ARTIFACTS

Since the late 19th century, Japanese art has been schizophrenically split into yoga (Western-style) and nihonga (Japanese-style). The latter arose as a self-conscious response to the inroads of the former. Nevertheless, when nihonga took up the challenge of Western art, it was unable to avoid borrowing some of its ideas, most notably the romantically inflated concept of the “divine” artist. But instead of Michelangelo or van Gogh, nihonga found its role models in the elite artist/craftsmen of the Rinpa school. The Yamatane Museum of Art’s exhibition What Did Nihonga Learn from Rinpa? uses 50 mainly large works to look at echoes of the school in the works of 20th-century nihonga artists. Particularly worth seeing is Kaii Higashiyama’s vast seascape Rising Tide and Gyoshu Hayami’s Falling Camellias. Through Dec 25. See exhibition listings (Ginza/ Kyobashi/ Tokyo) for details. CBL Giveaway! Metropolis is offering readers ten free tickets to “What Did Nihonga Learn from Rinpa?” For your chance to see this excellent exhibition, email the following information by Wednesday, December 17, to editor@metropolis.co.jp: 1. Name; 2. Address; 3. Age; 4. Home country; 5. Last exhibition you visited Include the text “Nihonga” in the subject line. Winners will be selected at random.

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By Andrew Conti

Masaaki Yamada

The Fuchu Art Museum honors Japan’s “Painter of Stripes”

Still Life No. 7, 1953 Courtesy of the artist‘s collection

In the world of contemporary art, it has become commonplace to see artists defined by their status as celebrity or pop icon rather than by their creative endeavors. For many, the inherent complexities of a medium are secondary to shock or intellectual concept. What makes “The Paintings of Masaaki Yamada: From ‘Still Life’ to ‘Work’ to ‘Color’” such an enjoyable exhibition is that, in contrast to this contemporary mold, Yamada is an artist obsessively dedicated to the possibilities of line, color and form.

Yamada (b. 1930) has spent his life methodically coding and noting slight variations of the themes and forms he has repeated over and over in a lifelong exploration of painting. The result, as this retrospective makes palpable, is a life of rare devotion and a body of work as affecting and absorbing as it is calculated.

Divided chronologically by rooms, the exhibition brings focus to the minute variations as well as the broader strokes of Yamada’s career. The opening room begins, as expected, with pieces from his student days and early work, but less expected are the sheer numbers of canvases included. Seemingly countless Cezanne-inspired still lifes are crammed and crowded along the walls.

Work C-73, 1960 Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Work C-73, 2000 Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Other rooms delve into later and more dynamic work, including a series from the mid-’50s that highlights his abstract expressionist tendencies. Paintings like Work B. 139 (1956-57)—a pulsating explosion of blues and whites—are powerful fields of chaotic rhythm and colliding mass.

Adjacent to these and displaying a similar energy are a series of drawings in the black, white and sepia lines of Conte crayons. Their heavily worked and reworked surfaces are beautiful records of Yamada’s passion played out on paper, with layers of line and erasure covering the image in eloquent swarms that swell against the paper’s edge.

Other paintings from the ’50s adopt a less dramatic and more systematic effect. Typical of these, Work B. 183 (1958) nests layers of minimal blue and gray rectangles in a calculated experiment with color reminiscent of the work of 20th century color-theorists.

Interestingly, all the works on display are titled through a complicated system of numbers and letters. A piece such as the sleek, pulsating, blue and yellow stripe-painting Work C. 77 uses “C” to indicate it was completed in the ’60s (“B” means the ’50s) and the numbers indicate other peculiarities of importance to the artist.

The horizontal strip paintings from these two decades—for which Yamada earned his moniker as “painter of stripes”—are by far the most alluring images on display. Their simplistic form allowed him a space to play with the interactions of color while simultaneously creating stunning art objects. In the museum’s quiet galleries, the paintings become chromatic meditations that alternately tessellate forwards and backwards with a sublime transcendence of their materials.

Although much of Yamada’s work is awash in the conventions of modernism, his paintings are made fresh and compelling by the power of his obsessive repetition of content. Following the alterations that differentiate his works and so inspired Yamada is a massive and overwhelming task, but viewed as a whole one can see the story of an extraordinarily possessed artist single-mindedly focused on the intricacies and practices of making art.

Fuchu Art Museum, until Aug 14. See exhibition listings for details.

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