Word: namban
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...should one suppose that these are dreaming connoisseurs who have just relinquished the ink block and the brush to dabble in the art of the namban, or round-eyed barbarian. Shigeki Kameyama, representing the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo, last week bought, among other things, Picasso's The Mirror at $26.4 million. The week before, he had also purchased De Kooning's Interchange at $20.68 million and a Brice Marden drawing at $500,000 at Sotheby's. Kameyama is known to other dealers as "Oddjob," after Goldfinger's hat-flinging chauffeur...
...state in your article entitled "As Others Saw Us" [Feb. 12], which reviewed Japanese Namban art, that Christianity became extinct in Japan after the Christian revolt of 1637. This statement is perhaps misleading...
...trade were inseparable) until the priests' meddling in Japanese political life enraged the Tokugawa government and persecutions began in 1612. In 1637, a rebellion of Christian peasants was crushed, 37,000 of them were killed, and Christianity was extinct-along with all further contact with the West. Most Namban religious art also perished, except for some rare tea bowls decorated with the cross or an occasional lacquer...
Such devotional paintings as survive are poor-routine ecclesiastical art, whose only interest is that its Sacred Hearts and puffy cherubs were done by Japanese, not Neapolitan hacks. But in its genre scenes, Namban art excelled. It seems that the 16th and 17th century artists were better observers than their 19th century successors. Hiroshige's American Woman on Horseback in the Snow, in Philadelphia, is the vaguest generalization probably based on a garbled story he had heard about Red Indian squaws; its charm is inaccuracy...
...when an artist of the Kano school (1543-90) produced the magnificent screens of Namban traders arriving in Japan that the Imperial Household Collection lent to New York's show, he took great care with detail: the cloaks, the baggy pantaloons, the rakish curly-brim hats, the mustaches and the grotesquely long noses of the foreign barbarians are meticulously set down. To us, it looks like caricature at first. To the lord Tokugawa, who is believed to have commissioned it, it almost certainly...