Word: koetsu
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...Koetsu, the Japanese artist, is scarcely known in the U.S., but in Japan he is a national treasure several times over--about as famous there as Benvenuto Cellini is in the West. This is because he was one of the supreme masters of calligraphy, an art that matters only to specialists on the American side of the Pacific but is wholly central to Japanese and Chinese aesthetics. It's understandable, therefore, that the present show of Koetsu's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, though respectably attended, has not been packing in the crowds. This is a boon...
There is an inverse relationship between the size of Koetsu's work and the scale of his cultural resonance. These tiny, fugitive-looking images, in which luminous fragments of nature--pines bowing before a wind, the undulation of a flock of cranes--were painted in colored inks on handmade paper by his collaborator Tawaraya Sotatsu and then written over by Koetsu, have acquired, for Japanese taste, the sort of cardinal importance that a fresco cycle or an altarpiece might have for ours. Koetsu's work, given the accumulated Japanese reactions to it, is perhaps the ultimate example of the power...
...Koetsu died at 79 in 1637, laden with the esteem of patrons and connoisseurs. He was a devotee of beauty and had given over his life to art with the degree of throwaway fanaticism that entails a horror of self-importance. Koetsu was not a professional artist. He raised amateurism to an extreme level. The rougher and more summary his work, the greater its appeal to the cultivated. He has always been associated with the "Renaissance" of the city of Kyoto, then Japan's capital, after the ferociously destructive civil wars of the 16th century, when Japan was finally stabilized...
...Koetsu's name is also associated with lacquer, another of the chief Japanese arts. "Associated" because it is highly unlikely that he actually made the lacquer boxes himself; the technique was too demanding and took too long to acquire. Clearly he knew a lot about lacquer and was immersed in its possibilities - not a surprise, because he was well known as an expert on the classification of swords, whose scabbards and other fittings were always adorned with lacquer. Clearly too he liked innovations in technique that may seem small to us but, in the tradition-bound and slow-moving context...
...Koetsu is one of those artists who elude classifications, even those of his own time and place. He remains the consummate amateur, drawing his authority from the peculiar independence of his work. It's not surprising that there is no one else quite like him in the West, because there was no one else in Japan either...