbu present all three elements, but the example shown here does not include Japan's most sacred mountain. Instead these screens offer a rustic composition of finely drawn, dense undergrowth, scraggly and uneven flowering plants, and tall wispy grasses. The vision is at once as imaginary as it is seemingly naturalistic, poetically lyrical as it is spaciously embracing.

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