Word: koetsu
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...Great Hon'ami Koetsu--how many people in the West have heard of him? Not too many, but in the early 17th century this man was to Japanese culture roughly what Leonardo da Vinci or Benvenuto Cellini had been to Italy a century before: a wonderfully versatile master of many media, renowned equally as painter, calligrapher, potter, lacquer artist and, thanks to his close relationship with the great shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, the virtual "art director" of Buddhist Japan. No artist, Eastern or Western, was ever more authoritative within his own culture; and Koetsu's work was also identified with...
...Arts of Hon'ami Koetsu, Japanese Renaissance Master" is the Philadelphia Museum of Art's major show this fall--the first comprehensive Koetsu exhibition outside Japan. It will be on view through Oct. 29 and is not to be missed...
DISCOVERING JAPAN'S DA VINCI HON'AMI KOETSU...
Which is not to say that the Edo period lacked individual artists who were seen, then and now, as stars. Its core achievement, in painting, was the allusive and delicate work of the so-called Rimpa artists: Tawaraya Sotatsu and Hon'ami Koetsu in the 17th century, and later the brothers Ogata Korin and Ogata Kenzan, Sakai Hoitsu and others. The show abounds in their work, especially the large folding screens that were Japan's closest equivalent to Western murals. Hoitsu (1761-1828) is represented by one of his finest screens, Flowers and Grasses of Summer and Autumn, in which...
...Koetsu and Sotatsu reacted against the hard, linear, brushpoint drawing derived from the Chinese that dominated Japanese art in the early 17th century; instead they used the mokkotsu or "boneless" technique, dropping pigment into wet pigment, staining and mottling the shapes of flowers, twigs and thunder-god with infinitely subtle gradations of color, preparing the paper with washes of gold or silver dust or with a snowy, glistening mixture of eggshell white and flakes of mica. These hallmarks-which must in their time have seemed very "Japanese," in elaborate contrast to the austerities of Chinese brush technique-helped form...