Things worth seeing

Ken Johnson has the story in The New York Times:

Have you ever felt put off by the imperturbable serenity exuded by the Buddha in countless artistic images? Maybe it is my American DNA or my underdeveloped consciousness, but I sometimes feel almost as alienated by his Teflon-like immunity to excitation as by the idealized agony of the crucified Jesus. They both seem so unnaturally abstract. These thoughts were crystallized for me by one of the most beautiful exhibitions I have ever seen: Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (Colorful Realm runs through 29 April; (202) 737-4215, nga.gov.)
The show brings together, for the first time outside of Japan, two parts of a suite of paintings that Ito Jakuchu (pronounced ee-toe ja-ku-chu) made for the Shokokuji monastery in Kyoto. Created between 1757 and 1766, it consisted primarily of thirty bird-and-flower scroll paintings collectively called Colorful Realm of Living Beings. The series is widely and justly considered one of the supreme masterpieces of Japanese painting. To give the nature pictures a divine focus, Jakuchu also produced a triptych representing the Buddha and two bodhisattvas, all luxuriously enthroned.
In the interest of preservation, the monastery donated the Colorful Realm paintings to the Imperial Household in 1889, but kept the triptych. Since then, the complete set has been exhibited only once before, at the Jotenkaku Museum in the Shokokuji monastery in 2007.
Organized by Yukio Lippit, a Harvard professor of Japanese art, the exhibition presents Jakuchu’s paintings on silk of flowers, birds, fish, lizards, insects, and seashells. They hang unscrolled behind glass panels on the long walls of a broad rectangular room, with the triptych of deities presiding at one end. Bordered by patterned fabrics, all the paintings have the windowlike dimensions of about five and a half by three feet.
It is a metaphysically pointed arrangement. The Buddha and the bodhisattvas belong to an eternal, transcendental realm that rules over earthly time and space. Implicitly the lively beings of material creation are gathered here to bask in the beneficence of their cosmic overlord. No doubt that was the program intended by Jakuchu, who retired at forty from running a large grocery business he inherited from his father to devote himself to art and Zen.
But now the experience of the ensemble is something else. While the nature paintings teem with life— figuratively as well as formally— the paintings of the reigning deities are so conventional and dull it is hard to believe they were made by the same artist. In fact Jakuchu copied them from a triptych attributed to a thirteenth-century painter, Zhang Sigong, that he discovered at Tofukuji, another monastery in Kyoto. Regardless, it clearly was not traditional theology, but worldly reality, that turned Jakuchu on.
If “turned on” sounds like an anachronistic phrase to apply to an eighteeenth-century artist, consider the paintings. Their vividness conveys a state of attentiveness and responsiveness to which ordinary consciousness, in its distraction and world-weary fatigue, rarely rises. This partly has to do with Jakuchu’s extraordinary powers of observation and painterly description. The profusion of realistic detail and the way feathers, blossoms, tree leaves and myriad other elements are deftly individualized is hypnotically gripping.
Looking closely at Maple Tree and Small Birds you see that each of the hundreds of red leaves growing from arcing, gnarly branches is distinctly different. Some glow bright red, some are nearly drab green; some are opaque, some let light through. Shells has 146 varieties of seashells— mussel, oyster, conch, snail, starfish, and many more— scattered over a sandy expanse, each described with loving exactitude. Pond and Insects pictures 76 species of bugs along with lizards, frogs, and a coiled snake.
Among eighteen marine species, all swimming down toward the left in Fish, is a big gold sea bream whose every scale and spiny fin is neatly articulated. But that is not all: Jakuchu also captures the iridescent sheen of its fat orange-and-white body.
The accumulation of zoological and botanical information could be exhausting were it not for another of Jakuchu’s remarkable talents: his virtuosic way with composition. Some works, like Peonies and Small Birds, are crammed nearly to bursting with blossoms. Others have open spaces letting in air and light.
In Rooster and Hen, a flamboyantly multihued male and an all-black female perform a tense mating dance on an open field of unpainted fabric, which concentrates the erotic drama. In Wild Goose and Reeds, a single big bird plummets straight down from the sky toward a surface of cracked ice, and the background expanse of unpainted light-brown silk, framed by reeds bearing globs of melting snow, evokes airy space.
Many of the later compositions produce a delirious confusion of gravitational orientation. In Lotus Pond and Fish, flat, circular leaves and pink and white blossoms viewed from divergent perspectives surround a school of small, silvery fish. It makes sense at a glance; but the more you look, the harder it is to tell what is up and what is down, and the more confoundingly dreamy it becomes.
Chickens has twelve roosters and a hen crowded together into a dazzling tapestry of brown, black and white plumage punctuated by bright red cockscombs and wattles and staring eyes. It is an impossible situation; you could never assemble so many cocky males and one female into such close quarters without violence breaking out. The effect is of a sly, anthropomorphic comedy.
Jakuchu was not painting social satires or moral allegories. But, especially in the later examples, images of the ostensibly natural world and its denizens become metaphorical mirrors of an irrepressibly lively mind. Nothing is fixed; all is in flux in nature as in consciousness. Up and down, inside and out, male and female, plant and animal, water and rock, unpainted silk and open air: these are provincial, merely human categories. That is why the Buddha remains so implacably calm. Ensconced on his transcendental throne, he is unruffled by the delusory problems we bipeds create for ourselves.
There will always be artists who aspire to Buddha-like abstraction. The grid-and-stripe painter Agnes Martin did, for example. But I much prefer Jakuchu’s joyful immersion in the colorful realm of living beings.

Rico says he wishes it were easier for him to get to Washington; he'll probably miss this splendid show...