Word: koetsu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This was not solitary art. It rose from collaboration among Koetsu, the painter Sotatsu, a suitably skilled papermaker, and - not least - the dead hand of the poet whose waka, or classic verses, Koetsu was transcribing. Some of the most beautiful things in this show are the shikisi, or poem cards, in which the visual form of Koetsu's writing chimes wonderfully with the loops and eddies of Sotatsu's water, the spikes of his plant stems and the slow blur of his distant mountains. And Koetsu's calligraphies on sheets of paper pasted together, paper made in the subtlest imaginable...
...Koetsu made ceramics too. In fact, he is seen in Japan as one of the two greatest potters of the 17th century, the other being Nomomura Nisei. But Nisei was a professional, and he specialized in such tea utensils as caddies and incense jars. The amateur Koetsu sometimes worked with potters and sometimes commissioned pieces from them; his approval became a signature of authorship. His passion was tea bowls - the "active," intimately handled objects of a ceremony that, imported from China, had been turned by its first Japanese grandmaster, Sen No Rikyu, into a cultural rite linked to Zen Buddhism...
...Koetsu was the first Japanese to sign one of his own tea bowls - the famous "Fuji" bowl, now designated a national treasure by the Japanese and hence unable to be shown in the U.S. - but he never ran his own kiln. Like Rikyu before him, Koetsu worked with a family of potters whose name came to stand for a whole class of rough, low-fired pottery: raku ware. Unlike Rikyu, though, Koetsu got his hands dirty, shaping the clay, carving it with knife and spatula...
...still a surprise, for people used to the immaculate technical refinement of S?vres or Wedgwood, to see the lack of finish of Koetsu tea bowls. Slumped, pitted, cratered, they seem to preserve the primal character of the earth from which they're made. They're so uneven that you'd think they'd wobble if set on a table. Instead of pattern or fine painting, their surfaces are all drips and cracks that, contemplated in the dim natural light of the teahouse, may suggest large natural events. One of the most beautiful bowls in this show, black glaze...
...uninitiated, such objects may look like cowpats, but their roughness has always made them precious to the Japanese connoisseur. Koetsu once sold his house to raise the money - 30 gold coins - for a particularly famous old tea caddy he yearned to buy. Later he came to see the ownership of such exalted things as "a nuisance" and the antiquarian enthusiasms they aroused as irrelevant: better to make them for oneself...