Word: momoyama
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Tapestry was to northern Europe what fresco was to Italy, or the refulgent gold-leaf screens of the Momoyama period were to the dark castle interiors of 16th century Japan: the main form of large-scale decoration. Moreover, it had two advantages that fresco did not possess: a duke could change his hangings, and they warmed his drafty abode in winter. And yet the appetite for tapestries went beyond all questions of use and ornament. They were collected with manic extravagance. As the Cluny Museum's chief curator Francis Salet points out in his catalogue introduction, Philip the Good...