Word: momoyama
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Perhaps the most gifted of the eight artists is the painter Hugh O'Donnell. His large, crammed canvases owe something to Frank Stella in their controlled decorative fullness. They also allude to Japanese Momoyama screens, and that is no accident since O'Donnell studied them while on a fellowship to Kyoto in the mid-'70s. The desire to activate every part of the surface with emphatic silhouetted forms, stopping just short of congestion, is the animating principle of O'Donnell's work: he is a trader in visual surprises who can set his big, fractured...
...hosting the first exhibit of art from the Momoyama period of Japanese history to be seen outside Japan. And its costume division is showing examples of "Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design"--movie star clothes of the 30's. The show, my sources tell me, is a disappointment, but I don't believe them and intend to find out for myself...
...Momoyama period, as it is called, lasted slightly less than 50 years, from 1568 to 1615. There could be no better introduction to it than the superb exhibition presently on show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Momoyama: Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur," together with its exemplary catalogue supervised by the Met's assistant curator of Far Eastern art, Julia Meech-Pekarik. The title, puffy as it sounds, is not (for once) a piece of museological bombast. The Japanese government has cooperated to the hilt, or tsuba, lending many works which are inaccessible even...
...castle at Osaka, "is full of gold, this one of silver; this other compartment is full of bales of silk and damask, that one with robes, while these rooms contain costly swords and weapons." It sounds like an Oriental Hearst at San Simeon, but the vast ostentation of the Momoyama warlords had a political aim: to dazzle visitors and cow supplicants. In private they practiced a cult of austerity the essence of which lay in the tea ceremony: the rough bowl, the unpainted wooden panel, the natural stone which, in manifesting sabi (simplicity or emptiness), embodied the ideals...
...These contrasts, within its art, between the spartan coarseness of a tea receptacle and the patient refinement of a makie lacquer box, between the swift brushwork of an ink painting and the daunting accumulation of labor represented by the embroidery of a silk No costume, have always given the Momoyama period a peculiar interest to Western eyes. This half-century was the point in Japanese culture that, in its secular largesse and curiosity about the real world, most resembled the European Renaissance. Indeed, it was during the Momoyama that the West's idea of Japan was shaped...