Word: sotatsu
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...between the size of Koetsu's work and the scale of his cultural resonance. These tiny, fugitive-looking images, in which luminous fragments of nature--pines bowing before a wind, the undulation of a flock of cranes--were painted in colored inks on handmade paper by his collaborator Tawaraya Sotatsu and then written over by Koetsu, have acquired, for Japanese taste, the sort of cardinal importance that a fresco cycle or an altarpiece might have for ours. Koetsu's work, given the accumulated Japanese reactions to it, is perhaps the ultimate example of the power of the small, the exquisite...
This was not solitary art. It rose from collaboration among Koetsu, the painter Sotatsu, a suitably skilled papermaker, and--not least--the dead hand of the poet whose waka, or classic verses, Koetsu was transcribing. Some of the most beautiful things in this show are the shikisi, or poem cards, in which the visual form of Koetsu's writing chimes wonderfully with the loops and eddies of Sotatsu's water, the spikes of his plant stems and the slow blur of his distant mountains. And Koetsu's calligraphies on sheets of paper pasted together, paper made in the subtlest imaginable...
...between the size of Koetsu's work and the scale of his cultural resonance. These tiny, fugitive-looking images, in which luminous fragments of nature?pines bowing before a wind, the undulation of a flock of cranes?were painted in colored inks on handmade paper by his collaborator Tawaraya Sotatsu and then written over by Koetsu, have acquired, for Japanese taste, the sort of cardinal importance that a fresco cycle or an altarpiece might have for ours. Koetsu's work, given the accumulated Japanese reactions to it, is perhaps the ultimate example of the power of the small, the exquisite...
This was not solitary art. It rose from collaboration among Koetsu, the painter Sotatsu, a suitably skilled papermaker, and - not least - the dead hand of the poet whose waka, or classic verses, Koetsu was transcribing. Some of the most beautiful things in this show are the shikisi, or poem cards, in which the visual form of Koetsu's writing chimes wonderfully with the loops and eddies of Sotatsu's water, the spikes of his plant stems and the slow blur of his distant mountains. And Koetsu's calligraphies on sheets of paper pasted together, paper made in the subtlest imaginable...
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...