Word: lacquers
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...masterpieces of traditional Japan stake their existence on this perfect clarity of image and technique. Such is the lesson of two fall exhibitions of Japanese art, seen at its utmost pitch of refinement. One is a selection of 235 works of the Rimpa school-scrolls, screens and lacquer-at the Tokyo National Museum, the other a show of inros, netsukes and sword guards from the Charles A. Greenfield collection at Manhattan's Japan House...
...bulk of the exhibition is devoted to folk arts and crafts. The quality--particularly of the older, genuine folk-art pieces--is often quite high, but the juxtaposition of genres, nationalities, and periods is confusing. Samovars, porcelain tiles, embroidery, lace, wood carvings, jewelry toys, lacquer boxes, tapestries, wall placques, crystal.... The non-initiate, unless he has a map of the U.S.S.R. imprinted on his consciousness, will have trouble putting it all in place...
...drive to re-learn and preserve the old folk arts. Where a break in the craft tradition has never occurred, the results are most successful--for example, plates and pitchers of iron inlaid with silver from Daghestan, and silver filigree jewelry, from Georgia. Two showcases display the products of lacquer-work masters from Ralekh--little papier-mache boxes, decorated with elaborate designs in egg-tempera (often depicting the exploits of Russian fairy-tale heroes), coated with transparent lacquer, then dried and highly polished. One box astonishes: a winter's scene of three youngsters in a troika superimposed on an oval...
Other contemporary offerings are not so successful. In the vicinity of the beautiful lacquer boxes are some of the most God-awful tempera and lacquer wall placques I have ever seen. A display of good crystal is flanked by a five-piece set of red glass vases with standardized workers' images frosted into the sides. Fortunately, an entire wall is allotted to an imaginative wall hanging of a woolly owl with immense purple eyes--if not, it would be lost in a forest of skillfully constructed by thematically banal tapestries...
...young Frenchwoman who says she is happily married keep flirting with an O.D. of Veronal? Her analyst suspects she has borrowed trouble from her husband, a French poet-novelist whose stock in trade is glamorous rebellion. Called in for consultation, the husband really wants to level, but beneath the lacquer of glory he can perceive only one small flaw in himself: "Despite the success of my books, I have no confidence." Through that tiny portal of awareness the analyst enters a hidden emotional hell...